A Placid Island of Ignorance

How odd that I've seen no mention of how much many of the bits on the newish Goldfrapp album sounds like pop-era Danielle Dax ... the flatulent bass synth thrashing round a motorik beat with cooing I'd-be-seductive-were-I-not-taking-the-piss kittenvox slithering antiphonically overtop1 1Go ahead, listen to “Twist” and “Cat-House” back to back — somebody deserves a royalty check here I think. ... the over-the-top For A Few Gucciones More hair/makeup/pose visual appeal with disturborealist layerings (dog heads?) ... the totally synthetic quality of it the inverse somehow of the totally synthetic pop sound it shadows, revelling in the plasticity of its production but the voice a human core, a ridge of warm thigh flesh emerging from the surface of the block of ice its torso is encased in ... Yeah, it's great that people are digging this sound, but I can't help but feel, again, deja-vu of deja-vu of deja-vu, that I've been here before and to be “forward” I have to step back a decade ...

So much retro ... looking at twenty-somethings responding to sounds resurrected from twenty years ago, I can't help but want to poke a bit at this strange nostalgia for a time one didn't live through; I think about my fascination, as a 12-year-old in the late 60s, with the discarded pulp culture of the thirties and forties — those stacks of Tarzan and Doc Savage and H.P. Lovecraft paperbacks, the reprints of Golden-age superhero comix, the old-time radio programs — there was a sense in which I felt more deeply about Depression-era NYC than about anything patchouli-scented ... but when I think about 1981, it just doesn't seem different enough to fetishize, it just makes me feel like I'm living a rerun (meet the new crypto-fascist, same as the old crypto-fascist). But I guess it's kinda cool to have my personal cultural apex hip again, if only for a minute; beats being the mouldy fig, even if I'm still “Who's the old guy?”.

I miss Dax. Admittedly, I miss the Dax of We Buy a Hammer for Daddy more than the Dax of Blast the Human Flower (the former's confused little girl lost in Ernst landscape having a bit more dramatic oomph than later years' cyborg ingenue lost at the disco), but I'd take either version really. One has the sense that all that success she was pushing for might actually be possible now (viz. the discussion on some listserv recently1 1Which was it? Or was it a blog? It's all a blur to me now... about the mistiming of the Gang of Four reunion — if only they'd waited another 5 years they'd have played to packed theatres instead of half-filled clubs).