3 April 22
Nostalgia. I wanted to start with a pithy quote from Baudrillard but that would mean actually having to read him. And of course when name-dropping intellectual French dudes one has to remember one's Baudelaire from one's Baudrillard. One had too much reality, the other too much hyperreality.
Instagram. It is now a hydra too difficult to extract a single coherent truth from, no atomic source as Plato would want, no external single truth. Forget shadows on the wall, it's everyone's fictionalised home movie projected atop of each other, with a message from our sponsor.
If Baudrillard had lived long enough to see present day Instagram I suspect he would have choked to death on rage induced bile.
Before Instagram there was Hipstamatic, an instant nostalgia tool — an oxymoron. You may not remember, but then that's nostalgia for you. Since it's a longing for a past that never existed.
Hipstamatic launched in 2009. I bought a copy. In 2009 digital cameras were awful. Or so we thought. I've just read a post I wrote in 2013 praising film cameras over digital, "have been wrestling the last year with digital cameras struggling to bring to images a sense of place, drama, mood"1. My love of analogue in this context has more to do with accidents, but since then I recognised that at that time I suffered from the error of anemoia.
Anemoia being an internet invented word that defines my own post-Baudrillardian interpretation of nostalgia.2
iPhones and Samsungs now have high quality cameras, using multiple lenses to overcome the greatest failing of digital imagery ten, fifteen years ago: the lack of depth of field. Also, to a lesser degree, a lack of sensitivity to light. Paradoxically being able to photograph in low light conditions meant the removal of chiaroscuro. Although an artificial construct, the narrow spectrum of suitable light levels gave analogue films dramatic shadows and highlights, continuing an artistic device appreciated since Caravaggio. That our eye actually sees "reality" far more closely to the digital camera's all-in-focus plane, rather than a traditional optical lens, is a fault. We want to echo the drama in the false reality of oil paintings and black and white movies.3
We didn't want our digital cameras to capture reality, we wanted them to fictionalise our lives. Which is exactly what Hipstamatic did.
My questioning of this fictionalisation was a slow process. A combination of programming and pursuing film photography. An understanding that randomness does not exist in the digital realm. The grain, the scratch, the light leak, all perfectly and exactly reproducible each and every time. Computers are pseudo-random, using a seed number, usually the number of seconds since 1970. How wonderfully ironic for a process trying to emulate the polaroid and disposable camera. An early version of the Lingo programming language manual listed under the entry for generating random numbers that the only truly random events in the universe are the radioactive decay of atoms. Not very helpful. But raising a philosophical point.
Hipstamatic was a superior product which fell from grace when Instagram launched a year later in 2010. Instagram added the social sharing of images to the instant nostalgia of filters. The rest they say, is the end of history.4
A pause here to reflect on Baudrillard's theory of hyperreality, in particular his Guardian pieces on the Gulf War never happening. Never happening in the sense that neither side were fighting each other, both were executing a power play to entrench their own political ends in their respective domestic markets. That war was reduced to sound bytes. And how Hipstamatic rose in public's eye when photographer Damon Winters used the filters to make his images of the Afghan war more aligned to our preconceptions. The realism of war did not reflect the needs of mass news imagery, “a sense of place, drama, mood” as I unwittingly and unrelatedly said a few years later. The reality of war was not real enough.5
With social sharing came the knowledge of the filter, which made our photos look instantly great, but everyone else too knew that the magic was a layer applied later in time, after the event. Reality - camera - filter - share. Once we all knew the voodoo of the filter, the fictionalisation of our world was revealed, just like pulling the curtain back revealed the great and powerful Oz. Once the sorcery was known we stopped using them. The fictionalisation of our world is for our internal monologue. Adding a sense of history to our everyday. If others see it as a play, it fails. It only took a couple of years for the rise of the #nofilter tag, a proclamation that this is my true reality.6
The tell tale sign of an aughties digital image is the lack of depth of field. Everything — foreground, background — is in equal focus. Along with an even, consistent light. At the time we hated it. It looked like we had simply taken a photograph of ourselves eating a pizza on a digital camera. We did not look like the movie stars of Technicolor, the blurred pornographic decadence of a 70s blurred Polaroid.7
At the time I wondered how long it would take for the flatness of the first mass market digital images to move from undesirable, to a signifier of an earlier unreachable time. By placing them in history, they become authentic.
And the answer is now. Looking at the vast majority of digital art being sold through NFT blockchain technology, it all adheres to the aughties aesthetic of low resolution JPEGs. It can't be authentic art if it looks like it was taken just now, on your iPhone. It must look like an artefact from the past, its value proved by its passage through time, a step in art history. Instant nostalgia adding authenticity to the now.
Reggaeton is viewed with a little snobbery in the UK and America. Partly because it's a form of dance music, and rock music claims to be the intellectual high ground (you may wish to see structural racism in this), and from underexposure as it's sung in Spanish.8
Two weeks ago I heard Toro y Moi's new track “The Loop”. I believe he ‘dropped’ the track. I loved it. I wanted to pop it straight into a column. But even I would blanch at shoehorning it into simulation theory or dead girls in woods. Besides, Consume and Enjoy has an unwritten guideline, it does not chase the new. It is deliberately a couple of weeks behind the curve. No danger in rushing to market, serving the scoop without digestion.
Toro y Moi was one of the architects of chillwave. A musical genre nascent at the same time as Hipstamatic and Instagram. A laid back version of electropop but adding a nostalgic vein to the futuristic origins of synthetic electropop. Its characteristic sound was artificially induced wow and flutter effect synonymous with hearing an overplayed stretched cassette tape.
He's now taken the psychedelic underpinnings of chillwave and gone full blissed out overdriven 70’s guitar sound of Snuggie Otis's Strawberry Letter 23. The very era which all those Hipstamatic and Instagram filtered photographs emulate. Instant nostalgia.
Wait. What? The Brothers Johnson surely? Nooooo, one of the Brothers Johnson was dating Shuggie’s cousin, and decided to cover it. Reproducing the seminal guitar solo note for note. Tori y Moi is of course half French (moi) and half Español (tori) allowing me to gracefully glide across topics.
Reggaeton is an island hopping mutation of Dancehall. A syncopated version of reggae, using drum machines. Emerging out of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, where Jamaican Dancehall fused with Spanish rap and Latin music influences.
Over the last ten years it has grown to become the de facto sound of the hispanic world. Unlike rap or hip hop it doesn't use samples. There is no referencing the music of bygone eras. Drum machine, electronic keyboard - note not a synthesiser, your standard Yamaha type keyboard, where the strings sound artificial, not pretending to be a string or brass section - and the acoustic guitar, part beach island rastaman, part flamenco.
The vocals are rapped and sung in Spanish, a language eminently suited to the mid tempo rhythm with all those explosive consonants and rolling r-r-r-r-rs. English always sounds like it's being stretched over the beats, while all that Spanish second syllable stress rides the rhythm so well.
There are no pretensions, it's pop music, genital focused. Occasional forays into money and cars, and very occasional partying with same gender platonic friends, as opposed to mucho mucho all night ‘partying’ with members of the opposite sex.
I live on Sleepy Island, where reggaeton is essentially the national anthem. When I first arrived I sneered at it in my best Englishman abroad way. When you find it being played on the coach by 50 year balding bus drivers with a paunch on the drive into La Capital, when it is the background soundtrack to the Chinese-run Spanish restaurant, when it blasts from the phones and boomboxes of the kids on the way to the beach, you have to ask yourself: who's right?
Reggaeton is authentic. It does not pretend to be of another age. It is not ashamed of its standard affordable keyboards, its programmed drum machines.
It is for the here and now.
Admittedly you have to get past the fact that there's a chap called Bad Bunny, whose look alone would, as a dad, make you instantly hate him, even before he turned up at your house asking after your daughter. (Nothing compared to the sound of the voice of art-hip-glitch-hop combo 18+’s male singer, who is like the personification of white middle class boy in full ghetto gangster whining snizzle n shit mode. By the way I love them, but the dad in me still quietly seethes every time he opens his mouth).
Luckily reggaeton is all in Spanish so you can't sing along, just make vague noises de Español, and you're saved from knowing the words you’re humming are in fact "I have too much cash and whores". In case you want to know, that's "Tengo demasiado efectivo y putas".
It's slowly being gentrified by the likes of lord of flat-pack music Ed Sheeran, and Madonna, ever the magpie, and her best track for years. But best served in Spanish. Embrace your inner puta.
Randomness. I had to move country to allow reggaeton into my soul. The problem of social media platforms like Instagram is their echo chamber effect. Reflecting back at you only what you already like.9
I have been a late convert to Spotify. At first I wanted my music, but their generated playlists are sufficiently nuanced that I can cook n listen easily with a relatively low level of next track skipping.
The man behind developing Spotify's matching algorithm, Adam Bly, has produced a very interesting mind-mapping tool. For launch it focuses on related issues around health and Covid. Worth having a look at.
https://about.system.com/about/overview
My recommendation for this edition was going to be a magazine. But it would be more in keeping with the themes discussed to instead suggest a subscription to Stack Magazines.
A brilliantly simple idea. A random magazine every month. Stack (actually a lovely man called Steve) shifts through piles of independent magazines, selects one and bulk purchases an issue, sending it out as that month’s title. You might receive a copy of Elephant, the book sized art magazine at far below cover price, or be surprised by a specialist Tennis publication which turns out to be really interesting even if you have zero interest in specialist Tennis publications.
It's one of those things I really don't want to stop existing, so I'm urging you to join and make sure they stay in business. I consider it an essential service.
A monthly subscription to Stack Magazines
https://www.stackmagazines.com/subscribe/
“Antes Que Salga El Sol” by Natti Natasha x Prince Royce
This is from the pop end of reggaeton. A gateway drug if you will. They want to romantically (for reggaeton) sleep together in a bed before the sun comes up. If you're not humming it by the end you're already dead.
“The Loop” by Toro y Moi
It's 1973, it’s the weekend, and your mum has just washed your favourite towelling t-shirt https://toroymoi.com/
To save you being accused of watching soft porn (aka reggaeton videos) on Youtube here's a Spotify playlist instead, featuring a tapas of reggaeton hits in all their autotuned glory, along with the other songs referenced.
References
Echo Chambers on Social Media: A comparative analysis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.09603