THE SUNDAY HANGOVER
009
WARREN ELLIS

"A love letter to alternative culture, written in an era where alt culture no longer exists."

This is the opening statement for COILHOUSE, a magazine by three friends of mine (Meredith Yayanos, Nadya Lev and this site's own Zoetica Ebb, who is presumably one entry down wearing something she cut off the skins of Japanese children right now).

"This is an idea Im presently trying out, like a new pair of shoes that are slightly uncomfortable, that you have to wear in a bit: the idea that we are now in different times, or more profoundly, living with a different sense of temporality. Indeed, have been for some while... a sense of temporality changing radically, the fading or disruption of a former sense of forward propulsion through time"

In the same month that COILHOUSE launched, I find this notion in BRING THE NOISE, a collection of the music writing and theory of the excellent Simon Reynolds (and I'm horrified to realise I've been following his work for twenty years now). He actually wrote this on his website Blissblog a couple of years ago and somehow I missed it, but anyway.

Does one tie into the other?

One of the few people in music who seem to me to be really leaning into the future right now is Burial, the reclusive lofi dubstep wizard whose work conjures fantastic images of a drowned London and haunted electronics. He's doing his bit to save 2007 from being a complete fucking disaster by releasing a new album, UNTRUE, next month. In a new interview with Kode9 (who is also pretty interesting), he says this:

"I don't want the music I love to be a global samplepack music... I like Underground tunes that are true and mongrel and you see people trying to break that down, alter its nature. Underground music should have its back turned, it needs to be gone, untrackable, unreadable, just a distant light."

Why doesn't alt culture exist? Perhaps because it's been devoured by the mainstream monoculture. It's a hungry bastard, after all, and it'll choke down anything that'll fill its stomach. That we see things in Hollywood movies and tv now that were limited to experimental film twenty years ago is only the nature of the beast. It's not an evolution of Hollywood culture -- it's simply the beast widening its diet because it's eaten everything else in reach. You might not like the look of that weird foreign food, but if there's fuck all else on the table and you're still hungry, you'll gnaw on Korean film, Dutch film, Thai film and any other goddamn thing. And you can yank "Hollywood" out of that equation and replace it with fashion, music and half a dozen other things. The DIY-ambience in portrait photography that this very site pioneered is now meaningless because it's everywhere.

Partly that, maybe? Partly because we're in Reynolds' "anachronesis" -- living in a time of constant, delusional recursion, in a limbo of a dozen different pasts. Re-enactment, like living as a medieval soldier for a never-ending Renaissance Faire. Being Lenny Kravitz. Being the White Stripes. Record collection bands. People who like Amy Winehouse. Reynolds again: "Things under the sway of anachronesis are just nothing. You might as well be dead." Half the excitement about the online steampunk revival seems to source from the fact that it's only been done once before. That's what it comes to, in the anachronesis condition: it's exciting because it's only a bit old.

And partly, I think, because people just don't make it anymore. Every corner of the web is blitzed with the light shone by thousands of curational blogs whose job is to parse the internet for their readers. I mean, I hunt for research material all the time and store it on my website, I'm as guilty as anyone. But at some point producing actual content on the web went out of fashion -- almost all of the top one thousand blogs are reportage and linkblogging sites. At some point people have to stop checking to see what happened yesterday and start thinking about tomorrow. And it's that that "alternative culture" comes from -- the drive to do what's next and the impulse to make the sound no-one's heard yet. That's just not where we are right now. We're still suffering exhaustion from the most utterly mad and brain-burning experience in human history -- the Twentieth Century.

Maybe Burial has a point. Maybe you just don't grow alt culture in the light. The alt print culture is largely gone, migrated to the web but often missing the crucial element of networking. (Back then, of course, we called that "letters pages," and "classified ads.") But with the rise of private social networks -- Ning, and Facebook groups and gated message boards -- maybe some dark rooms can be generated. The global comeback of the PDF magazine shows some promise, too. Another dozen great netlabels like Miasmah would be nice.

Start making things. Tilt into the future. Or get the eternal past you deserve.

kerouaclullaby

Philadelphia, PA

September 2006

OCT 21, 2007 06:23 AM

I think this is a very good point. In the art (fashion/music/design) world it seems like the "alt" culture has been defined, packaged, and sold as such; in essence mainstreaming a particular style but marketing it as alternative/underground/indie. I would even venture to say that the "alternative style" has never been so popular. It reminds me of the "modern style" at the turn of the last century, which took decades for the public to embrace, only after it was made marketable to a wider audience. Now the modern style of architecture/design/fashion is embraced and revered.

This also begs the question, is it such a bad thing? On the one hand, we all like to hold on to the idea that alternative & underground creations are unique, exclusive, and special (not completely unlike the products "luxury brands" try to sell). On the other hand, if these ideas and creations are indeed so great, shouldn't we be content with the prospect of mainstreaming them?

Don't get me wrong, I think creativity must move forward, not backwards. Like most things, creative ideas must start out small/alternative/underground. Maybe there is a lack of this alternative creativity happening today, but then again...maybe it's in the works and just hasn't made it mainstream yet. Maybe the new alternative culture is so different that it won't look anything like it's predecessor. Let's hope anyway.

commonman

USA

August 2003

OCT 21, 2007 07:24 AM

I've been thinking along these lines for a while now, but I never had a word for it. Now I do: anachronesis.

In some ways it's comforting to know that, as someone who is older than many on this site, I can still relate to contemporary culture, because the vast majority of it was formed when I was of age. Punk? Rap? Gangsta culture? Been there, done that, still have a Flava Flav t-shirt from the 1980's.

But its creepy to me that so little that is new has been created as compared to what has been recycled. Especially because what is recycled are the visual and audio cues from the past, not the actual emotions or beliefs.

I suppose that's why I'm here, because sometimes I get cued into something that you can't find in the mainstream or its many manufactured tributaries.

aaronthere

San Francisco, CA

September 2003

OCT 21, 2007 11:09 AM

Too much to say...

First, maybe you'd find something different culturally if you stopped googling "alt culture" and went outside to see what was happening in reality. I see new and interesting shit everyday that of course no one has heard of or is writing abut etc.

Saying something is dead is so lame and is never true. It usually is just the beginning of something new. As a jazz musician, when jazz left the mainstream (ie BeBop and beyond) it started to really get interesting, because they just didn't give a fuck what people thought anymore.

All culture refrences the past. Just because you are educated enough to see of hear all the refrences in something doesn't make it an "anachronesis". Who are the White Stripes ripping off? Some bands from the 60's and 70's who were in turn ripping off blues musicians from the 20's etc. But I think everyone can tell the difference between the Rolling Stones and Muddy Waters.

People have been crying about the corporatization of art since as long as I can remember. I'd say it's easier now to get you stuff out there without the help of major media than ever, perhaps to a fault. I will concede that corporations have become more savvy to marketing "hipness" and making you think you are going against the grain while in fact you are still sucking from the same monoconglomorate teet.

Formus

Milwaukee, WI

May 2007

OCT 21, 2007 11:32 AM

Two things killed alternative culture. The internet, and the corporatization of punk. In other words, alt cult's been dead since 1992.

I don't think that foreign film falls into the "alternative" category. If you think about alternative in general, it's a subtext of things that are enjoyed beneath the surface, in the "underground", and which we hope never bubble up to the surface. That's why it's "alternative." But foreign film has always been something that everyone has tried desperately (even in other countries - think Kung Fu Hustle) to mainstream.