Against nostalgia: retro as a way of looking forward

People have told me more than once, kindly: "Your covers look like they're from another era." They say it the way you'd point out a stain on someone's shirt. And I nod, because they're right, though not for the reason they imagine.

When someone sees a café with a Formica counter, a bubblegum pink that almost hurts your eyes or one of those rounded typefaces nobody uses any more, they immediately think of the past. Of what was lost. Of Grandma, of school summers, of that bar that closed down. That's how nostalgia works: it takes an image and turns it into grief. I don't want that. I have no interest in mourning a time that, besides, wasn't exactly comfortable for people like me.

The past wasn't better, it was pinker

This is the contradiction that amuses me. Retro pop aesthetics are full of cheerful colours, gingham tablecloths, neon signs advertising milkshakes. Everything looks innocent. And in the era those images conjure up, two men couldn't hold hands in a café without half the room turning round to stare.

So when I put a boyfriend from Albacete or a nosy neighbour inside that set, I'm pulling a little trick. I use the wrapping of a time that left us out and fill it with what didn't fit back then. The pink is still pink. What changes is who's sitting at the counter.

I don't see it as revenge. It's more like a house move: I keep the pretty furniture from the old place and arrange it in a flat where you can finally live in peace.

Why the old helps me tell the new

I make music with artificial intelligence tools. It's the most up-to-the-minute thing there is in my trade, and that's exactly why I don't want everything around the songs to smell of the laboratory. If the cover looked like a sci-fi render as well, the whole thing would feel cold, like an electronics catalogue. I prefer the contrast. A song made with today's technology, wrapped in the colour of a strawberry milkshake.

That clash tells listeners something that matters a lot to me: this is pop for having a good time, for laughing at your exes and humming along in the kitchen. The technology is there, but it isn't in charge. The lyric is in charge. The tone is in charge.

Retro also has a practical advantage that took me a while to grasp. It's a language almost everyone reads the same way. A pastel shade, lettering from an old shop sign, a plate with a cream cake on it: nothing needs explaining. In Madrid, in Bogotá or in Santiago, those images stir up something similar. For a project that wants to speak to people on both sides of the Atlantic, that shared language is worth its weight in gold.

There's one kind of retro that bores me stiff: the exact copy. Reproducing an old cover with a faded-photo filter and calling it a day. That really is pure nostalgia, and a bit lazy into the bargain. If all you do is copy, you get stuck in the museum.

What I try to do with my covers and videos is something else. I take an element from another era and push it until it turns slightly absurd. A colour that's too intense. A character who doesn't match the set. A long title, like «Mitad Venezuela, mitad Pakistán» ("Half Venezuela, half Pakistan"), written in the lettering of a village fair poster. If the result looks like an exact postcard from the fifties, I've done something wrong. It has to look like a postcard someone has gone over with a marker pen.

That's where camp comes in, of course. Camp has always known how to play with the old without worshipping it. It looks at the unfashionable with affection and a raised eyebrow at the same time. That double gaze is what interests me: I love those cafés, and I laugh at them too.

I do have my doubts, mind you. Sometimes I wonder whether I overuse the device. When you've made hundreds of covers and more than 280 music videos, it's easy for the formula to repeat itself and for bubblegum pink to become a uniform. When I notice an image coming too easily, I change it. I don't always manage. Some of my covers look more alike than I'd like, and I know it.

*Copla* is retro too, and it isn't dead

My music has a touch of copla, the dramatic Spanish song tradition. For a lot of people, copla is the perfect example of something old. Songs from another era, with their fan-fluttering melodrama and their stories of impossible love. But when I listen to it, I don't hear something old. I hear a way of exaggerating feelings that still works today, above all for telling gay love stories, which had to live in hiding for so many years and can now afford their drama in broad daylight.

Picking up that tone isn't going backwards. It's recognising that some old tools still cut well. Like Grandma's knife, which stays in the drawer because it's the best one in the house.

I think of the GAYFOLK trilogy. The first album has a title like a news headline from an old newspaper: «Descubierto un nuevo planeta llamado GAYFOLK» ("New planet called GAYFOLK discovered"). It sounds like a headline from another era, with the solemn tone of a scientific breakthrough. And yet it's about a place that doesn't quite exist yet, a corner where nobody has to pretend to be what they're not. The form looks back. The content looks forward. That's how I like to work.

If I had to sum up my relationship with retro, I'd say I use it the way you use a pair of vintage glasses: to see more clearly what's in front of me, not to sit staring at old photos. The past lends me colours, lettering and sets. I give it back characters who weren't allowed in the picture at the time.

I don't know whether in a few years all this will look dated too. Probably. Today's covers will be tomorrow's retro, and someone will laugh at my pinks with the same tenderness I feel when I laugh at Formica cafés. I'm fine with that. It's proof the game goes on.

The covers, the music videos and the songs are all at mikesaintlouis.com.