That’s why the band’s music resonates so powerfully today when authoritarian populism is driving us headlong into the past.
I’ve been a huge fan of Stereolab from the moment I first heard them. Come to think of it, I was already sold on their aesthetic as soon as I heard about them. But their music surpassed my expectations by a wide margin.
What explains this devotion, one I share with many people of my generation?
I started to ponder this question during the pandemic when I once again found myself listening to Stereolab records on auto-repeat as I rode my bike or ran errands around the house. At a time when the whole world had turned upside down, their music kept me from falling on my face.
Stereolab’s music pulses with life. It always seems to be making progress, including when it repeats the same patterns without much variation.
Even when the records made by co-founders Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadier are overtly critical of the status quo or are suffused with melancholy, there is still an underlying optimism to almost everything they have done.
That was also apparent when I saw Sadier last year on her solo tour at the Rebel Lounge in Phoenix. Although she seemed very emotional and upset about the state of the world, her message of love came through clearly.
From the beginning, I loved Stereolab’s political convictions, but also the fact that they gave me pleasure that didn’t require me to think politically. I could ponder lyrics critiquing the society of the spectacle. Or I could lock into one of their signature grooves and forget about the horrors of contemporary existence for a while.
Having that option proved helpful during the pandemic. And it’s doing so now, when the news seems to get worse with each passing hour.
When Stereolab began attracting attention in the early 1990s, their sound and graphic design combined to recall the heyday of the postwar counterculture.
With their recent comeback album, Instant Holograms on Metal Film, they have completed a fitful transition to commemorating their own era, encouraging us to remember the utopian energies that were circulating within it.
Gane and Sadier kept Stereolab going after an awful 2002 in which their relationship dissolved and bandmate Mary Hansen was killed in a bicycle accident. But by the end of the decade, the band seemed to have lost its way.
While Stereolab went on hiatus for personal reasons, the political upheavals that followed the 2008 financial crisis made their absence seem logical.
Throughout the twists and turns of their career, Stereolab seemed to insist that a better world could be discerned in the promise of technology.
Although the band’s aesthetic maintained an ironic distance from Timothy Leary’s famous injunction to “turn on, tune in, and drop out,” their music still crackled with the electrical consciousness he had in mind.
Stereolab caught the wave of excitement generated by the internet as it transformed from a niche mode of communication for academic researchers into a mainstream consumer phenomenon. But they rode it differently than artists who celebrated the new way of life directly.
By reminding people of the time when the internet began to take shape at the end of the 1960s, exemplified by Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s concept of the “global village,” Stereolab tapped into a reservoir of hope that had subsequently been sealed off during the heyday of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and their neoliberal allies.
Once it became apparent that the dream of technologically facilitated interconnectedness was turning into a nightmare of corporate exploitation masquerading as freedom of expression, the optimism coursing through Stereolab’s music started to distort.
Maybe the answer wasn’t in turning on and tuning in but doing the opposite.
No matter how germane this question was in the 2010s, though, it is now proving to be an impediment to progress. Even if we are hopelessly coopted by the technologies that we require to remain an active participant in the world, we cannot afford to reject the networks that make global coordination possible.
As Stereolab’s sound evolved away from a propulsive squall reminiscent of the Velvet Underground and Krautrock bands like Neu! and Faust, they continued referring to the height of the counterculture with hallucinogen-tinted pop and the jazzy prog rock that featured on many film soundtracks back then.
By the time they arrived at 1997’s Dots and Loops, Stereolab were collaborating with German duo Mouse on Mars, who eschewed commercial synths for custom-built equipment with an analogue feel, and incorporating the polyrhythmic beats of post-rave dance music. Yet despite aligning the band with the post-rock movement, they were still vibing with the counterculture.
That’s why Volkswagen decided to use the track “Parsec” in a television commercial for the new Beetle. Even though its slogan, “Less Flower. More Power.” implied a break with the legacy of the counterculture, the fact that it mimicked the automaker’s advertising campaigns of the 1960s suggested an underlying continuity.
Stereolab’s song was ideally suited to communicate this ambivalence since its sped-up rhythm was complemented by dreamy vocals. Indeed, that tension is prominent in almost all of the band’s music, softening the cutting edge just enough to make it palatable to mainstream listeners.
The band’s detractors, both then and now, zero in on this quality, complaining that their songs are too easily pushed into the background, effectively becoming Muzak for hipsters.
Yet it is precisely the malleability of Stereolab’s music, the way it can toggle back and forth between the centre of attention and ambience, that sets them apart from other alternative bands of their generation. It’s hard to concentrate on something else when a Nirvana record is playing. And it’s hard not to concentrate on something else when a Tortoise record is playing. Stereolab songs, by contrast, serve both functions with aplomb.
It only makes sense to criticise Stereolab on this account if they wanted their work to dominate listeners’ consciousness. The better you get to know them, however, the more clear it becomes that they aspired to create sonic architecture, not the equivalent of a painting that demands to be stared at.
More than anything, that’s what identifies them with the counterculture. We have been trained by decades of conditioning through the mainstream media to think that it can be reduced to a few simple stereotypes. This flattening of history drains the counterculture of its power to inspire.
What the young people who protested conformity and hypocrisy in the 1960s and 1970s understood was that political convictions will never amount to much on their own. They need to be embedded in a way of life that resists business as usual at every turn.
In other words, the only way that meaningful change will happen is if the distinctions between foreground and background, focus and ambience, concentration and distraction are dissolved.
The capacity of Stereolab’s music to serve all these functions is what makes them so great. Their music enacts this insight on a formal level. And we should be delighted to have more of it, both in the form of their fine new album and the concert tour they will be making this year.
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Photograph courtesy of the author. All rights reserved.
