Week 22: Shaking their bits to the hits, oh
Week 22: Shaking their bits to the hits, oh
A brief trip to Gothenburg to see Suede, how technology has changed the music industry, and why we are so attracted to nostalgia
On Friday I caught the train to Göteborg (Gothenburg) to see Suede. The band were playing a free show as part of the city’s 400 year anniversary festival. Suede were one of the central bands of my teens, but the last time I saw them play live was 20 years ago. So the opportunity was one I felt compelled to take.
Usually I am suspicious of bands that refuse to come to a dignified conclusion. There’s nothing more unseemly than old men who still think they’re young men, and male musicians especially have a difficult time growing up. Although maybe this sentiment could also extend to those of us who relive our youth through our current cultural consumption?
The continued emotional pull of our youth has made the nostalgia industry big business. Whether it is through movies and shows set in the decades we grew up in, or bands who have realised that there’s money to be made continuing to sell the 80s and 90s to Gen Xers or Geriatric Millennials who now have significant disposal incomes.
Streaming and YouTube have created not just new ways of consuming music, but changed the nature of what music is deemed popular in the present. Old music now makes up 70 percent of the music market, with people streaming albums they may have first bought on CD, or reformatting their collections into vinyl. Streaming has made old music highly profitable again, and both record labels and investment firms have been buying up the publishing rights to older bands, realising there’s a new money to be made in these old catalogues.
There is also the phenomenon of younger people now no longer existing in a specific musical time period. They now live in all of the past 7 decades of popular music simultaneously. Technology hasn’t facilitated a better experience of now, it has created an enhanced experience of then.
As a festival show, Suede were well aware of what their priorities should be with their setlist. Despite the band having released four albums since 2013 – after an almost decade-long hiatus – the set was dominated by their material from the 1990s (15 of the 19 songs played, to be precise). Which isn’t to indicate that these new albums are bad, they have all being very good – with Night Thoughts especially being excellent. But these albums are still far from as compelling and iconic as the band’s first three albums, and most importantly don’t serve the nostalgic rush – or transferred nostalgia for the young – that anyone going to see Suede these days is seeking.
Nostalgia has an immense pull on us as human beings. Often it is seen to be a defensive response to unhappiness, or being disconcerted with the present, yet this doesn’t mean it is just a response to difficult personal circumstance. Instead it should be understood as more a general way of seeking some emotional security in our era of rapid economic and social change.
While our human brains are capable of the most extraordinary creativity, our psychological reflexes haven’t evolved at the same pace as our technological and cultural output. To compensate we reach for the things we know from our pasts as emotional anchors, to give us the stability that our whirlwind world feels like it is sweeping away.
This is not to say that nostalgia is entirely negative. There can be a deep sense of meaning attached to what we have done and how this makes us feel. Our lives are for living, but they are also for remembering. How we explain ourselves as human beings is through our stories, and these stories emerge from our experiences. Nostalgia can act as our filter of wisdom, how we sort the good from the bad and how this mental organisation governs our present-day actions.
Beyond this contemplation of why we seek nostalgia, there is also the simple recognition of having a good time. Fun is something I’m usually opposed to (or frightened of), however, although Suede may be close to three decades past their peak, they still managed to put on an incredibly upbeat and thoroughly enjoyable show. One that left me with a teenage-like glee.
Although I only had a brief visit to Gothenburg, the city looked to be a fantastic place that I would love to spend more time in. Especially as most of Sweden’s best music has come from the city – during the period between 2000-2010 in particular the city had a cultural influence far greater than its size (at least in my circles).
Maybe there’s a reason why a country’s second cities are so culturally fertile? I suspect someone has written on this idea. Although now that Melbourne is Australia’s first city this theory may not hold up.
But in honour of Gothenburg, I’d like to bring your attention to this little gem of a city anthem – GBG Belongs To Us by Air France – a response to Saint Etienne’s London Belongs To Me. The song is unfortunately not on Spotify.
This Week’s Reading
Grant Wyeth – The Diplomat
“So this may be the calculation that Canberra is making: cozying up to Modi in the present in order to build the habits of cooperation for the India of the future. For a middle power primarily concerned with the practical implications of China’s increased power in the Indo-Pacific – rather than a principled opposition to authoritarianism in general – such a compromise with its India strategy may be the reality of Australia’s limited capabilities.
However, does this compromise rely upon Australian prime ministers allowing themselves to be used as tools in the BJP’s domestic propaganda? Is there not a more sophisticated way to make this bet on an India of the future? The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade may have ideas, but Australia’s India strategy is complicated by the growing Indian population within Australia, and politicians seeing domestic political gain aligning with the BJP’s emotive transnational reach.
While this may impress some – but not all – members of the Indian diaspora, this is not the only constituency the Australian government has with its India policy. The broader Australian public needs to be confident that the government is acting in its interests and with its values in mind. While Australians are aware that their country is far from a superpower and therefore needs to make compromises with its foreign policy, the sycophancy displayed by Albanese last week is not something Australians would feel comfortable with as part of the country’s strategic character.”
Australia’s Undeclared National Crisis: A Dire Lack of Affordable Housing
Grant Wyeth - The Diplomat
“On an individual level, the current cost of housing is a burden that younger people should not have to carry, but more broadly the high cost of housing is a failure of national and subnational strategy. For cities to function well, essential workers like nurses, teachers, cleaners, and hospitality staff must be able to secure housing in the areas close to where they work. Yet often these people are pushed out to the fringes of cities, where public transport is sparse and driving to areas of employment is long and traffic-bound.
In a broader economic sense, the high cost of housing – either to purchase or rent – reduces the ability of individuals to pursue careers of choice, and careers where their passions lie. For a country that is lacking in a substantial ideas economy the cost of housing is an extraordinary economic opiate. It prevents people from taking the time to dedicate themselves to ideas, take economic risks, and invest in long-term projects. The cost of housing binds Australia to its current economic structure – one where two of its largest exports, coal and gas, are about to fall off a cliff.”
How Australia Can Speak Up On Human Rights In India
Hugh Piper - The Interpreter
“There are also strong strategic and foreign policy reasons for Australia to speak up on the human rights in India in order to forge a more resilient bilateral relationship. Silence at this growth phase of the relationship could undermine its long-term success. Australia is creating a difficult precedent for itself, making it harder to speak in the future without causing irreparable damage. Moreover, Modi won’t be prime minister forever. Australia needs to invest in an enduring relationship with India, and that includes the 63 per cent of voters who did not support Modi in the 2019 elections.
While political level advocacy would be ideal, Australia can make use of its independent foreign policy actors at arm’s length from executive government that to raise awareness and promote discussion. Taking this approach puts distance between core bilateral diplomacy and human rights advocacy, reducing the risk of foreign policy blowback, while still speaking with force and legitimacy. In building relationships, Australia can use “all elements” of national power, including ones not under government control.”
America Is Winning Against China in Oceania
Derek Grossman - Foreign Policy
NB: Terrible headline and framing, but the article provides a decent summary of recent activity in the region.
“Wang’s whirlwind tour of the region last year alarmed some of the region’s leaders. Wang had been promoting Beijing’s Common Development Vision but decided to work outside the Pacific Islands Forum—a familiar diplomatic tactic for Beijing but a giant red flag for members. Beijing also felt compelled to do it this way because four of the Pacific Island countries—the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, and Tuvalu—still diplomatically recognise Taiwan over China, and others are not particularly China-friendly. The problem was that it appeared as if Beijing were attempting to rapidly and secretly gain regional approval of the agreement. Coinciding with Wang’s visit, then-Micronesian President David Panuelo wrote an unprecedented and scathing letter to fellow Pacific Island leaders that called Beijing’s plan a “smokescreen for a larger agenda” to “ensure Chinese control of ‘traditional and non-traditional security’ of our islands.”
Panuelo’s letter, in combination with China’s secretive dealings with the Solomon Islands, seems to have had a profound impact on Pacific Island leaders. In January, the new Fijian Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka canceled a yearslong Fiji-China police training agreement. Rabuka noted: “Our system of democracy and justice systems are different [from China] so we will go back to those that have similar systems with us.” Last year, Pacific Islands Forum Secretary-General Henry Puna, from the Cook Islands, pointedly rebuked China’s approach after Wang’s visit, saying: “If anybody knows what we want, what we need, and what our priorities are, it’s not other people. It’s us.”
The ‘Golden Age’ of Retirement Is Over
Richard Jackson - World Politics Review
“It’s easy to forget that retirement as we know it is a relatively recent social construct. Until well into the 20th century, only soldiers, civil servants and the members of a few other privileged professions could feel any confidence about one day retiring. Most older adults worked for as long as they were able, and when they could no longer work they were generally cared for by their extended families.
It was only in the post-World War II decades that retirement became a near-universal expectation in developed countries. With both the workforce and wages growing rapidly, many of them set up new government pension systems or expanded existing ones. Almost all were financed on a pay-as-you-go basis, meaning that the contributions of current workers pay for the benefits of current retirees. By the 1970s and 1980s, some European countries were virtually bribing older workers to retire as early as their mid-50s with lofty income replacement rates and no-penalty early retirement programs. Others provided for backdoor routes to early retirement by liberalising older workers’ access to disability and unemployment benefits.
The architects of this postwar retirement revolution assumed that rapid demographic and economic growth would continue indefinitely. The U.S. was in the midst of its postwar boom, Germany and Japan their economic miracles, and France its “Trente Glorieuses,” a 30-year period of exceptionally robust economic growth. As Nobel-Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson put it in a 1967 article in Newsweek, “A growing nation is the greatest Ponzi game ever contrived.” With an expanding population and economy, he argued, there will always be more young people than old people, and each new generation will always be richer than the one that preceded it. It therefore seemed entirely reasonable to channel some of tomorrow’s “guaranteed” affluence into retirement benefits.”
Richard V. Reeves - Literary Review
“[Turchin’s] models suggest that societies have periods where things are good (‘integrative phases’), followed by periods where everything goes to hell (‘disintegrative phases’), and so on. There’s nothing good about disintegration. The only thing to do is try to delay the disintegration phase, or to make it shorter and less costly.
The integrative phases are characterised by ‘internal peace, social stability, and relatively cooperative elites’. Crucially, in Turchin’s models, these are also periods where the proceeds of economic growth are reasonably evenly shared. Disintegrative phases, by contrast, are marked by ‘social instability, breakdown of cooperation among the elites, and persistent outbreaks of political violence, such as rebellions, revolutions, and civil wars’.
Turchin identifies four key early warning signs of a disintegrative phase. First, ‘popular immiseration’, which creates the conditions for mass anti-establishment movements. Immiseration can be tracked by economic indicators, especially the relative wage, a measure of how far wage levels for the typical worker track economic growth as a whole. In the United States, relative wages have been falling in recent decades after rising rapidly in the middle decades of the 20th century. ‘Relative wages have not declined in such a sustained manner since the three decades between 1830 and 1860,’ Turchin writes.
The second warning sign is ‘failing fiscal health and weakened legitimacy of the state’. As I write, the United States is embroiled yet again in an embarrassing political wrangle over the debt ceiling. Only 2 per cent of Americans trust the federal government to do what is right ‘just about always’, and only 19 per cent say they trust it ‘most of the time’.
The third warning sign is turbulence in external affairs, marked specifically by disruptive foreign wars or revolutions. It looks like the war in Ukraine counts here.
So far, so familiar. But the fourth factor is much less so. According to Turchin, ‘intraelite competition and conflict’ is the single biggest predictor of instability. The condition to watch for here is ‘elite overproduction’. This occurs when there are not enough elite roles for the number of people who feel entitled to them. A contemporary example is the gap between the number of college graduates and the number of jobs that actually require a degree.”
America Is Headed Toward Collapse
Peter Turchin – The Atlantic
“The foundations of this broad-based postwar prosperity—and for the ruling elite’s eventual acquiescence to it—were established during the Progressive era and buttressed by the New Deal. In particular, new legislation guaranteed unions’ right to collective bargaining, introduced a minimum wage, and established Social Security. American elites entered into a “fragile, unwritten compact” with the working classes, as the United Auto Workers president Douglas Fraser later described it. This implicit contract included the promise that the fruits of economic growth would be distributed more equitably among both workers and owners. In return, the fundamentals of the political-economic system would not be challenged. Avoiding revolution was one of the most important reasons for this compact (although not the only one). As Fraser wrote in his famous resignation letter from the Labor Management Group in 1978, when the compact was about to be abandoned, “The acceptance of the labor movement, such as it has been, came because business feared the alternatives.”
We are still suffering the consequences of abandoning that compact. The long history of human society compiled in our database suggests that America’s current economy is so lucrative for the ruling elites that achieving fundamental reform might require a violent revolution. But we have reason for hope. It is not unprecedented for a ruling class—with adequate pressure from below—to allow for the nonviolent reversal of elite overproduction. But such an outcome requires elites to sacrifice their near-term self-interest for our long-term collective interests. At the moment, they don’t seem prepared to do that.”
Samuel Earle - The New Statesman
“It is ironic that, at the very moment Conservatives’ made Burke their mascot of moderation, the Conservative Party itself was becoming an unruly force. The Liberal landslide in 1906 unsettled Conservatives like never before. “They are always in a state of incipient political apoplexy,” the then-Liberal MP Winston Churchill remarked in 1909. A few years later, as the Conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law threatened a military insurrection in Ireland to oppose the Liberals’ plans for Irish Home Rule, the Economist noted the party’s growing revolutionary spirit: “We cannot escape from the one outstanding and extraordinary fact – that the leader of the Conservative party has definitely and repeatedly encouraged the outbreak of civil war.”
Conservatism is sometimes understood as the opposite as radicalism, but as Corey Robin showed in The Reactionary Mind (2011), radicalism is permitted – even encouraged – so long as it is in pursuit of restorative ends. What is unforgivable, in Conservative eyes, is radicalism motivated by the hope that a new, untested and usually more equal social order can be built. Radicalism to defend or restore an old social order is another matter entirely. Many Conservatives have no problem with people who show rage or fanaticism in pursuit of such ends – their ranks are filled with them.
This readiness to embrace radicalism in pursuit of restoration explains why Conservatives can seem so un-Conservative. The two most disruptive forces within it over the past half century, Thatcherism and Brexit, both expressed this tendency. Each movement saw their destructive project as a restoration, not a revolution, undoing disagreeable postwar trends: in Thatcher’s case, her target was an economic consensus that accepted the nationalisation of certain services and higher taxes on the wealthy; for the Brexiteers, it was European integration from the second half of the 20th century.”
Men Have Lost Their Way. Josh Hawley Has Thoughts About How to Save Them
Carlos Lozada - New York Times
“Manhood is something attained, not born to,” Hawley writes. “It is an attainment of character.”
“Manhood doesn’t happen by itself,” Bly writes. “It doesn’t just happen because we eat Wheaties.”
“Manhood is fragile,” Reeves writes, adding that “the making of masculinity is an important cultural task in any society.”
The unity of these visions is conceptual; their differences are practical. Whether manhood is constructed through biblical interpretations, nurtured through rituals and mentorship or reimagined in periods of cultural and economic upheaval is less vital than the simple notion that it is created.
This forging of manhood is not without risks; if men and boys are groping for a sense of purpose and meaning they will find it, whether in a temple or a basement, from a mentor or an influencer, through a ritual or an addiction. Reeves is right that men’s collective struggles should not be interpreted as a problem inherent to one gender, as though every man is flawed and must be sent back for repairs. But if we conceive of manhood as something created or achieved — not given, inherited or immovable — then this collective crisis of boys and men is also an opportunity for individual self-definition. It can be about every man, each of us, deciding what it means to be one. It doesn’t have to be about manning up or settling down.”
Steve Chung - Foreign Policy
“South Korea’s size has something to do with its constant cycle of creation and improvement. With just 52 million people in the Korean market, entertainment companies’ growth depends on creating movies, TV shows, and music that will fare well internationally. As a wealthy country that has prioritised content creation as an economic engine, in some ways the Korean entertainment industry has become too big to be contained within national borders. At the same time, the Korean domestic market acts like a shark tank as companies battle for a limited number of entertainment dollars. These factors combine to create high-quality, ready-to-export content.
This constant pressure guarantees a pipeline of high-quality shows and movies at a pace most other countries haven’t matched. For example, four of the eight-most watched non-English Netflix series of all time are South Korean. South Korea is a perpetual content engine tuned to the latest societal issues of our times. It’s also worth noting that South Korea has made the entertainment industry a national priority, in terms of seed funding, establishing numerous international film festivals and teaching filmmaking in schools, and the industry treats behind-the-scenes production staff as importantly as stars.
Culturally, South Korea is like a petri dish of innovation for many industries. The cycle of consumer trial, adoption, and failure or success is accelerated to warp speed because of the country’s dense population, global orientation, and fast internet. (South Korea was the first nation to roll out wide-scale commercial 5G service.)”
This Week’s Playlist Is Themed: Suede (lesser lights)
I suspect most people in their teens or twenties in the 1990s – in the UK at least – would be familiar with the band’s big singles. So I thought I’d put together some of their B-sides and less well-known album tracks.