Since the 1980s, "Re" has been the predominant cultural mode. This condition is an endless lifestyle loop of repeating, retrieving, rewinding, recycling, reciting, redesigning and reprocessing. Popular music's backward spin accelerated and diversified dramatically during the Re Era. The past quarter century's "like a version" loop invites "The Cover Age" as a fitting characterization. Standardization, interpretation, incorporation, adaptation, appropriation and appreciation have been manifest in a multitude of musical manners and methods, including retrospectives and reissues, the emergence of rap and sampling as commercially dominant pop styles, karaoke, and a steady flow, if not stream, of cover compilations and tribute recordings which revisit a significant cross section of musical periods, styles, genre and artists and their catalogs of compositions. This essay is a collage and chronicle of the continuous coverage, intertextuality, and issues (imitation, ownership, apprenticeship, and preservation) within the karaoke climate of the music, mass media and marketplace triad, with artists, producers, record companies and consumers cohorts in the massive cover up.
Songs are just songs and everyone should sing them. (Rickie Lee Jones, "Beneath the Covers")
Songs need new voices to sing them in places they've never been sung in order to stay alive. (Emmylou Harris, qtd. in Griffith)
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Since the 1980s, American culture has been operating on "Re" mode control. This cultural condition, identified by Washington Post television critic Tom Shales in his enduring essay, "The Re Decade", is an endless lifestyle loop of repeating, retrieving, reinventing, reincarnating, rewinding, recycling, reciting, redesigning and reprocessing. Reverse gear rammed in maximum overdrive. Creators and audiences alike are revisionaries, infatuated with the familiar and wired with all access passes to the antecedent, reconsidering, reexamining, reinterpreting, revisiting, and rediscovering the world through replays and reissues, reruns and remakes. What goes around comes around. And 'round again. The Ecclesiastical Pete Seeger Byrdsian chime "Turn, turn, turn" backmasks into "Re-turn, re-turn, re-turn" as history repeats. The past is prologue and preference, occupation and preoccupation, an orientation and value scale that is positively postmodern, with producers parasitical of predecessors, and consumers captivated by "previously played" packaging.
Popular music's backward spin accelerated and diversified dramatically during the Re Era. Whereas Shales branded the 1980s "The Re Decade," the past quarter century's "like a version" loop in music invites "The Cover Age" as a fitting characterization. Standardization, interpretation, incorporation, adaptation, appropriation and appreciation have been manifest in a multitude of manners and methods, including retrospectives and reissues, the emergence of rap and sampling as commercially dominant pop styles, karaoke, and a steady flow, if not wave, of cover compilations and tribute recordings which revisited a significant cross section of musical periods, styles, genres and artists and their catalogs of compositions.
The continuous coverage cultivated a cluttered, karaoke climate and mix mentality within the music, mass media and marketplace triad. Artists, producers, record companies and consumers were cohorts in the massive cover up. Everyone was running, and re-running, for covers.
Back to the Future Shock: "Reflections of the Way Life Used To Be ..."
"Re" was not a trend that faded with other Big 80s phenomena. Re-forms ran rampant, having evolved symbiotically within the technospace, marketplace and collective consumer consciousness during the past 25 years. By the end of the millennium, nostalgia was well rooted as a permanent state of mind, soul, spirit and lifestyle. Objects in our collective cultural rear view mirror were closer than they appeared. The times were re-actionary, with hints of the strand of "nostalgia paralysis" Alvin Toffler predicted in 1970 in Future Shock. As Baby Boomers clung to their childhood as collectors and packrats--lost in the Mary Hopkin lyric "Those were the days my friend/ We thought they'd never end"--a new Generation Next emerged--the "Echo Boomers," who rediscovered and appropriated the iconography, music, language and lifestyle of earlier eras as the basis for defining their own culture and perspective ("Nostalgia").
"Repeat what you sow,"--or what has already been sown by someone else--became the mantra, mode and mindset. VCRs and electronic replay--the most important invention since the book, in the view of media theorist Tony Schwartz--empowered "time shifting" (Shales). Sports coverage featured endless replays for fans clad in throwback jerseys and Puma gear to review action from every angle, speed and color analyst viewpoint, before being replayed on the stadium's Jumbotron or Diamond Vision scoreboard, and then edited for ESPN's Sports Centers recycle followed by distribution through its franchise fragments ESPN 2, ESPN News or ESPN Classic. Cheaper imitations, "knockoffs" and reproductions were plentiful, from clothing and accessories to pottery and house designs. Vintage was fashionable. The reconfigured Volkswagen Beetle and PT Cruiser were among retro road rulers. Reunions, career comebacks and retirement resurrections, from Michael Jordan to the Deion/Dion(s)--Sanders and Celine--warranted the line from the situation comedy Grounded for Life (Fox)--"We go to all their farewell concerts, you never know when it will be the last one." Reinventions seemed requisite. The mother of makeovers, Madonna, built a biographical cast of en vogue, in the groove, multiple personas--pop star, entrepreneur, provocateur, virgin, whore, material girl, mother, new age spiritualist, cowgirl, divorcee, diva, dominatrix, actress, political activist, model, subject of coffee table sex book, children's book author, and Kabalist, starring her most recent reincarnation, Esther, just in time for her 2004 Reinvention Tour.
