Presented on stage by Russell Smith at Ryeberg Live Toronto (June 1st, 2010).

Lady Gaga, “Telephone” (2010)

Well, I am sick of preaching to the converted. So what I’m about to do you might call biting the hand that feeds me: I am bringing my condemnation of hipster culture right here into the belly of the beast, into hipster ground zero.

Bear in mind in your no doubt angry response that I am outnumbered here; I am performing this act as a kind of self-sacrifice, a self-immolation for the sake of art.

My first exhibit, my best example so far of the emptiness and self-indulgence of hipster culture, is this music video.

Pomplamoose, “Lady Gaga Telephone” (2010)

You may recognize this song as the dance hit by the pop star Lady Gaga, whose multimillion dollar video of the same song was playing as we all filed in here. (You may also know that Lady Gaga’s videos have been much discussed on Ryeberg, after a brilliant disquisition on them by Mary Gaitskill, which is partly why I thought I would prolong this particularly Ryebergian fixation this evening). And this performance of it – as all you bearded and spectacle-wearing types no doubt already know — is by a California-based group Pomplamoose.

And yes, even the humour in their name annoys me. Why grapefruit? Is that funny in itself? What’s the pun? What’s the point? Does everything have to be silly and meaningless? But anyway, that is but a small reason to despise them when there are so many other more powerful reasons, which I would hardly need to enumerate to a non-hipster audience but I will try to do as quickly as I can here.

First, who are they? Pomplamoose is a popular and expertly contemporary group; they have hit on a brilliant way of selling their music in the digital age. They record music in their own house, and they do it dressed in the fanatically comfortable clothes of the hipster – the clothes that must all look like pyjamas – not that this is at all important to my judgement — and they post videos of the performances on YouTube and then sell their songs from MySpace as MP3s. No CDs, no distributor, no middle-man, iPod ready.

In what way, besides that, are they perfectly representative of hipster culture? Well, it’s not just their clothes. They do compose and record their own music, which is sort of cute and quirky folk-jazz-twee-pop that sounds very much like this, and they did have one big original YouTube hit (it’s called “Hail Mary”). It’s a very nice song, and if you’re a nice person you’ll probably like it. It belongs to a genre I suppose one could fairly call Vegetarian Rock. You can smell the fair-trade coffee from the screen). But that’s not actually what they are best known for, not actually why you all probably found the first YouTube link in your inboxes with the attached note: “Check these guys out! Hilarious!”

They are best known for doing these covers of pop songs, particularly by big stadium mainstream performers. Their most popular compilation is called “Tribute To Famous People.” What they do is they take a massive dance tune – something by Lady Gaga or Beyonce or Michael Jackson – and they wimpify it; they bring it down in scale till it’s a plaintive, wispy little sing-along.

Here’s another example: here’s possibly the most pretentious version of “Beat It” ever recorded.

Pomplamoose, “Michael Jackson Beat It” (2010)

There is pervasive irony here: They are taking the most mainstream (i.e., uncool) of music and translating it into another aesthetic, one that privileges the small over the big, the homey over the polished, the gentle over the aggressive. What they are doing musically is stripping out all the elements that made these pop songs fun and popular: They have removed the buzzy, booming, abrasive aggressiveness that made them sexy.

Are they mocking those songs then? I don’t think so – I think they honestly think they’re improving them. There is a smugness about this that is a reflection of hubris. And of course they’re benefitting too, even while being superior, from the massive popularity of these uncool songs. Jack Conte, the guy with the beard, has made superior comments in interviews about countering “fake” music culture, and reviews have praised them for being grassroots and the opposite of slick. So of course they carefully cultivate the unaffected, in a massively affected way.

The singer, Nataly Dawn, has perfected that wide-eyed surprised naïf look that you may have noticed she puts on every two seconds that’s about as natural as Lady Gaga herself. And then they add, in the most nauseating touch of all, outtakes that show the two of them joking together, or, here, at the end of this video, eating.

Pomplamoose, “Hail Mary” (2009)

So down to earth! So adorable!

Okay, but seriously it’s not just their clothes and their posturing that annoys me. On an artistic level, they are perfectly representative of hipsterdom because of their fixation with other people’s music – with the idea of a cover, a remix — that’s significant. This is what is so contemporary.

And they have to be well aware that their rendition of the “Telephone” song comes to the YouTube viewer as part of a torrent of other personal remixes and private performances of that same song, most of them humorous or ironic in nature. We have all at this point probably seen the far more entertaining US army in Afghanistan version:

malibumelcher, “Telephone Remake” (2010)

The army video is at least understandable as purely ironic, even sarcastic. And for that reason it’s strangely more pleasurable that the brilliantly musical interpretation of those two talented but sadly artistically dull serious musicians. It doesn’t have any archness, it doesn’t inhabit the grey zone of semi-irony of hipsterdom.

Why does Pomplamoose continue to focus so on covers of mainstream pop songs? Well, this is pretty much the definition of a certain kind of postmodernism: the idea that there is nothing original in art, that everything is a reference. And that every perception is filtered through a haze of mass culture, the omnipresent noise, so all art might as well be about, in some way, Beyoncé and McDonalds. And that there is no difference between a parody and an homage, that one laughs at everything one admires anyway, that irony is so unavoidable that it is impossible to differentiate from seriousness.

There is something defeatist and basically not brave about hipster post-modernism – and this goes for the domains of visual art and literature too. If you claim to believe that there is no possibility of original art in an age of reference, you are cleverly avoiding the nauseating stress of being original. It’s too easy. And you shouldn’t believe it, either, because it’s not true.

Artists in every era have faced the terrifying pressure of what has already been done, and every age has had its revolutionaries. An artistic culture so focussed on pastiche as our own can start to look nihilistic.

This, then, is my plea, my injunction, my exhortation: Come on, hipsters. I really don’t care what you wear, honestly I don’t. And I don’t really want you to die. But I want you to get brave, artistically.

Get out of your living rooms.

- Russell Smith

Since I discovered that there are videos for all the underground songs of my youth now on YouTube, I’ve been staying up late watching them. I couldn’t believe you could find actual footage of the Human League performing “Being Boiled,” a song first recorded on a Sony two-track tape for a cost of two pounds fifty.

But I am not the only fan of John Foxx and Co. to have been disappointed with these old videos. And this is the great marvel and joy of YouTube — that disappointment can be answered: John Foxx fans have posted their own remixes of his 1980 hit (And of course you can also see John Foxx performing the song live in a variety of venues.) My favourite of the modern videos is one entirely in black and white: It nails the Kratfwerkian nostalgic element of early synthpop, situating the whole thing in a time of post-war optimism (and minus the little girls). This video is better than the original.

John Foxx, “Underpass” (Metamatic, 1980)

The dance remix is also a lot of fun: it updates the song with an electro bassline and a sample from Liberace. There it is: irony. An injection of just a little of it makes it so much more contemporary.

Mark Reeder, “Underpass Reeder Sinister Subway Mix,” (2009)

Is this just a dangerous nostalgia? Am I just being like the boomers, constantly looking over their home movies from Woodstock? Possibly in giving in to this I am distancing myself from the present. But I like to think it’s also research, from a distance, on something I didn’t fully understand at the time.

Trust YouTube to provide visual commentary on exactly this question. Here are Miss Kittin and the Hacker, who in 2001 released a song called “1982.”

Miss Kittin and the Hacker, “1982,” (2009)

And by the way, techno is still obsessed with “Stalker.” Watch these two:

Richie Hawtin, “The Tunnel,” (2005)

Richie Hawtin, “We (All) Search,” (2005)

- Russell Smith

Part 1 of Russell’s On Nostalgia.

John Foxx, “Underpass” (1980)

John Foxx, one of the founding members of Ultravox, was the son of a Lancashire coal miner. He released several solo albums after he left Ultravox in the late 70s; the most avant-gardist of them was Metamatic, from 1980, an all-synthesizer record. Foxx wrote and sang all the songs, and played all the instruments and drum machines. All the songs share a coldness, the machine fixation that was the hallmark of the sensitive in those days, and a certain resistance to pleasing melody, particularly in the vocals, which are deliberately adenoidal and often chanted rather than sung. Foxx had a remarkable voice, actually, and was given to diva-like wailing on other albums, but here he did his best to sound like an airport announcement. “Underpass” was the most dramatic and orchestral of the songs on Metamatic, and has a driving melody that will stick in your head to the point of irritation.

This music preceded house music by about five years, techno by about seven.

Foxx’s debt to Kraftwerk is obvious, but he is bringing something new to the genre here: Kraftwerk liked cold machine sounds, but they liked the pretty, too. There is a sunniness, a lightness to so many Kraftwerk songs -- think of the flute bits in Autobahn -- and a hint of irony to almost everything they did. Even their image, the suits, the made up mannequins, the sepia photographs, the nostalgia of their cover designs, was part of a complicated series of parodies.

But there is no humour to be found in John Foxx. This is deadly serious. Even his image -- the ghostly pretty boy in the dark suit, inspired no doubt in part by Bowie, later to become standard for Goth bands -- is not ironic. He shares nostalgia with Kraftwerk, but his is not parodic. His nostalgia is despairing:

Well I used to remember
Now it’s all gone
World War something…
We were somebody’s sons

Foxx’s urban alienation, dependent as it was on images of industrial landscapes and loneliness (“click click drone”), is now clichéd. But his is complicated by this nostalgia, by the idea not of a futuristic techno-society but of a rusting and abandoned place, in many ways an obsolete place (“Misty on the glass now/Rusty on the door/Here for years now…”), reminiscent of Tarkovsky’s portrayal of the future in Stalker-a place of rubble and debris.

Tarkovsky, “Stalker” (1979)

When I first heard Metamatic, in a Canadian university residence in or around 1982, it was electrifying; it was revolutionary, to us, and brilliant. It instantly unified the intellects and the weirdos, gave us our secret anthem. (I had a friend, a PhD student in English, who claimed that all the songs in Metamatic referred in some way to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. We pored through the cryptic lyrics trying to see the clues. I don’t think they are there. But that’s the kind of words they are. They could be.)

Our anthems had to be secret, of course, because they provoked mockery from happier students. The most popular music of the time was still American-style rock. Bruce Springsteen was big. And there was something offensive to the healthy crowd about our melancholy music: they saw it as pretentious, and, well, I suppose it was.

Interestingly, we never saw music videos to match our favourite songs.

Music of the time was on vinyl, or, more frequently, on cassette tapes, copied from somebody who had a record store in Toronto. We didn’t even know what the album cover art looked like most of the time, let alone what the performers looked like. There was a television in the common room of the residence, but it didn’t have cable, and MuchMusic didn’t come on the air until 1984. (Just to remind you of the tenor of the times: the first video ever played on Much was by Rush). For almost the whole of the 1980s I was living in shared student apartments and I don’t remember there being a television set in a single one of them.

So I first saw this video, of one of the most influential songs of my youth, last month.

It was a joy, of course, for nostalgic reasons, but also disappointing. The two girls looking frightened in an empty room, for example -- that’s surprisingly gothy for such a tasteful minimalist as Foxx. But I still thrill to the images of subways and highways, I love the raw concrete and I love the stiffness of the cadaverous musicians.

The sudden migration towards electronic pop music that occurred over the next few years, the early 80s, produced astoundingly cheesy videos for a movement that was so aesthetically obsessed. Watching the videos of the great synthpop hits -- Visage’s “Fade To Grey”, for example, with its hysterical makeup and mime-like posing -- might have turned me off electronic music, had I seen them the time.

Visage, “Fade To Grey” (1980)

What is charming about this video now is how it reminds us of a time before pervasive irony. Remaking the world as aesthetically ideal was serious business to these guys: it really was romantic. There was no humour to it at all. That’s why it’s embarrassing now.

I sometimes yearn a bit for that lack of self-consciousness.

 - Russell Smith