Repeat With Variation

If 60s Were 90s is the title of an album by Beautiful People that came out in the early 90s. It's now "If 20s Were 70s". Cool is something that requires "spin", but it's all spinning anyway.

It's gotten much more difficult to be cool on the internet. What would have worked on Twitter only 10 years ago is now akin to Jerry Lewis pranks. I had this experience in the 90s when I went to a staging of a musical from the 50s and all the jokes were stale. Even that album hasn't aged well. Some people have never heard of it (or Jimi Hendrix for that matter) and requires running a Google search. What hasn't changed is the idea of cool. Cool is essentially archetypal, probably tapping into Magician or Trickster archetypes.

I recall Bowie saying in an interview that the door was closing on postmodernism and that we should seize the day. What used to be cool is still cool but has a different patina. Like Steve Lacy's performance on SNL last night: I saw it as 70s-retro redolent of 1976 top-40 which perhaps he picked up in a kind of morphic resonance. What people might be doing is ushering in the end of postmodernism with nostalgia trips to places they've never been to so as to experience the same nostalgias of older generations in order to find the postmodernist cool in it before it runs out, as Bowie prognosticated, or to dismiss postmodernism altogether.

The higher-consciousness ("HC") movements seem to also be pointing in that same direction, as YouTube is mostly an anything-goes soapbox.

[Speaking of Soapboxes (as a nod to Warhol's Brillo Boxes), the recent Supreme Court case involving Warhol's use of a photograph of Prince (prints of Prince) for one of his silkscreens also speaks volumes about postmodernism. In some ways Warhol was the poster-boy of postmodernism and he still defines cool in art philosophy. Subconsciously we still inhabit that mental model even if we've compartmentalized it by allowing ourselves to buy a print of Jackie Kennedy when we may no longer espouse the Kennedy era. Anything continues to go with anything. So you can have both the intellect to understand complex thermodynamics and be a petulant troll on Twitter--then buy the platform for billions of dollars and do whatever you want].

The popular notion in the art (or music) world is that you should not want to repeat what you've done in the past in order to continue to be postmodernist. That's me in the late 90s when I did a 180 into ambient and non-song music because culture was telling me traditional songwriting was over. In retrospect, it was also over for teenagers in 1995, the youngest millennials, but it didn't end ultimately, as many still like to write songs. But once you've seen 20-30 years worth of content you see the patterns and repeats, which are then made into neo-something or post-something. But it's the same old postmodernism, which may never end as epochs do. It would be like continuing to say it was the end of history.

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I've been revisting my HC days in the late 1980s, when I had a deep interest in Jung and the archetypes. It's so interesting how this revives itself and evolves. For example, I see Jordan Peterson as an elder of that time, bringing in all that could have been absorbed circa 1988. (Even Joe Rogan is of this ilk). It's very odd from my perspective because a boomer's HC is both the same and different from a gen-X's or a millennial's HC. Jordan Peterson probably read Jung, Joseph Campbell, Robert Bly and other mens' movement stuff from that time because that's what was on Kroch's & Brentano's or Walden's Books New Non-Fiction shelves or in the new age bookstores that were everywhere on Chicago's north side.

Yesterday, I was watching the lecture series by philosopher John Vervaeke. In one episode he talked about the collapse of the Bronze Age as what I interpreted as a wink to what's happening now. Everyone wants to make the predictions because it's good attention for HC people and their platforms or channels, regardless of their politics. They all have their own nostrums, from Marianne Williamson and A Return to Love to Caroline Myss's mystical insights, both with roots in 1990s HC, but with deeper roots in the 1960s. (The 20s are 60s). They are good profit centers as well charging hundreds or thousands of dollars on courses and individual coaching, all of what is a championing of 60s individualism couched in a collectivism super-charged by social media.

Caroline Myss is quite interesting. She admits to the negative side-effects of 60s individualism:

"[The pattern that started] in the 1960s is a pattern that is anathema to human nature. It was this idea that we could go off on our own and do our own thing--ethically, spiritually, morally we could just do whatever we wanted. We could just take flight--and in the process we threw out babies with bath water. It is okay to pursue the self when the self's had enough direction on how to manage the self you understand what I'm saying once the self has been schooled on the self then go ahead and take the self on a on a long hero's journey in the language of Jung..." https://youtu.be/iIXczgEVDx4 (~50:00)

From a musical standpoint as a composer, revisiting ways of working from 30 years ago is exciting in its own way because it is deeply personal rather than a collective re-interpretation or simply a continuation of it. You also get to repeat entire cycles rather than just being nostalgic for one point in the cycle, e.g.. going back to only 1992. In each cycle you see new things on the repeats, but it's just slightly new. Postmodernism suggests revolutionary upheavals but it's never the end of any history.

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Some interesting references to postmodernism in recent reads:

"The French poet Charles Baudelaire suggested that modernity was fascinated with “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent. Rather than painting stolid landscapes, modernist painters attend to the ballerina’s leap, the exhale of steam from the train, the golden light before the sun plunges again beneath the horizon. In this sense, modernism could be seen as an intense attunement to creaturehood and the lineaments of the human condition. To be created is to be ephemeral, fugitive, contingent. To be a creature is to be a mortal, subject to the vicissitudes of time: the sun rises and bids farewell each day; the tulip bulb pushes forth, blooms in glory, and then passes into hibernation; we learn, remember, forget. Learning to be a creature is a matter of learning to let go." How To Inhabit Time (97)


"Part of the problem is that the word holism has become scientifically defiled. It has become synonymous with the mushing of everything we understand into a malfunctioning, soft-bladed (and soft-headed) blender. To rephrase Orwell: one equation good; four equations bad. And then things got worse. A variant of postmodern scientific thought threw the equations, with the blackboards they were written on, into the trash; the baby went with the bathwater."  Song of the Cell (365)