2001: A Space Odyssey is playing on the tv. The scene pictured in this now-retro futuristic hotel lobby just passed. I’m dazzled every time I watch this movie. It’s so bold and futuristic that it still promises some peek into the future, even 7 years past its promised fruition, when we live in a hi-def world that still never seems as crisp and synthetic as the one Stanley Kubrick depicted. This feeling of wonder over the Look of a film makes sense to you, right? It doesn’t have to be this particular film for you.
I would imagine that there are recordings that have hit our ears in a similar way to what I describe with the visuals in 2001: A Space Odyssey. In your music-loving lifetime, has there been a recording that’s stayed fresh and “boldly futuristic” long after its debut, maybe even after it’s become part of the mainstream and used in Target commercials? The only thing I ask is that you keep it to recordings that have come out in your music-loving lifetime. If you were 3 when Sgt. Pepper’s came out, for instance, try something more in tune with the years when you consciously became a music lover. We all imagine how boldly futuristic some reissued record we’ve picked up at one time or another still sounds, but it’s not the same as hearing it for the first time with your own ears.
I look forward to your responses.
OK. I may be chided for my lack of futuristic vision, but so be it. I remember the night I got home with my brand-new lp of Kraftwerk’s Computer World. I know, I know, the whole point was to create a cartoonishly futuristic soundscape, and they did so very literally. But it totally freaked me out. I played it plenty loud, with not much light on, several times. I had been a fan of theirs for several years, and of a lot of electronica in general, but the sounds on that album struck me at the time as outlandishly alien. The sounds themselves. They are so ubiquitous now. Everyone copied them all the time because I think everyone heard them that way, too. And wished they had come up with such ideas.
I read an interview once where someone was remembering hearing Bartok’s 3d quartet for the first time in the thirties or so, and that when he had heard it, he felt physically nauseous. It was so disorienting, but not nonsensical. Years later, he said, the piece was a cherished old chestnut of 20th century stuff. He said he really missed the nausea. I feel the same way. It is only possible to get the dimmest inkling of what I felt that night. Watching the record spin with such sounds coming out. Certainly, among other things, the idea of such sounds coming out of CDs or hard drives or iPods is much more consonant with the gist of the music.
But I still think that record in particular speaks to a future in some ways better or sharper than the one that arrived. Some of that reflects the disorientation that results from the future being so ike the past. Like, in movies about 2050, no one ever explains what happened to all the old furniture. And in movies Americans got thinner, not fatter. If we all were, today, suddenly zapped into silver lame body suits, it would be a horrific vision, indeed.
In film, I always appreciated the Bladerunner aesthetic. More dirt, old things among new, – the future still had sleazebags, strippers, booze, bigotry. And none of that über lighting Kubrick used to delineate the sharp future.
So the future of Bladerunner might be more the future of Meet the Residents, where Kubrick, Strauss aside, is more Kraftwerk.
General Slocum wrote:
You have TOTALLY grasped the point of this thread. Thank you for getting us off to such a good start. You know what’s cool, too? You share from your own personal experience, not feeding us some rehashed critical thought handed down through the ages.
Another Green World, Avalon (to a lesser degree, but still) and most of all Dub Housing continue, for me, to hold the promise of the future, even though they have all long since become the past.
Dub Housing is the one album that keeps coming to mind that I was able to buy when it came out. The first album that came to mind was Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), but that was a good 7 or 8 years old by the time I discovered it. It’s no wonder you got what I was saying regarding The Specials and The English Beat, Mwall. I still think the sound of Dub Housing has yet to be fully integrated into the present.
I think someone said here recently that Beefheart’s music still sounds futuristic. I think instead it seems outside of time, especially since no one one really followed down the path he blazed.
The futurism of the past always seems kind of quaint. The Jetsons is an extreme example.
And the general suggests, the past is always present in the future, even in the furniture pictured in 2001. It seems to me that Stereolab has a good grasp of this approach. The krautrock influence still gives off a vaguely futuristic vibe, even as the analog synths now sound sort of like a throwback, as do the Frenchpop vocals. I guess it’s the motorik rhythms that still carry me into the future.
I can’t decide whether Metal Box era PiL is futuristic or timeless.
I would agree, Steve, that Beefheart doesn’t sound all that futuristic. But I would suggest that’s true partly because his approach is a little more rootsy than is sometimes noted.
I hear you on the second PiL album, BigSteve. Beefheart’s a good one, too, especially “Dirty Blue Gene”, which I still find to be their most dazzling peak into the future.
True. For al his denials, Charley Patton and Howlin’ Wolf are still there in his voice.
Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love/Where Did Our Love Go” 12 inch was a track that totally knocked me out when I first heard it, it was all synth but rather than embracing the chilly ethos it contained that blue-eyed soul vocal from Marc Ball. The rest of their catalog is highly uneven but that track still still stops me when I hear it. Love(d) those Yaz records for the same reason (but geez, not those Alison Moyet records…)
-db
Champion Jack Dupree/King Curtis – Live at Montreaux
Laurie Anderson, with her use of pitch-shifted vocals and sampled instruments, made it sound like the machines were talking back back to us. I dug her records in high school; to my ears, now, they sound kind of gimmicky.
Dub reggae, probably because it makes up the imagined soundtrack to William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer.
Wrong context, I know, Dr. John, but I’d love at some point to hear your take on Neuromancer. I felt disappointed by it, and the other Gibson I tried to read at some point was worse. But I always think that maybe I’m missing something.
Prince was pretty freaking nihil-futuristic for a while there, but he’s been self-consciously retro for a while now. I suppose he’s got a right.
Beauty Pill- The Cigarette Girl from the Future
Sam Phillips- Omnipop
Blur- 13, although this isn’t futuristic as much as it is the direction I thought rock music should’ve been heading at that time.
However, I have to break Mod’s edict about music before “my time” to concur with the general futurism of Eno projects. To me, Low and Fear of Music are but two choice examples that haven’t been mentioned yet.
Pince nez time folks. dbuskirk wrote:
Actually that would be Marc Almond, although I could see why you made that mistake as Ball is the last name of the other guy in Soft Cell (I can’t remember his first name now). Nevertheless, I really like that record, too.
As for my own thoughts on this subject, here are a few artists I always think of as futuristic (at least in their own time): Devo, Kraftwerk and more recently Radiohead, starting with Kid A. I think that Kraftwerk embodied the ’50s and early ’60s kind of Jetsons futurism which has been mentioned above, but they’re also probably the most forward-thinking band of the last 30-35 years, too.
BigSteve wrote:
Sure the Captain was definitely an original, but what about The Fall? There’s also a Portland, OR based band called Old Time Relijun that put their own spin on Beefheart and post-punk. They just put out the last album in a trilogy and the album is called Catharsis in Crisis. I highly recommend it. It’s on the K label, which would make you think it’s twee indie-pop, but it’s anything but.
I was 15 years old and was hanging out with this girl who knew I was into music so invited me over to listen to records her sister was into. We intiially listened to old T-Rex albums, made out and then she put on the first Roxy Music record. I am not sure if it was the fact that I was “getting some” from this girl or what, but the record was unlike anything I heard before, yet was filled with things that were familiar at the same time.
The record still sounds futuristic to me. I’ve always felt the future would remake and remodel the past into some bizarre hybrid.
I just remembered that this same girl turned me on to Hawkwind (she had a freaky older brother). Not get all “High Fidelity”, but now I wonder what happened to her?
The Fall???? If that’s the future I’m jumping off the nearest cliff:)
For what it’s worth, I didn’t mean that The Fall were futuristic. Like Beefheart, I think they kind of exist out of time and orbit around their own universe. I just meant that they followed where Beefheart initially led. With that said, like much music from that great era, they did away with many of the roots-based influences that folks like Beefheart were clearly indebted to (i.e. Charley Patton and especially Howlin’ Wolf in his case), though they have a great love for ’50s rockabilly like Charlie Feathers, early rock and roll like Bo Diddley and country ala George Jones and Merle Haggard (they covered “White Line Fever” on their last album, for instance).
Mr. Secrutz reminisces about the future:
I was 15 years old and was hanging out with this girl who knew I was into music so invited me over to listen to records her sister was into.
My parallel experience:
I went with a girl to the basement workroom where her dad’s hobby was rehabbing old Edison cylinder machines and Victrolas. She played me a cylinder of Caruso singing an aria in 1899 or something. It didn’t sound like the future, but what was bizarre was how much it sounded like the present tense. Like when natives worry that taking photos steals your soul? It seemed much more plausible that Caruso existed in some real way in this recording than in various CDs I’ve heard of the same thing. He physically sang in the room with this cylinder, and when you play it, it feels like he’s in the room now. I’m not going to credit this phenomenon to this girl’s charms beyond a certain extent. There was a whole other element of interest, obviously. But the sounds themselves were so different listening this way. Time travel works!
I’d like to hear more from the Eno-haters who voted in the current poll.
I know this is probably not what Mr. Mod had in mind because everything seems to be about electronic or avant garde stuff. I guess Switched on Bach and Tomita the Electric Indian were supposed to be futuristic. I didn’t pay much attention to them then, and I haven’t followed electronic music much since. But when I was a kid, if you had told me that the music of my future would lie somewhere between The Sex Pistols and Lynyrd Skynyrd, I’d have never believed it. But here it is, thirty years later and I can’t get enough of that stuff.
Your future is the future, 2K. I wonder how many people concentrated on the “-ic” in futuristic when I really should have asked for examples of music that sounded like the future, as the title of post was trying to get at. In other words, music that sounded like the future without any thoughts of The Jetsons clouding your real feelings.
Oats mentioned Blur’s 13, and that’s a pretty good one. I’ve listened to it too much to be able to say if it still sounds “futuristic” to me, but at the time, it definitely had that feel of decaying sprawl that pointed to a more Blade Runner-y musical future. Sonic entropy or something, if I had to describe the feel of the album.
Eno’s music, which I do like, doesn’t seem so much futuristic to me as much as kind of foreign or alien. Not necessarily space alien, but…I don’t know, maybe. Kind of like what the pop music would be if they pulled records out of the ruins of some Martian city.
mwall, with regards to Neuromancer, you’re not missing anything. It’s cool stylistically but lacking in substance, a recycled film-noir plot and one-dimensional characters dressed up in cyberpunk shades and shiny leather jackets.
Thanks for the response (and the confirmation), Dr. John. If you ever want to read a novel that really does all the things that people claim Gibson’s work does, try M. John Harrison’s novel “Light.” I guarantee that you’ve never read anything like it, and it easily puts him in the league with Philip Dick and Stanislaw Lem.
This has been your RTH literary interlude.
Funny, I just watched A Scanner Darkly the other night. It’s not as good as the book (how could it be?) and definitely not as seriously disturbing, but a creditable version despite/because of the animation thing.