This will be the first in a series of posts about anachronism in pop, each focusing on one particular band. In this post we start off by looking at the Dresden Dolls. (We like the Dresden Dolls. You may have gathered that already.)

When you put on the first Dresden Doll’s album, you might press play on a CD player, or double click the first file in an MP3 playlist. Either way, what you’ll hear is the sound of a gramophone needle falling into the groove on a record. The record crackles for a few seconds, and a then simple melody is played on an old piano. The melody is loosely doubled by another instrument, you can’t quite place it but it conjures up images of old-time fairground rides and broken mechanical toys. Just before the bar is complete the needle skips back a groove and the melody starts over. This happens again, and again, before the needle stops skipping and we hear the piano intro to the album’s first song.

You flip the CD case over and look at the cover, or click on the jpeg to display the artwork. The two band members are dressed cabaret style, kneeling with arms outstretched, hands together like obsessed lovers. On an oak table in front of them is a candle, a rose and a bottle of red wine. Where is the anachronism in this picture? It’s the jet flying overhead- modernity intruding into an archaic fantasy. But for that, the picture could have been taken eighty years ago.

Whatever method we might be using to listen to this album, we are within a few seconds transported back to an age when such technology did not exist, through the sounds we hear and the images we see. This is the magic of the Dresden Dolls, and it’s worth exploring the reasons why the use of anachronisms makes for such emotionally powerful music.

The Dresden Dolls are part of an underground cabaret revival movement, which has hubs of activity in the US cities of New Orleans, Portland and Boston and is best exemplified on the compilation A Dark Cabaret. Much of this stems directly from the continued popularity of the 1972 film Cabaret, based on the musical of the same name. Now if you’ve never seen this film you need to go rent or download it as soon as you can, but the clip above will do for starters. Cabaret tells the story of Sally Bowles, an American cabaret artist performing at the Kit Kat Klub, and Brian Roberts, an English academic of uncertain sexuality. Both are living in Berlin in 1931, and their story is one of decadence and romance against the backdrop of the rise of Fascism.

The film Cabaret represents the defining characteristics of cabaret as an art form, namely a subtle political critique through satire matched with an exuberantly honest approach to personal issues and sexual relations. Naturally, in a socially conservative climate the latter becomes a political critique of society in its own right. Thus, the personal and political are closely linked in cabaret, a style of performance theatre when the singers are also actors, conveying emotion though costume, gesture and movement as well as through lyrics and melody. This is the approach to music and art adopted by the Dresden Dolls, and the personal/political crossover helps explain their association with punk rock feminism and queer movements.

To understand why the Dresden Dolls and others have chosen to revive a form of music which was established long before current pop music reference points such as Elvis Presley or the Beatles, we just need to look at what parallels there are between the cultural climate of the early years of the 21st century and that of the early 1930s. A resurgence in social conservatism and mainstream racism, albeit with a different monotheistic religion as its target? An increase in social unrest and a corresponding reaction from the authorities? Invasion, terrorism and occupations? All present and correct.

A friend once said to me to me that he liked Radiohead’s Hail To The Thief because its schizophrenic nature was a reflection of the times we were living through when that album was recorded. I recall listening to R.E.M.’s Green on the evening of September 11th 2001 for similar reasons- although from a different time, the fears expressed on that album felt very relevant. My partner once told me that she watched the film Cabaret on the day of the invasion of Iraq, and that the creeping authoritarianism and inevitable march towards war shown in the film felt all to familiar.

Life cannot help but affect the art that we create. We have resurrected cabaret because we think we need it.

The song Girl Anachronism is Amanda Palmer’s raison d’être, a song as fundamental to the Dresden Dolls as was White Riot to the Clash or Motown Junk to the Manic Street Preachers. In three frantic minutes Palmer trawls through her psyche and pins her perilous state of mind down to a chronological displacement, a desire to exist in past decades rather than the 21st century. When exactly is not clear; the costumes she wears during the music video for the song include a WW2 era housewife, a WW1 era nurse, an Elizabethan lady of court and (of course) a Weimar era cabaret artist. Significantly, all of these eras are before the 1950s, before the dawn of popular culture as we know it. She is not nostalgically referencing the popular culture she grew up with, as so many contemporary musicians do. She is striving for something altogether different.

Amanda Palmer’s songs often deal with personal issues, often autobiographically. Personal relationships are a reoccurring theme, as are sex, gender issues, and the loss of childhood innocence. Certainly these issues are not confined to modernity, but this is no costume drama- Palmer throws in references to computers and condoms and cars because they exists in her life and the lives of the people she is writing about. So why the obsession with pre-1950s culture?

Part of the answer comes from a thirst for romance, a desire to escape the alienation of modern life. There is, as Karen O sang, no modern romance. Capitalism reduces individuals to units of labour, and assigns the value of what we do an hourly rate. How can anything creative, impulsive or romantic exist in such a system? As capitalism becomes more advanced this alienation becomes more pronounced. It’s why people who work 9 to 5 as civil servants and office workers dress up at the weekends and go to clubs such as Stay Beautiful and Rockabaret.

We are no longer a society put a collection of atomised individuals, simultaneously connected to and isolated from each other by modern forms of communication. We no longer live and love with the same vigour that we used to. In 1953 the first edition of the Situationist International magazine claimed that “Presented with the alternative of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people of all countries have chosen the garbage disposal unit.” Nowadays you could say the laptop, the ipod, the mobile phone…

Which brings us to another piece of the answer. There’s an anti-technology tinge to many of the Dresden Doll’s lyrics, as though they pinpoint technology as responsible for the watering down of modern life. Modern Moonlight is one of the most schizophrenic songs the duo have recorded, lurching between drunken bluesy romance and high-speed classical piano riffing, before ending with an epic call to arms. The inspiration for the song came when Amanda Palmer contemplated how long it would be before some company put an advert on the moon’s surface. Would Coke or Pepsi get there first? Perhaps they would take turns, changing the advert every month.

What follows is an almost stream of consciousness rant against against modern technology and consumer capitalism. She argues for and against her own Luddite tendencies, and rants against the lack of privacy in the modern age. The original Luddites, as E.P. Thompson notes, were not simply anti-technology, but voiced opposition to the introduction of the free market and the loss of their livelihoods.

And she proposes a solution- an anarchist or even situationist scheme to destroy the communications networks and plunge the world into chaos. “Stripped of your equipment you’ll be forced to face yourself…” The implication is clear- modern technology is dehumanising the human race and our reliance on it must be broken if we are to, as the situationists put it, leave the twentieth century. We come full circle- using the past to escape the present into the future.

Next time- the Dropkick Murphys, and not just because they’re next on my ipod.