Alternate Title: Why Casiotone for the Painfully Alone Puts the Lie to Lo-Fi’s ‘Authenticity’.
It’s difficult to argue that irony is the dominant mode of expression in our time. From the resigned snarkiness of Gawker to the ubiquity of The Simpsons and The Family Guy, irony is seemingly everywhere. Its position in our culture is often seen as a product of a postmodern weariness – and wariness – of sincerity: that the breakdown of accepted truths during the 20th century has rendered detached irony the only ‘honest’ option when any commitment to truth starts to feel like what one might call ‘naive dogmatism’.
There are, however, pockets of resistance to the dominance of irony. Perhaps more than any other medium, in music one finds artists committed to sincerity and authenticity – to the ideas that meaning can still happen, that art can still affect people and that self-expression is more than just reconfiguring somebody else’s ideas. It is, I suppose, possible to conceive of a debate between the two ‘sides’: the ‘sincere’ could argue that art must still point out fundamental human truths in order to be relevant, while the ‘ironists’ might claim that art is only truthful when it lays bare its own artifice, its own inability to represent ‘truth’ in anything but a limited way.
I was thinking of this recently while listening to a lot of Casiotone for the Painfully Alone (yeah c’mon, like you’re surprised…). There is a remarkable appeal to synth player/singer Owen Ashworth’s lo-fi approach. The stories of alienated twenty-somethings and the insistence on a stripped-down aesthetic resonate loudly with the North American urban experience and listening to CFTPA, you almost imagine yourself unemployed and smoking while sitting in a damp basement apartment somewhere. But what especially intrigues me is why CFTPA’s music works so well: is it because it so sincerely captures the malaise of modern urban life? Or because it so soundly rejects the sheen and polish we associate with pop music, material success and mainstream culture?
The answer, I think, all depends on your approach to lo-fi. Traditionally, lo-fi (i.e. the opposite of hi-fi or ‘high fidelity’) was seen as a move towards authenticity, specifically as a rejection of the slickness and polish of seventies and eighties rock. Today, it continues to occupy that rebel spot, often in electronica like Casiotone and most frequently in indie rock and pop, perhaps most recently with Jacksonville foursome Black Kids. The wikipedia article on lo-fi sums things up pretty well: “Often lo-fi artists will record on old or poor recording equipment, ostensibly out of financial necessity but also due to the unique aural association such technologies have with “authenticity,” an association created in listeners by exposure to years of demo, bootleg, and field recordings”.
So the usual argument says that by stripping out production values and studio trickery, lo-fi is more authentic. But the wikipedia article quite cleverly points out the ‘aural association’ that lo-fi has – that it is the attachment to the ideas of poverty and the image of the struggling artists that give lo-fi its aura of authenticity. Context is thus everything: lo-fi does not represent a purer, truer form, but is instead a contingent reaction against over-production. In fact, you could argue that lo-fi is far from ‘authentic’ and that a polished, clean-sounding album does a far better job of ‘authentically’ reproducing a band’s sound.
But I would go a step further and argue that, rather than only a rejection of the aesthetics themselves, lo-fi is also a rejection of the sincerity that underpins the desire to make a ‘polished’ record. After all, what is more ‘sincere’ or ‘authentic’ to try and create a highly produced ‘Corgan-esque’ disc that ‘best represents a band’? It is not sincerity and authenticity that breeds lo-fi; it is the wariness of those very things. The sound of lo-fi, far from being more pure, insists upon itself as a recording, as a product of technology and it constantly points to its own artifice – the clicks, the fuzz and the muffled sound becoming markers of an ironic rejection of sincerity. Lo-fi has become the aesthetic manifestation of our generation’s approach to irony, our resistance against the attempt to produce the ‘perfect’ piece of art and it instead embraces the constantly self-effacing nature of irony. What lo-fi ultimately points to is the inability to ever capture a moment or sound or experience and in the giving up, it becomes liberating. And, if lo-fi continues to produce things like Casiotone for the Painfully Alone and its remarkable ability to connect with the zeitgeist of our time – then I wouldn’t have it any other way.
