In 2023, the director Kelly Reichardt appeared on WTF with Marc Maron and she and Maron raved about their mutual love of Robert Altman’s 1971 film McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Reichardt spoke about how her own movie First Cow explored similar territory as the Altman classic. She went on to say how so many film directors want to make their own version of McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Directors have the ability to not only build off of their influences, but can also work inside of different time periods, just as novelists can write within the genre of historical fiction. Directors and fiction writers are afforded this level of artistic flexibility as a matter of course and without scrutiny, while musicians are expected to be forward-facing in their art. Citing influences and utilizing specific production techniques from the past are allowed to a certain point, but the expectation of musicians is to push the field forward to avoid insinuations of the work falling too much in the arena of tribute or pastiche.
This argument is a central argument of Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past, a 2010 book by cultural critic Simon Reynolds, who posited that ready access to most of the history of recorded music through YouTube, Spotify, and the like has led to an elevated fascination with the past by musicians and fans alike. According to Reynolds, this has led to a form of stasis that he refers to as “retromania,” explaining:
“For the greater part of the last century, modernism and modernisation were the watchwords: the emphasis was on harking forward, an intent focus on everything in the present that seemed to present ‘tomorrow’s world today’. That changed, gradually but with increasing momentum from the early seventies, towards a preoccupation with the residues of the past in the present, a massive cultural shift that encompassed the rise of the nostalgia industry with its retro fashions and revivals, postmodernism’s pastiche and renovation of historical styles, and the spectacular growth of heritage.”
Two artists who have fully inverted Reynolds’ notion of retromania are Cindy Lee and Jack Name. They have adopted an artistic practice that could be referred to as period piece music. They employ the same artist instinct as Reichardt doing her version of McCabe & Mrs. Miller, though both go beyond Reichardt by using identity and character as a way to look back while moving forward. Both Cindy Lee and Name released different variations of period piece music in 2024 — one highly acclaimed and one much more obscure — that demonstrate acts of reverse retromania.
Cindy Lee is an identity created by musician Patrick Flegel that allows them the performing and songwriting freedom to inhabit certain genres and sounds. Describing themselves as “more of a cross dresser than a drag queen,” Flegel’s adoption of the Cindy Lee role became “a way to reinforce me doing something that I love doing that I often withhold from myself.” Cindy Lee has released several albums since 2012, experimenting with various sounds and structure, but they fully realized their vision with 2024’s Diamond Jubilee. It feels like a classic album that was forgotten about in a fit of collective amnesia, buried underground for 30 years, and unearthed while digging for something else. The double album represents an overflow of ideas, bursting with glistening guitar riffs and solos all laced with sensual, yearning vocals. It’s as if Cindy Lee wants to try all of the old genres at one time.
“If You Hear Me Crying” — Diamond Jubilee’s 25th track — serves as a good example of Cindy Lee’s embrace of retromania. The song begins with a classic rock and roll opening, featuring two distinct guitar voices: one solos while the other holds down the rhythm part. This twin guitar method is reminiscent of The Velvet Underground, Television, and even John and George. The handclaps accompanying the drums are as fundamental a pairing as seeing moss on a rock. After the 20-second intro, Cindy Lee’s vocals enter the song. There could be three vocal parts or 100, it’s impossible to know. They ask, “Can I hold out? / Can I hold on?” Immortal questions of love that are essential to the history of rock and roll.
There’s a sudden break as a new section swooshes in with a weird-sounding guitar, perhaps a violin or two, and what sounds like a sound effect announcing the entrance of a genie in a Warner Brothers cartoon. The instrumental break ends just as abruptly as it began and a new passage commences, highlighted by a simple percussion and bass part. They support the vocals that are distorted, delayed, yet exquisite as Cindy Lee channels Cocteau Twins, The Chordettes, and Julee Cruise all at once. The connection to Cruise is apt as Diamond Jubilee must be in steady rotation on David Lynch’s turntable as Cindy Lee certainly fits a few of Lynch’s musical obsessions, namely female singing groups of the 60s and torch song chanteuses. In fact, as they sing the central lyrics of the song — “Whisper to me / I heard you loud and clear before / Look right through me / Is this the love I’m looking for?” — it’s easy to imagine “If You Hear Me Crying” as a song recorded by Laura Palmer in the last days of her life in an unreleased musical interlude on Twin Peaks. Furthermore, Diamond Jubilee as a whole could be construed as Cindy Lee doing David Lynch akin to First Cow being a variation of McCabe & Mrs. Miller.
The rest of “If You Hear Me Crying” contains many other elements, including glam, wah-wah funk guitar fills, girl group-esque vocals that call back and forth to each other, and blasts of distorted guitar that sound like every guitar player at once (e.g., Mick Ronson, Thurston Moore, Ira Kaplan, Dean Wareham) and none of them, only Cindy Lee. The last minute of the song is particularly noteworthy as Cindy Lee plays the main melody as a solo, beginning softly and containing hints of surf music, but then they break into a loud, jagged version of the same melody. High, ethereal vocals accompany this guitar flare-up, ending the song in a striking and splendid fashion.
“If You Hear Me Crying” is only one of a 32-song masterpiece that is inundated with an array of alluring sounds and inspired songcraft. Within Diamond Jubilee, Cindy Lee displays a complete acceptance of the past, not only presenting their music as a period piece or a musical work of historical fiction, but they have added an extra layer. Cindy Lee has been created as a character so that they are within and part of this period piece, going beyond mere presentation. Cindy Lee becomes the full context, thoroughly subsuming the listener into the world that they have built.
Jack Name is another artist working in a similar way as Cindy Lee, through an embodiment of retromania while making character and identity a central part of his artistic mode. “Jack Name” is a pseudonym for the Copenhagen-born and Los Angeles-based musician John Webster Adams, who sometimes tours as a live guitarist for the band White Fence. To date, Name has released four full-length albums, all of which are framed by individual concepts. 2015’s Weird Moons is a phantasmagoric narrative of werewolves in space that works as a representation of Name’s experience of radiation therapy to treat his cancer.
It’s difficult to discern the lyrics for “Under the Weird Moon” from that album, but the snarling snakes sound of the guitars and keyboards are offset by the overlapping vocals of the chorus, resulting in a bizarrely inspirational feel. It’s clear that Name is channeling glam as well as borrowing from the late 70s troika of Eno/Fripp/Bowie, but, as with Cindy Lee and Kelly Reichardt, the influences are utilized as blocks on which to stand and conceive of something new. The highly personal and the character-creation of Weird Moons was necessary to convey the concept, as Name explained in this interview:
“It was sort a mix of character-driven decisions and musical aesthetic decisions. They’re doing a dance the whole time, and are inseparable…I had started dreaming up Weird Moons before I knew about the cancer; I had an unrelated idea about werewolves that was on my mind a lot. But it also turned out to be a perfect way to address the cancer stuff. Bodies changing, morphing, and mutating. These things, — ideas and realities — always flow together in strange and almost magical ways.”
In 2024, Name released Fabulous Soundtracks, which differs from his previous albums. Instead of writing and recording a collection of songs that are connected as a way to convey a single idea, the individual tracks act as separate soundtracks, “each a sonic re-construction dedicated to a distinct scene,” as explained in the liner notes.
It’s apparent that the third song, “The Runaway Girls,” is supposed to accompany a horror movie of some sorts. The track’s introduction incorporates hypnotic, gamelan rhythms and hip-hop keyboards and guitars that could be taken from Timbaland production. Name’s lead vocals during the verses are chanted, spoken world-style, and are unbearably spooky. Likewise, the lyrics are deeply creepy as Name asks, “Do you see through the demons within the dream?” The dreamy, yet nightmare nature of the song is reinforced by the gorgeous and woozy chorus that drips with 80s guitar sounds. Name references characters, such as Mother Mary and the titular Runaway Girls. As the song reaches its peak, “The Runaway Girls” feels less like a soundtrack to a movie, but rather it is its own movie, an A24 arthouse horror film that will out-perform its budget and become a hit. The same is true of the rest of Fabulous Soundtracks. Each track is its own separate world, going beyond the album’s concept as Name has conceptualized 10 distinct movies in the form of 10 songs.
Borrowing another phrase from cinema, both Cindy Lee and Jack Name are musical auteurs. In film criticism, the term is used as a way to identify those filmmakers whose style is so individualized and identifiable that they ellipse the inherent collaborative nature of film. In music, it’s much easier to identify who is the author of an album or song because, well, they’re usually the lead singer and/or songwriter. But in the case of Cindy Lee and Name, not only do they play most if not all of the instrumentation on their recordings, but there’s extra consideration as both have constructed identities with which they perform. This could be similar to when a director of the film plays a role in the movie they are directing. Cindy Lee and Jack Name have written their songs specifically as platforms for “Cindy Lee” and “Jack Name.” This goes beyond Spike Lee simply playing the lead character of Mookie in Do the Right Thing. With Cindy Lee and Name, it would be as if Spike Lee played every character in Do the Right Thing.
In the world of the visual arts, theories, opinions, and arguments about how much tradition an artist should incorporate into their work and when to break from tradition are incessant. A recent reading of New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century by Jed Perl demonstrates that the New York City-based artists of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s sometimes struggled with their almost complete knowledge of art history. Yet many artists felt the opposite, understanding that they persist in a continuum and in dialogue with the artists who came before them. Perl cited the attitude of Willem de Kooning from an Art News symposium focused on artists’ relationship to the past: “Painters are bound to be involved in painting. Old and new are just one thing… Being anti-traditional is just as corny as being traditional.” Going further with this same line of thought, Perl quotes the Swiss sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti, an artist from a previous generation of de Kooning:
“All the art of the past rises up before me, the art of all ages and all civilizations, everything becomes simultaneous, as if space had replaced time. Memories of works of art blend with affective memories, with my work, with my whole life.”
Giacometti’s words perfectly describe the work of Cindy Lee and Jack Name. With both artists, the influences that they draw from as they create their music can be obvious at times or sometimes like a fleeting memory that recalls a once-glimpsed face on a train. They’re not tribute bands, nor are they writing fan fiction. With their period piece music, Cindy Lee and Jack Name encompass all of their influences at once and synthesize them into their own vital music that is also representative of our time. They have become, to use Giacometti’s word, “simultaneous.” Their work goes beyond retromania. Instead, they utilize an imagined past to create new work in the present, from the past, and, concurrently, for the future.
Recliner Notes 