Tense, Nervous Headache?

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Tense, nervous headache?

Then read my new essay, 'Classicism and Atrocity'. You'll feel better right away.

It's about death and synthpop.

― Momus, Monday, 20 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

What's that image in the bottom right? The two women, one holding a mirror.

Got a bigger version? It's intriguing.

― Andrew, Monday, 20 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

That's by Kuniyoshi Kaneko. I was fascinated by his CD-ROM, Alice, in the mid-90s and wrote a tribute song to him on 'The Philosophy of Momus'.

― Momus, Monday, 20 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Haven't read it yet, but how could I be so stupid to print it directly from my browser? Have you got a contract with HP or another printer/toner producer, Momus? The cheap printer prices are financed by extremely high prices for toner cartridges. Your page is white on black. I guess the four pages cost me a couple of quid. Now I really hope that your thoughts are worth the ink now, Momus!

― alex in mainhattan, Monday, 20 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

How could you suggest such a thing? My conscience is white as the driven snow.

― Momus, Monday, 20 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

'Course, it's sposed to be printed in colour. That's why I put the printer's colour calibrations up the side of all the paintings.

― Momus, Monday, 20 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

OK, so the early 80s were a period of classical revival? Surely the only reason why 97% of the people who were involved with that movement were involved with that movement was that their friends were involved with it, or they read that it was 'in', very few people ever think about the historical or intellectual basis of the fashions they follow, and although this opens up an interesting issue for study, it also seems to (in my opinion at least[which you're invited to wholly ignore if you wish]) devalue the basis of such studies. The early eighties were awash with dark, grey, grim groups like Tones On Tail, who seemed to exist not so much because death had been glorified by a greater focus on classical values, but because someone who was cool said it was cool. Such is pop culture

― j, Monday, 20 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I take your point, J, but isn't this 'the intentional fallacy'? Whether Tones On Tail (my first band shared a 4AD display ad with them in 1982, but I've still never heard them) knew what allusions they were making is no more relevant than whether the fragments of Roman rock collected by Winkelmann 'knew' their relevance to the 18th century. In fact, one of the reasons the 'dead' past is exciting is that it can't talk back, leaving us free to mess about with its posthumous remains in ways that are more to do with our creativity than its own.

― Momus, Monday, 20 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Momus, have you perchance read 'Anatomy of Human Destructiveness' by Fromme? It's probably been discredited hundreds of times by now but there's some interesting shit in there re 'deadness', although the author seems to be against it

― dave q, Monday, 20 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

alex - can't you just set your browser to always print text in black on white?

― michael, Monday, 20 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Dave, no, I'm going to Google it up now. Sounds interesting.

― Momus, Monday, 20 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

grey, grim groups like Tones On Tail

? The last thing something like "Go!" and "Twist" are is grey and grim. Cool in a certain sense, yes.

― Ned Raggett, Monday, 20 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Hmmm.

And how does this square with the Momus as the champion of wit and scourge of romanticism? Are you gonna get all doomy and miserable on us after all these years?

― phil, Monday, 20 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Momus, how's this gonna interact with Spooky Kabuki and the "tree" song? I'm worried that you already did your Electroclash in Robot Cowboys, and your Bootlegging (although cover/meddly) in "Folk Me Amadeaus" does this mean that your new album / and the near future of pop it predicts, is gonna be GOTH REVIVAL?

I deliberately steered well clear of Goth in the essay, although it occurred to me that this was also an 80s movement which was in love with death. But it's not in that Winkelmann way, a love of the detached, calm classicism of antiquity. No, it's a Christian, Romantic take on death which informs Goth. I'm still against that.
― Momus, Monday, 20 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

And I'm against italics!

― Momus, Monday, 20 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Thanks for the tip Michael. I can switch off background colours and images in IE. It seems to work.
Interesting article. It was well worth the (stupid) investment. I was surprised that you didn't mention the new recent swing to the political right in many European countries which again (like the 80s revival) parallels the 80s. Anyways concerning revivals I feel that the artistic colour palette has been quite exhausted long ago (in music with Stockhausen and John Cage, in the arts with people like Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys). All boundaries have been trespassed so it is natural that artists are referring to or even repeating past currents nowadays.

Concerning the fascist deathly beauty I find that it is not particularly unique to the 80s. Wasn't the bombast rock of 70s bands like Yes or ELP not also aesthetically fascist? In any case it was closer to Wagner's megalomaniac operas. And punk also used fascist symbols though there it was mainly as a provocation.

― alex in mainhattan, Monday, 20 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Another thing that I found a little weird in your essay, Momus was that you equated deathly beauty to fascism. Fascism and especially Nazism originally were quite the opposite. The ideology was much more life-affirming ("Blut und Boden" = "blood and soil") and secularistic. Just think of the body cult. "Heimat" (home country) and the race were central as well of course. The holocaust was carried out rather secretly and I don't think you can interpret it as a jubilation in death. Even the Nazis were not as cynic and macabre. The holocaust was more about the almost perfect efficient mass murder carried out with "German precision". I guess the Thanatos connection only came later when Nazism collapsed at the end of WWII and Hitler decreed the "politics" of "Verbrannte Erde" (burnt earth) where he tried unsuccessfully to destroy Germany with him as he had linked his fate to Germany's.

― alex in mainhattan, Tuesday, 21 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Yes Tones on tail ARE a good group... if grey and grim in places... Performance being thier best track in my opinion. Other tracks of theirs like you the night and the music are unmistakeably scary, though.

― jboogle, Tuesday, 21 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

All of that 'dark' stuff was really happening more in the UK than here in the United States, even if this essay was written by a Brit. Americans in the early 80s had no interest in gloom and doom.

I don't know how much more 'fascist' one type of imagery is over another, really. Authoritarianism could be expressed through any number of conventions. The sort of unthinking pseudo-pagan expressionism that glorifies the 'irrational' comes to mind. This classical and geometric stuff is merely a fetish, so it's harmless. Mud-slathered cyber-hippies who espouse a sort of cloaked social darwinism, who stage fake pagan rituals in the desert, who take the word 'freedom' at face value and who believe that it is infinite and not relative are much more dangerous because they mistake a tired construct and patently manufactured experience for something 'authentic' and 'real'. Those people scare the shit out of me, not people who take uniforms and reduce them to fetish and play.

― Debbie, Tuesday, 21 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

'This classical and geometric stuff is merely a fetish, so it's harmless'

Oh, Arnold Layne. It's not the same, it takes two to know!

― dave q, Wednesday, 22 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

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