> following factors. Many young professionals are making a lot more > money then in the past. This increased income allows someone who is > relatively young to become a buying force to deal with Yep, just like the Eighties again, and wasn't that a great era for culture! > tastes and interests. One last thing.. "High End fashion for well > paid 25-35 year olds" basically sums up the roots of the original mod > movements. No, mods were a LOT younger - 16 relative to 25 is a lot - to 35, well work it out. Well paid-ish, for the time, but basically clerks living at home, not professionals, not the Jet Set. But more importantly, up until it's commercialisation, they set their own fashions - and they weren't high end - more East End rather than Saville Row. <ny attribute mod happening only because of increased > buying power of the English youth. I just see this buying power > growing increasingly stronger again as it has been for the last 10 > years. Along with the re-definition of youth as 'early 20s'. It's a hell of a lot harder to earn a living at 16 these days. Though 16 year olds parents are on the whole richer and more indulgent (which is a whole other thing in itself). > I agree, without substance its just fashion.. but don't piss on > fashion too hard. It visually defines a movement in many ways.. I'm not part of the 'lord protect our culture from the fashion and advertising people' brigade - it's just that it's like believing that because Top Shop are selling Motorhead T-shirts and leather jackets to teenage girls that there's going to be a rock revival, or the same for punk on the haute cauture catwalks . . . I can't think of one occasion (unless you believe Malcolm McLaren) when fashion has created or pre-ceded a subculture, rather than the other way round. > Err.. I was suppose to say "shouldn't pigeon hole". So let me explain > again.. Define a movement first and foremost.. Intellectually.. then > justify your music preferences with that.. I can't. Even Carlos at 'not a mod site' The Boiler ducks out of the whole mod/ modernism / music debate by claiming that the same values expressed in design and art weren't expressed in music (which is crap), because while you can justify Blue Note as modernist, or The Who as Pop Art, you're stuffed when it comes to Motown (or trying to link Pop Art and Modernism) and end up having to include Stockhausen. It just doesn't work if you try and define it as anything except suss and a certain style. > There is a lot of good > music out there and you should never let a label ever stop you from > listening to it. I don't. But where does that get us? I think Stereolab are a great band, full of connections to the 'modern' aesthetic, but I don't particularly want to dance to them, and they have their own scene of connected bands and fans that I don't have any wish to fit in with, and don't think are 'modern mods' either. Ditto, I'm sure there's still decent techno around (I don't pay attention) - but I'm equally sure it's got fans with one-track minds who've forgotten why they ever started. I'll defend to the death the right of people to enjoy great pop groups like Pulp, or Blur in their (cough cough) mod period, but I'm going to argue to the death with anyone who suggests they're 'the new mod'. > I respect the past, but I don't think it is healthy to live in the > past. I think one can get more out of what has been done before by > applying the lessons learned to his present day situation. This is just re-iterating what you've said before. Apply them and what's the answer? Bars full of head-nodding 'down-beat' post-trip-hop neo-lounge music providing cool background atmosphere for designer interiors? Or pumping techno and exuberant but bad dancing (and isn't that the new hippy and new punk too)? Or celebrating the musical equivalent of illiteracy? > I just > expect mods to be.. modern. But that is my sole expectation alone. And I'd expect modern culture to be able to produce some equivalent movement of it's own if there was that much great music and art and clothes that fitted the bill. But on the evidence of it . . . people keep getting attracted to this thing - now why could that be? > For new ideas bring new life into movements.. Old > tired ideas.. only kill them. That's all i am saying... And this one (mods should be modern, but what does that mean?) has been debated since The Style Council, at least. Plus the idea that the mod scene remains the same is daft - it's always changing. > The > edge of being new.. Rather it just sits in a time capsule ignoring > many of the great new ideas out there that really are very similar to > their own. Such as? > why sit and live in the > past.. wishing you were there.. when you can actually make it happen > again. When I'm out hearing good music I am there. Not in the 60s, but at a place now, playing great music, with people I know. The music might be old, but so what - so long as it's new to me. I don't want to go to a club playing UK Garage (house) for the same reason I don't want to go to one playing Korn and Blink 182 - I don't like the sound and I don't want to dance to it. >Are you going to follow an old cultural revolution or create > a new one. Or follow a new one? What would you suggest people should be consuming or creating then? We've got the clothes, we're waiting on the shoes . . . but where are we going to go? > >Punter: 'Old-skool hip-hop'. > Well is that really that bad.. so what. he like old skool hiphop.. No, the point is that looking down on mods for being backward looking and stuck in their ways, while merely leaping as far as the next fashionable retro bandwagon, kind of undercuts what you're saying. _________________________________________________________ Enlighten your in-box. http://www.topica.com/t/15
