New Sincerity draft replacement
New sincerity is a term that has been used in music, film criticism, poetry, and philosophy, generally to describe art or concepts that run against prevailing modes of postmodernist irony.
New sincerity in music
edit"New Sincerity" was used as a collective name for a loose group of alternative rock bands, centered in Austin, Texas in the years from about 1985 to 1990, who were perceived as reacting to the ironic outlook of then-prominent music movements like punk rock and New Wave. The term "New Sincerity" is said to have come from a sardonic, off-handed comment by Austin punk rocker/author Jesse Sublett: "All those new sincerity bands, they're crap." The term was picked up by a local music writer, and it ended up becoming the catch phrase for the bands Sublett was criticising. [1] [2] [3]
Nationally, the most successful "New Sincerity" band was The Reivers (originally called Zeitgeist), who released four well-received albums between 1985 and 1991. True Believers, led by Alejandro Escovedo and Jon Dee Graham, also received extensive critical praise and local acclaim in Austin, but the band was held back by difficulties in capturing their live sound on recordings, among other factors.[4] Other important "New Sincerity" bands included Doctors Mob,[5] [6] Wild Seeds,[7] and Glass Eye.[8] Another significant "New Sincerity" figure was the eccentric, critically-acclaimed songwriter Daniel Johnston.
Despite extensive critical attention (including national coverage in Rolling Stone and a 1985 episode of the MTV program The Cutting Edge), none of the "New Sincerity" bands met with much commercial success, and the "scene" ended within a few years.[9]
"New sincerity" has also been used to describe later performers such as Will Oldham, Cat Power, Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom.[10] and Okkervil River.[11]
New sincerity in criticism
editCritic Jim Collins introduced the concept of "new sincerity" to film criticism in his 1993 essay entitled “Genericity in the 90s: Eclectic Irony and the New Sincerity.” In this essay he contrasts films that treat genre conventions with "eclectic irony" and those that treat them seriously, with "new sincerity." Collins describes
the 'new sincerity' of films like Field of Dreams (1989), Dances With Wolves (1990), and Hook (1991), all of which depend not on hybridization, but on an "ethnographic" rewriting of the classic genre film that serves as their inspiration, all attempting, using one strategy or another, to recover a lost "purity," which apparently pre-existed even the Golden Age of film genre.[12]
New sincerity in philosophy
edit"New sincerity" has also sometimes been used to refer to a philosophical concept deriving from the basic tenets of performatism.[13] Related literature includes Wendy Steiner's The Trouble with Beauty, Denis Donahue's On Beauty, Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just, and Bryn Gribben's 2005 Bodies that Shatter: Ekphrasis, Beauty, and the Victorian Body as Art, and the term was taken up by avant-garde director and scholar Herbert Blau and designer/film auteur Brady Becker. Related movements may include Post-Postmodernism, New Puritans, Stuckism, and Remodernism, as well as the Dogme 95 film movement led by Lars von Trier and others.{citations needed}
New sincerity in The Sound of Young America
edit"The New Sincerity" has been espoused since 2002 by radio host Jesse Thorn of PRI's The Sound of Young America, self-described as "the public radio program about things that are awesome." Thorn characterizes New Sincerity as a cultural movement defined by dicta including "Maximum Fun" and "Be More Awesome." It celebrates outsized celebration of joy, and rejects irony, and particularly ironic appreciation of cultural products. Thorn has promoted his "New Sincerity" concept on his radio show and in interviews.[14] A typical explication of Thorn's concept is this 2006 "Manifesto for the New Sincerity":
What is The New Sincerity? Think of it as irony and sincerity combined like Voltron, to form a new movement of astonishing power. Or think of it as the absence of irony and sincerity, where less is (obviously) more. If those strain the brain, just think of Evel Knievel. Let's be frank. There's no way to appreciate Evel Knievel literally. Evel is the kind of man who defies even fiction, because the reality is too over the top. Here is a man in a red-white-and-blue leather jumpsuit, driving some kind of rocket car. A man who achieved fame and fortune jumping over things. Here is a real man who feels at home as Spidey on the cover of a comic book. Simply put, Evel Knievel boggles the mind. But by the same token, he isn't to be taken ironically, either. The fact of the matter is that Evel is, in a word, awesome. . . . Our greeting: a double thumbs-up. Our credo: "Be More Awesome." Our lifestyle: "Maximum Fun." Throw caution to the wind, friend, and live The New Sincerity.[15]
New sincerity in poetry
editSince 2005, poets including Reb Livingston, Joseph Massey, Andrew Mister, and Anthony Robinson have collaborated in a blog-driven poetry movement, described by Massey as "a ‘new sincerity’ brewing in American poetry -- a contrast to the cold, irony-laden poetry dominating the journals and magazines and new books of poetry." [16] Other poets named as associated with this movement, or its tenets, include Dave Berman, Catherine Wagner, Dean Young, Matt Hart, Tao Lin, Frederick Seidel, and Arielle Greenberg. [10]
References
edit- ^ Barry Shank, Dissonant Identities: The Rock'N'Roll Scene in Austin, Texas (Wesleyan University Press, 1994) (ISBN 9780819562760), p.148-49 & n.84.
- ^ Peter Blackstock,"'is it worth the admission....'", No Depression blog post dated January 15, 2008.
- ^ Regarding Jesse Sublett, see Ken Lieck, "Young, Loud, and Cheap: The Skunks, the Band That Broke Austin Out of the Seventies," Austin Chronicle, December 8, 2000.
- ^ True Believers at Allmusic.
- ^ Kent H. Benjamin, "Why Should Anyone Care Now?", Austin Chronicle Weekly Wire August 30, 1999.
- ^ Doctors Mob at Allmusic.
- ^ Wild Seeds at Allmusic.
- ^ Glass Eye at Allmusic.
- ^ Kristin Gorski, Almost Famous: The Austin Texas Soundtrack Circa 1985, Annabelle Magazine, No. 12 (2006).
- ^ a b Jason Morris, “The Time Between Time: Messianism & the Promise of a “New Sincerity,” Jacket 35 (2008)
- ^ Kate X. Messer, "Okkervil River: The New Sincerity," Austin Chronicle, March 3, 2000.
- ^ Jim Collins, “Genericity in the 90s: Eclectic Irony and the New Sincerity” in Jim Collins, Hilary Radner and Ava Preacher Collins, eds., Film Theory Goes to the Movies (New York: Routledge, 1993) (ISBN 0415905761, ISBN 9780415905763), p. 242, 245.
- ^ Raoul Eshelman, "Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism" in Anthropoetics 6 (2000/2001) . See also his book, Performatism or the End of Postmodernism. Davies Group: Aurora, Colorado 2008.
- ^ See, for example, "Jesse Thorn, America's Radio Sweetheart" at Gothamist.
- ^ Jesse Thorn, "A Manifesto for The New Sincerity," February 17, 2006.
- ^ Katy Henriksen, " Drunk Bunnies, The New Sincerity, Flarf: How Blogs are Transforming Poetry," EconoCulture, January 23, 2007.
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