We live in a kind of weird hazy area between modernity and postmodernity, that is, modernity hasn’t really faded away yet – we still, for example, for the most part, believe in the supremacy of human reason, and it’s really only on the fringes of philosophy or philisophico-historical thought that things like the solid self and the progress narrative are being demythologized. Art, however, is a different story. Though we may never get to Hegel’s stage of absolute spirit in the way we live, where there are no new logical categories to be found and all that’s left to do is articulate what we have, in art, it is arguable that we are to the point, as Barth put it, of “the literature of exhaustion.” This is commonly what is called postmodernity in art, there is nothing left to do, everything has been done before, so all that’s left is to revitalize the old and to recombine what we already have into new ideas. Though there’s a lot of evidence that this may be so, at least for a majority of artists working today – there are new mediums being created; this is undeniable, but this notion – that everything’s been done before – is a peculiar symptom of artistic postmodernism, and it has a grip on our psyches, such that, even if it’s not true, many people operate under the assumption that it is. To be honest, if all that’s left is making new combinations out of old things, that’s not really a bad place to be. Basic combinatoric theory shows how complexity arises very quickly from just a small amount of combinations and permutations. This is the basis of Oulipian novels and minimalist compositions. If this is art for the rest of human development, we don’t really have to be depressed.
This has been a trend in music for a quite a while. There are a number of people who revitalize the old, say the neo-folk movement or the spate of bands aping 70s rock, and there are a number who recombine, either literally as in Negativland or Girl Talk, or there are those who take different forms of music and hybridize them. Chimera rock. Like the pattern I identified in the Air Guitar Magazine review in which say, globalization, the internet and postmodernity have all opened up and given many people easier access to the folk music of other countries. Thus one has the desire to try new things to augment different styles. One of the things I’ve been thinking for a long time is that for indie rock to remain vital in any way, it would have to eventually embrace not just postmodern recombinations, but specifically combinations with the avant-garde, either modern composition or free jazz. This is happening more and more now, and it’s heartening to see, but we still have a long way to go (interestingly, and as a side note, the avant-garde will probably be the last refuge of disaffected youth. As more and more genres of music are co-opted by mass culture [specifically the slouching capitalist behemoth], it will be a long way off, if it ever comes to be, before noise and modern composition become fodder for mainstream commercial uses – and notice the trend away from punk towards more noise-oriented projects in the last few years, among the young, at least)
Final Fantasy’s album He Poos Clouds fulfills the promise that I saw in Owen Pallett when I first heard his cover of Joanna Newsome’s “Peach, Pear, Plum”. I was excited about the combination of indie rock and avant-garde composition – not that this was the first, but rather that I saw in Pallett both the strength of songwriting and the promise of interesting instrumentation/arrangements that often fall by the wayside in these kinds of combinations – but his first album was rather disappointing, as if he was just finding his legs. This, however, is really magnificent. It’s dramatic, reminiscent of a Stanley Elkin novel in that it feels steeped in middle-aged anxiety, even though Pallett’s what, in his late-20s? Early 30s? Something like that. And the drama is sometimes wearying, not that it is tiresome, but real drama in real life wears you down, and Pallett manages to capture that without making it didactic – the kind of stuff that makes a lot of fictional drama tiresome. And it’s offset a lot of times by the both how interesting it is, by the complexity of the arrangements and by the moments of beauty.
