Back to the future

Recently I was listening to Mark Ronson's single Bang Bang Bang on YouTube and guess what? I actually quite like it! It features Q-Tip and MNDR and displays some nice retro-futurist vibes, which I've been thinking about a lot lately. It also bizarrely appropriates the lyrics of traditional French nursery rhyme Allouette – a song about plucking the feathers from a Skylark!


The song and video evoke a kind of 60s/70s futuristic feel, with the effect that it manages to seem retro and strangely foward-thinking at the same time.

This also struck me about Julian Casablancas' solo album Phrazes for the Young (even the title, actually taken from an Oscar Wilde title, gives off this vibe with the use of the z!). It's all spacey analogue synths and and the artwork is all planets and trippy 80s lazers.

I like this retro-futurist schtick, but I can't help thinking, are these artists (both known for their previous retro-laden work) duping people into thinking that they're making a progression, while simply aping forward-thinking notions of yet another past era?

It's like when, a few years ago, indie bands started ditching their guitars for synthesisers as a reaction to retro guitar music which relied too heavily on the past.

This in itself is pretty meaningless, because no-one's trying to pretend there's anything modern about synthesisers – they've been commercially available since the 60s (Wikipedia claims the synthesiser was actually invented in 1876!) and anyway, the synths they started using were all analogue.

And what does futuristic actually mean now? Does it have connotations separate from it's actual meaning? To me it evokes, among other things, minimalism and a pre-occupation with space travel. In the 50s and 60s I guess space travel was the be-all-and-end-all in terms of the future, but now it seems that people are more concerned with our own planet and how to conserve it! Minimalism seems pretty retro now, too.

And is it just me, or do computers in sci-fi films still seem to operate in DOS?!

Now that the possibilities for the future seem so limitless, maybe the term futuristic itself is a retro concept?

In a nice bit of synchronicity, last week I found a copy of cult 1986 Disney film Flight of the Navigator (in, of all places, a cottage in Cornwall) and the theme tune is eerily similar to Bang Bang Bang! This was one of the defining films of my childhood, but I haven't seen it or thought about it for about 15 years.


The plot bears repeating for it's sheer ludicrousness (the film also features an early performance from Sarah Jessica Parker as a NASA intern!).

Twelve-year-old David is kidnapped by an alien spacecraft which is conducting experiments on different life-forms. Determining that humans only use 10% of their brains (err, hang on a minute...) it fills the other 90% of David's brain with maps. The fruits of this experiment are never revealed. For whatever reason, eight years pass before David is taken back to earth, not having aged (The spaceship believed that humans may not be able to withstand time travel, which is why he wasn't dropped off back at the time he was picked up). His family, who thought he was dead, are delighted and confused to see him, but it is all a bit exhausting for them and after a while his dad and brother go back to bed.

However the spaceship then crashes and is impounded by NASA, who are also studying David to find out why he hasn't aged since his disappearance. David gets aboard the Trimaxian Drone Ship (Max) who reveals that he lost his space maps in the crash and needs to download them from David's brain to get back to his planet, Phaelon. Despite claiming not to know what human emotions or humour are, Max does a good line in camp sardonicism. He downloads the maps and the two fly about pointlessly for a while, with David navigating, before deciding to take David home to Florida. Despite being able to travel through time and space, they consult a standard road map to get there.

Then David decides that actually he wants to go back in time to the point where he was kidnapped and Max agrees to take him, which makes you think, what on earth was the whole point?

I guess I thought this film was pretty futuristic when I was younger, but it seems so dated now. At one point a still frame is used to depict a crowd as a shadow flies over them.

Flight of the Navigator fans – Disney are currently planning a remake!

Anyway, in a nice subversion of retro-futurism (future-retroism?), art project ALT/1977 imagines how modern technological gadgets would have been marketed in the 1970s. My favourite is a re-imagining of the iPod, called the Pocket HiFi, with the strapline "Like a party in your pocket. But not in a weird way"!


There is also the LapTron 64 computer ("Apple II? Seriously?"), the MobileVoxx ("Stop missing calls. Start interrupting movies") and the Microcade 3000 handheld games console ("A child's toy that can literally guide nuclear warheads. Whoops!").

Alt/1977 artist Alex Varanese says: "The irony is I’d gladly trade in my immac­u­lately designed 21st cen­tury gad­gets for these hideously clunky, faux-wood-panelled pieces of über-kitsch. Sorry, Apple."