The past didn't go anywhere
Welcome to ddrake.substack.com, a substack written by former music journalist/current industry A&R David Drake. This substack is one dimension of an art project I’ve been working on, one which manifests primarily as a series of DJ mixes courtesy Industrial Streaming Information Logistics (isil.club) exploring a sound I’ve labelled cyberfunk. In contrast with the predominant strains of retro dance culture—particularly disco and techno, which I find boring—cyberfunk has largely been marginalized as “dated” since at least the early 1990s. This substack is an effort to explore the real histories of a fictive genre, and have some fun. Listen to one such cyberfunk mix here.
I have a good friend in the East. A good singer, and a good folksinger, a good song collector, who comes and listens to my shows and says, “You sing a lot about the past. You always sing about the past; you can’t live in the past, you know.” And I say to him, “I can go outside and pick up a rock that’s older than the oldest song you know and bring it back here and drop it on your foot.” Now, the past didn’t go anywhere, did it? It’s right here, right now – I always thought that anybody who told me I couldn’t live in the past was trying to get me to forget something that if I remembered it would get ’em in serious trouble.
No, it’s not that – that “that’s Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, Nineties” – that whole idea of decade packages. Things don’t happen that way… No, that, that packaging of time is a journalistic convenience that they use to trivialize and to dismiss important events and important ideas. I defy that. Time is an enormous, long river, and I’m standing in it, just as you’re standing in it. My elders are the tributaries, and everything they thought and every struggle they went through and everything they gave their lives to, and every song they created, and every poem that they laid down flows down to me – and if I take the time to ask, and if I take the time to see, and if I take the time to reach out, I can build that bridge between my world and theirs. I can reach down into that river and take out what I need to get through this world.
I like how utah phillips see the past as guidance, as tools, as practical, a source of tools he can draw on to ‘get through this world.’ there is no nostalgia invoked here