Music

From retro to repro, and beyond

Dominikus Müller
Assistant editor of frieze d/e, based in Berlin, Germany.

The biggest musical event of 2011 wasn’t an album or a band, or even a new style. It was a book: Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past, by Simon Reynolds. According to the LA-based British critic, today’s pop culture is imprisoned in the loop of history, thus completely destroying its capacity for innovation and deviance. While Reynolds certainly has a point, maybe ‘retro’ is too general a buzzword, in that it obscures other phenomena – especially those that are based on the principle of copying, of repetition and reference,but without being merely backward-looking or nostalgic.

One need only think of the controversy surrounding the video for ‘Countdown’, the third single from Beyoncé’s album 4.The song itself could easily be classified as retro, on account of its Boyz II Men sample from 1991 and the ‘Killing Me Softly’ reference in the lyrics – not to mention the video, with its style clichés à la Audrey Hepburn, Monica Vitti or Diana Ross. Directed by Adria Petty, the video caused a stir due to a different kind of quotation: it openly borrows from performances by Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, specifically the filmed versions of her pieces Rosas danst Rosas (1997) and Achterland (1994). De Keersmaeker accused Beyoncé of violating her intellectual property rights. The matter did not go to court, however, perhaps because the gestures the choreographer claimed as her own – rolling on the floor, wiping hair out of one’s face, swivelling one’s head or letting it fall forward – are simple everyday movements. Nonetheless, the charge of plagiarism had been raised, and with it the question of whether movements can be copyrighted.

In May 2011, Beyoncé faced similar charges over the elaborate stage presentation for the single ‘Run the World (Girls)’ (which, incidentally, is based on extensive sampling of Major Lazer’s 2009 single ‘Pon de Floor’): the interactive setting and the animations for the performance resembled elements found in a stage show by the Italian dancer, singer and actress Lorella Cuccarini. As these cases reveal, ‘copying’ is particularly controversial at the moment, not so much in the music but its performance – the live show, or even individual dance steps.

Another instance of this shift could be observed in July, when Hamburg-based Henning Besser (a.k.a. DJ Phono) presented his ‘DJ Phono Plays Daft Punk’ project on a large open-air stage in Berlin. For this gig, Besser copied an entire Daft Punk concert – to be precise, a concert from the 2007 ‘Alive’ tour, including the stage set, light show and LED projections. The music was pre-recorded and the show was based on footage of the original event gleaned frommobile phone videos and YouTube clips.

In Retromania, Reynolds describes re-enactments of entire concerts at the ICA in London: from Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s 1998 re-creation of David Bowie’s farewell Ziggy Stardust concert from 1973, to the 2007 re-enactment by the British artist Jo Mitchell of Einstürzende Neubauten’s Concerto for Voice & Machinery II. This performance was restaged – including the riots that accompanied it – in exactly the same space where the original had been held in 1984. Although the similarities are striking, ‘DJ Phono Plays Daft Punk’ stands apart from such re-enactments, by not focusing (as they do) on the meticulous repetition of past events deemed relevant and considered ‘authentic’. Similarly to Richard Prince’s use of advertising photographs from the early 1980s, in the case of Besser, the raw material is already markedly non-authentic and contrived. The main subject of the performance (a cross between a musical, a parody and a tribute concert) was the principle of the show itself, the ‘live experience’ – thus rendering absurd the music industry’s last remaining guarantor of profitably marketable ‘authenticity’.

Besser’s appropriation was barely distinguishable from a real Daft Punk concert, and when snippets of the fake gig in Berlin turned up on YouTube – some tagged ‘Daft Punk @ Tempelhof Berlin’ – the process had come full circle. Only once, in the middle of the show, did Besser break with his slavish faithfulness to the work: a group of non-professional dancers took to the stage – dressed as robots, swimmers and skeletons – to recreate the video for Daft Punk’s 1997 single ‘Around the World’. Instead of perfectly choreographed steps, there was amateurish fun; instead of accurate imitation, an obvious departure from the original. The copy became visible as a copy.
This insertion could be read as a reference to the popular YouTube meme for which girls, mostly scantily clad and often pretending to be robots, write the lyrics to Daft Punk’s ‘Harder, Better, Faster,Stronger’ (2001) on their bodies and dance to the song with varying degrees of choreographic perfection. Thus the mechanisms of an online copy culture based on fandom were applied in a live setting. Perhaps in 2011, copying finally became the predominant cultural technique – and pop a culture of versions, speaking more of the need for appropriative imitation and less of an attempt to bring back the ‘genuine’ and the ‘authentic’ of days gone by. Beyond retro, there’s a whole lotta repro.

Translated by Nicholas Grindell

Dominikus Müller