Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines And Tomorrow’s Music Today
Simon Reynolds ★★★★★
White Rabbit, £25
ISBN 9781399618335, 416 pages
Described by Reynolds as the “twisted sister” to his Retromania, published in 2011 and which concerned pop’s addiction to its past, Futuromania… is not a recantation of that volume but a corollary. It’s a collection of pieces dating back to the 90s, written for, among others, Melody Maker,
The Observer,
The New York Times, The Wire and Pitchfork but with a particular emphasis on that complex and diffuse century we currently occupy, the 21st. Subjects covered range from Kraftwerk to grime, synthpop to Auto-tune, A Guy Called Gerald to Boards Of Canada.
As a critic, Reynolds was always among the very first to spot new trends – he was ahead of the game in writing about UK jungle in the early 90s and grime in the 2000s despite having relocated to America. Quite simply, he digs deeper, works and thinks harder than most, although his prose exudes effortlessness. He brings to his writing a rare and dogged scrutiny, penetrative insights, upturning truisms: he observes that early synthpop wasn’t “emotionless” but full of emotions, simply bleak ones, that a great many of the soundtracks to sci-fi film classics aren’t very futuristic at all and how Donna Summer, with I Feel Love, didn’t just help inaugurate electronic disco but anticipated what he describes as the “fembot” pop stars of our own time.
Barely a page passes without at least one great shaft of illumination; how industrial music is “enthralled by the outer limits of human experience, and in particular with the extremes of male psychology: the outlaw, the survivalist, the terrorist, the serial killer, the dictator, the technocrat”... or inspired comparison, comparing the feeling of “abandonment” in Burial’s music to The Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby. He is alive to ironies, noting in a Daft Punk profile that “in 2050, businessmen will still wear ties and suits. That the top speed for vehicular transport will be within the current range ...There is an awful dawning suspicion that popular music might actually be rather similar in 2050 to how it is now.”
Although writings on electronic music past have been liable, in the spirit of the Italian Futurists past, to fetishise machinery, celebrate the elimination of the human, in 2024 Reynolds sees electronic music making as very much a human story. Without the people operating them, machines are merely machines. It is those stories, from Moroder to Jlin, that he tells and celebrates in this excellent collection.