Mark Fisher. Thanks Tony and thanks everyone for coming so early on a Saturday. I'm just going to play a couple of, well not whole tracks but fragments from tracks just to set the tone of what I'm going to say. Thank you.
First there was the silence We became in love By the time it was decided Our ascent began to slow She used to get excited Showed me what she needed Now we are divided This is how we feel Watch it burn to me Burn my room now Watch it burn to me Burn my room now Oh
It's so crazy, crazy, crazy I got everything figured out But for some reason I can never find what real love is about No doubt, everything in the world figured out But I can never see the signs of real love was about Do you think I sacrifice real life for all the fame, a glashing light? Do you think I sacrifice a real life for all the fame, a glashing light?
There is no Gucci I could buy There is no Louis Vuitton to put on There is no wire snail that they could sell To get my heart out of this hell And my mind out of this jail There is no vacations spot I could find that could bring
back a piece of real life, real life, what is it to you like? Okay, I'm guessing most of you probably know those tracks, or significant proportion of you do anyway. The first is two chords from Dark Star's album, North, the second Pinocchio's story from Kanye West's 808s and Heartbreak. So what I'm going to do today is a kind of what I call augmented reading, which is so I'll read a little bit from the book, but give a bit of a gloss on what I argued there, really. So, I mean, the concerns of the book really are a sense that I've had
for not quite a decade, about eight years, I think, eight or nine years, a sense of really the disappearance of a sense of futurity, not only in music culture, but especially in music culture. And I think the book that treats music culture as a kind of symptom, a privileged symptom of a wider cultural malaise, really. The brief way to put this would be the failure of the 21st century to really arrive. The simple thought experiment that I pose in the book is, if we imagine practically any track produced in the 21st century
beamed back 20 years to the early 90s, what sort of response would that produce? What I doubt it would produce is a sense of future shock, is a sense of, my God, this stuff is unrecognizable. I think, actually, that it's more likely if we follow this impossible thought experiment, I mean, we're not going to be able to carry it out, but if we try it out in our minds, the likely response of somebody faced with music from in 1994 faced with music from 2014 will be, is this really music from 20 years in the future? Is this really going to sound so familiar to us?
And of course think about what that means if we reflect back on what it would have been like to do that from 94 to 74, or from 74 to 54. You think about the vast, you know, the rather rapid turnover in kind of sonic worlds within that period, within both those periods. And then I think we get a clear sense of the deceleration of the 21st century sonic culture. and of this strange new, paradoxically new, because in a way one of the key features of this temporality
is really the disappearance of the new as such. There's this strange flatness of time. And one of the signatures of this is really the floating free of cultural artifacts, from particular marking in time, or staining by time. I think to those of us who grew up in the post-war period, in the 20th century, we're used to marking time, particularly with music. It's something I tried and tested, and that boring technique used by filmmakers, isn't it? If you want to evoke a period, you use... in a particular rock, pop, jazz, whatever.
I think it's very difficult to do that in the 21st century. It just wouldn't function the same way in the 21st century as it did in the 20th. I think we've got a fairly clear sense now, most of us hear, what the sound of 1974 was. But what was the sound of 2008? 6, 7, how can we tell 2006 apart from 2009? The line I have for this is there are non-times as well as non-places. is that just as the non-place is that kind of generic space, which when you encounter it, you could be in any city in the world. I think increasingly in cultural time, we have non-times as well, where each year could be any other year, really.
So this has been the broad set of concerns that have occupied me and which I'll focus on in the book. And what I'm going to narrow in on today then really is a specific area around R&B, electronic pop, etc. Perhaps the major significance of this is that R&B pop interface is perhaps the last example of something which reliably delivered the sense of futurity going into the early 2000s. But maybe something like 808s and Heartbreak was a sign that that had come to an end,
a sign that popular music could no longer deliver popular modernism. a retreat back into the 80s with a lot of the signifiers of the album, the famous echo of New Orders, Blue Monday, with the color strip of 808s and Heartbreak, plus the heavy indebtedness to the synth pop of the 80s on that album. I'm just going to read a few sections from the book there to illustrate this. more closely. It's a really gray-sounding synth,
really organic and grainy. We call them swells, where synthesizers start quite minimal and then develop into a huge chord before progressing. I thought it wouldn't be quite right if we carried on with that Dayglo hyperdub sound of a couple of years ago. I mean, I love those songs, but it already feels like a lifetime away. That's a quotation. from Dark Star's James Young, an interview with Dan Hancock's. When I first heard that album, North, in 2010, the phrase that came to mind was another grey world. The landscape of North felt like the verdant Max Ernst forest of Eno's Another Green World, but it had become ash. With winter ahead of us,
The depressive world is black and or white, but North does not yet project a cold world entirely swayed than snow. North is the direction that the album is heading towards, not yet a destination it's reached. Its landscape is colorless rather than black, its mood tentative. It is gray as in unresolved a gray area. This is an album defined by its negative capability of remaining in doubts, disquiet and dissatisfactions factions that it's unable to name. It is grey as in the Cure's All Cats Are Grey from Faith, a record that stood between the spidery psychedelia of 17 seconds and the unrelieved darkness of pornography. Yet North is ultimately too jittery to muster the glacial fatalism of faith. But what North has in common with the Cure's great records is the sense of total immersion in a mood.
It is a work that came out of method immersion. Young told Dan Hancock's that as they recorded north. The group had listened obsessively to Radiohead Burial, The Human League, and a first album by orchestral manoeuvres in the dark. The record demands the same kind of involvement, which is perhaps why some found it unengaging. On a casual listen, the very unresolved qualities of the tracks could seem simply undercooked. James Buttery's vocals could come off as limping or anemic. In addition, many were disappointed by Dark Backstar's failure to provide an album full of the robotic two-step that they had invented on 80s Girl as a Computer. In fact, they made the robotic two-step album, but dissatisfied with its lack of ambition. By 80s Girl as a Computer Apart,
if you heard North without knowing the history, you wouldn't assume any connection with dubstep. At the same time, North isn't straightforwardly a return to a pre-dance sound. It is more a continuation of a certain mode of electronic pop that was prematurely terminated sometime in the mid-1980s, like New Order if they hadn't abandoned the sleek cybernetic mausoleum that Martin Hannett built for them on movement. Except, of course, it's not possible to simply continue that trajectory as if nothing had happened. Dark Star acknowledged the present only negatively. It impinges on their music, perhaps the only way it can, as a failure of the future, as a temporal disorder that has infected the voice, causing it to stutter and sibilate, to fragment into strange, slithering shards.
Part of what separates Dark Star from their synth-pop forebears is the fact that the synthesizer no longer connotes futurity. But Dark Star aren't retreating from a vivid sense of futurity because there is no such futurity from which they can now retreat. This becomes clear when you compare the Dark Star cover of Gold to the Human League original. It's not just that one is no more futuristic than the other, it's that neither are futuristic anymore. The Human League track is clearly a superseded futurism, while the Dark Star track seems to come after the future. It's this sense of living in an interregnum that makes North so untimely.
And untimeliness is perhaps the only form of timeliness today. Where Burial made contact with the secret sadness underlying the boom, Dark Star articulate the sense of foreboding that is everywhere after the economic crash of 2008. North is certainly full of references to a lost companionship. The album can be read as a bleak take on a love affair gone wrong. Our fate is not to share, the connection between us gone. But the very focus on the love couple rather than the rave massive is itself symptomatic of a turn inward. In a discussion that Simon Reynolds and I had about North shortly after it was released, Reynolds argued that it was a mistake to talk as if rave was bereft of emotion. Rave was a music saturated with affect, but the affect involved wasn't associated with romance or
introspection. The introspective turn in 21st century post-dance music was therefore not a turn towards emotion. It was a shift from collectively experienced affect to privatized emotions. There was an intrinsic and inevitable sadness to this inward turn, regardless of whether the music was officially sad or not. The twinning of romance and introspection, love and its disappointments runs through 21st century pop, of course. By contrast, dance music since disco offered up another kind of emotional palette, placed in a different model of escape from the miseries of individual selfhood. The 21st century has often felt like a comedown, the comedown after a speed binge, or the exile back into privatized selfhood.
And the songs on North have the jittery clattery of clarity of Prozac withdrawal. As significant and most of the digital interference on North is applied to James Buttery's voice, Much of the vocal sounds as if it has been recorded in a shaky mobile phone connection. I'm reminded of Franco Barati's arguments about the relationship between informational overload and depression. Barati's argument is not that the dot-com crash caused depression, but the reverse. The crash was caused by the excessive strain put on people's nervous systems by new informational technologies. Now, more than a decade after the dot-com crash and the density of data has massively increased, the paradigmatic laborer is now the call center worker, the banal cyborg,
punished whenever they unplug from the communicative matrix. On North, James Buttery afflicted by all manner of digital pulses. Sounds like a cyborg whose implants and interfaces have come loose, learning to be a man again and not liking it very much. North is like Kanye West 2008 album, 808 and Heartbreak, with all the gloss removed. There is the same method melancholia, the same anchoring in early 80s synth pop, explicitly flagged in 808's case by the cover design, it echoes of Peter Savile's sleeves for New Orders, Blue Monday, and Power Corruption and Lives. The opening track, Say You Will, sounds like it's been worked up out of the crisp, synthetic chill of Joy Division's atmosphere and a funeral drum tattoo of Luttony Orders in a Lonely Place.
As with North, though, the 80s parallels were disrupted by the digital effects used on the voice. 808s and Heartbreaks pioneered the use of autotune, which would subsequently come to dominate R&B and hip-hop from the late 2000s onwards. In a sense, the conspicuous use of autotune, that is to say its use as an effect as opposed to its official purpose as a device to correct a single pitch, was a 90s throwback, since this was popularized by Cher, famously on the 1998 single belief. Auto-tune is in many ways the sonic equivalent digital airbrushing, and the overuse of the two technologies, alongside the increasing prevalence of cosmetic surgery, result in a look and feel that is hyperbolically enhanced
rather than conspicuously artificial. If anything is the signature of 21st century consumer culture, it's this feeling of a digitally upgraded normality, a perverse yet ultra banal normality from which all flaws have been erased. On 808s and Heartbreaks, we hear the sobs in the heart of the 21st century pleasure dome. Kanye's lacrimose android shtick reaches its maudlin depths on Pinocchio's story, which you just heard a bit of. This is a kind of auto-tuned lament you might expect Neo Pinocchio and android Oedipus David from Spielberg's AI to sing. You can either hear this at the moment when a commodity achieves self-consciousness or when a human realizes he or she has become a commodity. It's the soured sound at the end of the rainbow
and Electro is desolated as suicide's infernal synth opera Frankie Tear Drop. A secret sadness lurks behind the 21st century's forced smile. The sadness concerns hedonism itself, and it's no surprise that it isn't hip hop, a genre that has become increasingly aligned with consumerist pleasure over the past 20 odd years, that is melancholy as registered most deeply. Drake and Kanye West are both morbidly fixated on exploring the miserable hollowness at the core of super-affluent hedonism. No longer motivated by hip hop's drive to conspicuously consume, they long ago acquired everything that they could have wanted. Drake and West instead dissolately cycle through easily available pleasures,
feeling a combination of frustration, anger, and self-disgust, aware that something is missing but unsure exactly what it is. This headness, sadness, a sadness as widespread as it is disavowed, was nowhere better captured than in the doleful way that Drake sings, we threw a party, yeah, we threw a party, and take care's Marvin's room, and nothing could sound more miserable than this party. just as a break for a few minutes, another track by Drake, which I think is highly symptomatic. Or me from this last album from last year. Got everything, I got everything. I cannot complain, I cannot.
I don't even know how much I really made. I forgot, it's a lie. Fuck that, never mind what I got Nigga don't watch that cause I Came up, that's all me Stay true, that's all me No help, that's all me All me for real Came up, that's all me Stay true, that's all me No help, that's all me All me for real Money on my mind, you should think the same J's on the pinky ring Dogging these hoes, I need quarantine In the same league, but we don't ball the same Oh, she want all the fame I hear this shit all the time Since you love me I said, baby girl, fall in line Okay, made a million off a dental fork Watch me switch it up Walked in, ill nigga alert
Ill nigga alert You need that work, I got that work Got bitches in my condo Just bought a shirt that cost a Mercedes Benz car I know from the A to Toronto We let the metal go off And my dick so hard It make the metal detector go off This that sauce, this that dressing T5T, nigga, God bless you If having a bad bitch was a crime, I'd be arrested Got everything, I got everything I cannot complain, I cannot I don't even know how much I really made I forgot, it's a lie Fuck that, never mind what I got Nigga, don't watch that, cause I Came up, that's all me When Drake says, I can't complain, I think
quite disingenuous given that his whole career has been complaining but I think that's the contribution he has to make the misery at the heart of hedonism you can hear it in the track so even I think the doubleness of that claim all me is really apparent all me meaning only me which is on the face of it a boast but underneath that sense of isolation, solipsism, inability to connect, something really deep missing but unable to identify, articulate, specify what that is. And the sadness communicated not in the words themselves which are officially standard braggadocio
in the delivery and in the refrains, the samples, the suppressed but nevertheless evident kind of melancholia. So there's an unconvincing or perhaps unconvinced quality to so much of mainstream culture's hedonism now. Oddly, this is perhaps most evident in the annexing of R&B by club music. When former R&B producers and performers embraced dance music, you might have expected an increase in euphoria and influx of ecstasy. But the reverse has happened. And as if many of the dance floor tracks are pulled down by hidden gravity, a disowned sadness. The digitally enhanced uplift in the records by producers such as Flowrider, Pitbull, and Will.i.am.
It's like a poorly photoshopped image of a drug that's been hammered so much that we've become immune to its effects. It's hard not to hear these records' demands that we enjoy ourselves with thin attempts to distract from a depression they can only mask and never dissipate. So a brilliant essay on the Quietus website, Dan Barrow analyzed the tendency in a slew of chart pop over the last few years, including Jay-Z and Alicia Keys' Empire State of Mind, Keisha's TikTok, Flay Riders, Club Can't Even Handle Me Yet, to give the listener the payoff, the sonic money shot, as soon and as obviously as possible. Pop has always delivered sugar-sweet pleasure, of course, but Barrow argues there's a tyrannical desperation about this new steroid-driven pop. It doesn't seduce, it tyrannizes.
So it's a crude, over-determined excess, as if pop were forcing itself back to its defining characteristics, chorus hooks, melody, accessibility, and blowing them up to a cartoonish size. There's an analogy to be drawn between this artificially inflated pop and Baradi's discussion of internet pornography and drugs such as Viagra, which similarly dispensed with seduction and aimed directly at pleasure. According to Baradi, we're so overwhelmed by the incessant demands of digital communications that we're simply too busy to engage in arts of enjoyment. Highs have to come in a no-fast hyperbolic form so that we can quickly return to checking email or updates on social networking sites. Baradi's remarks can give us an angle on the pressures that dance music has been subject
to over the last decade. the digital technology of the 80s and 90s fed the collective experience of the dance floor. The communicative technology of the 21st century has undermined it with even clubbers obsessively checking their smartphones. So Beyonce and Lady Gaga's telephone might now seem like a last failed attempt to keep the dance floor free of communication or intrusion. Even the most apparently uncomplicated calls to enjoyment can't fully suppress a certain sadness. Take Katy Perry's Last Friday Night. There's lots of tracks like this now. It's kind of hedonistic nihilism, it seems to be the increasingly common amongst in this kind of cosmopolitan
kind of non-placed dance music pop, which is dominant at the moment. Anyway, Katy Perry's Last Friday Night. On the face of it, the track is a simple celebration of pleasure. Last Friday night, yeah, we maxed our credit cards and got kicked out of the bar, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's not hard to hear. It's something Sisyphean or purgatorial in the song's evocation of a not-so-married round of pleasure that Perry and her friends can never get off. Always say we're going to stop this Friday night, do it all again. Played at half speed, this would sound as bleak as early swans. Try it out, it really does. But I think that the bleakness is already there, actually. or David Guetta's Play Hard
which is like ideology contemporary ideology in the form of a track really it's like They Live the command of corporate capital just straight up said to you and calls a passimely interminable repetition pleasure becomes an obligation that will never let up us hustlers work is never through we work hard, play hard, work hard, play hard, do it and hedonism is explicitly paralleled with work. Keep partying like it's your job, you know. And your job is never over. It's the perfect anthem for an area in which the boundaries between work and non-work are eroded by the requirement that we are always on, that for instance we'll answer emails any hour of the day, and it will never lose
an opportunity to marketize our own subjectivity. In a not at all trivial sense, partying is now a job. Images of hedonistic access provide much of the content on Facebook, uploaded by users or effectively unpaid workers, creating value for the site without being remunerated for it. And partying is a job in another sense, in conditions of objective miseration and economic downturn, making up the effective deficit is outsourced to us. Sometimes a free-floating sadness seeps into the grain of the music itself. On their blog, No Good Advice, the pseudonymous blogger Jay describes the use of a sample from Chioma's 1989 track Lambada, and Jennifer Lopez's 2011 hit On the Floor.
The snatch of Lambada functions as a buried memory trigger, a sort of party hauntology that lends the song a slight edge of wistful, nostalgic sadness. There's no reference to sadness, again, in the official text of the song, and the track which is the simple exhortation to dance. So it's as if the sorrow comes from outside, like traces of the waking world incorporated into a dream, or like the grief which creeps into all the embedded worlds in Christopher Nolan's Inception. Part of your hauntology, in fact, might even be the best name for the dominant 21st century form of pop, the transnational club music produced by David Guetta, Flo Rida, Calvin Harris, and Will I Am. The debts to the past, the failure of the future are repressed here.
meaning that the hauntology, like the kind of melancholy, takes a disavowed form. Take a track like the Black Eyed Peas, immensely popular I Got a Feeling, which was, I think, the most downloaded track of all time at one point. Although I Got a Feeling is ostensibly an optimistic record, there's something forlorn about it. Perhaps that's because of Willie I.M.'s use of autotune. There seems to be a sort of Sparky's magic piano-like machine melancholy, intrinsic to the technology itself, something which Kanye drew out rather than invented on 808s and Heartbreak. But in spite of the track's declamatory repetitions, there's a fragile fugitive quality about the pleasures I got a feeling so confidently expects. And that's partly a formal question, I think, about the actual qualities of the music, because I got a feeling comes off more like a memory of a past pleasure
than an anticipation of a pleasure that's yet to be felt. the album from which the track comes the END, The Energy Never Dies which is an ironic title was like its predecessor at the beginning so immersed in rave that it effectively operated as an act of homage to the genre the beginning's time dirty bit could have actually passed for a rave track from the early 90s I think, actually passed for that the crudeness of its cut and paste montage recalls the rough and ready textures that samplers would constructed that time and it's borrowing from Dirty Dancing's I've Had the Time of My Life was just the kind of subversion or sublimation of cheesy source material that rave producers delighted in. Yet the Black Eyed Peas' rave
appropriations didn't function so much as revivals of rave as denials that the genre had ever happened in the first place. If rave hasn't yet happened then there's no need for us to mourn it. We can act as if we're experiencing all this for the first time, that the future is still ahead of us. Sadness ceases to be something we feel and instead consists in our temporal predicament itself. And we are like Jack in the gold room of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, dancing to ghost songs, convincing ourselves that the music of yesteryear is really the music of today. Okay, so I think then my broad claim would be really that the 21st century has been pretty catastrophic for music culture, I think. And if you think about it, it's not really that surprising that
that would be the case. That on the one hand the major transitions have happened in music culture quite evidently. But few of those are audible. Few of those, I think few or none actually are audible or translatable into sensation or affect, into what is to listen to something. Almost a few of them have impacted production, the actual production of music. Obviously the major shifts in music culture of the 21st century have been in terms of distribution and consumption. These have changed out of all recognition evidently. but at the same time
those shifts have not been good for a few musicians I don't think, why would they be? I mean, I wouldn't want to say that the old system of record companies etc. was ideal but at least it did provide a form of remuneration for musicians which now they don't have I think when we think about that when we couple that also with the broad attack on social security, particularly in the British context, the social democratic infrastructure we can see retrospectively as being a major indirect contributor to sonic innovation
from the 50s through to 2000. What do I mean by that? Well, the fact that you could live in a city like London, you could squat there, you could be on a university grant, you could be on housing benefit, you could be unemployed and live in a reasonable sort of life. of this created pockets of time, pockets of unpressured time in which cultural producers could invent new things. Then when we add in some of the things I talked about in the readings,
we add in also the frenzied, the phenomenological nature of time now. the kind of communicational frenzy, the impact of, particularly I think of smartphones, which is this major threshold where we're inside capitalist cyberspace at all times unless we make a deliberate decision not to be. Meaning that we're subject to this ceaseless series of imperatives. You know, Deleuze says communication is command and I think And just if you think about that, what is it to be endlessly commanded by things? Even if we ignore those commands, nevertheless, our nervous system is fielding them.
And this is what I think ultimately is at issue here, is this is a kind of war over time and the different forms of time. that we may look back, in fact, to the 20th century boredom as a somewhat utopian prospect now. Boredom's impossible now. Those large swathes of empty time that we once had to deal with, which was so key to the dialectic of punk, that boredom was this kind of existential challenge that you sort of had to, you know, if you were bored, you had to fill up your boredom.
You had to confront it, to do something in response to it. Boredom is very difficult to access in the old way. I mean, my slogan for that is... No one is bored, everything is boring. It's in the sense that we can't be bored because there's too much stimulation on tap at any one time. But it doesn't mean that things are interesting. It just means that we lack the capacity. Boredom is a state of intense absorption. That capacity for absorption ultimately, I think, is what has been eroded by multiple means in the 21st century. And I think that absorption, that ability
to be absorbed is the basis of where the new comes from. And I think that involves a certain kind of capacity for withdrawal, dislocation. That's the kind of paradox, I think, about the production of the new, that involves a withdrawal, a temporary withdrawal. withdrawal. But those forms of withdrawal are very difficult for us to achieve now. So ultimately I think that it's a struggle on lots of levels to regain that other sense of time, that unpressured time, a time free from constant imperatives, from business and
from busyness. And that's the kind of, I guess that's the broad picture of everything I try to argue in the book. But perhaps we can leave it there, if that's okay. Thanks so much. Thanks, Mark, and hi, everyone. We've got a little bit of time set aside for some a bit of a discussion. I don't think we've got microphones today. We do have microphones. That's great. So if you've got a point you want to put or something you want to pick Mark up on or just want to make an observation of some sort, do please go ahead.
There's a guy right here. Basically, just... Well, one idea I've been thinking about recently I mean you're focusing mainly on R&B and hip-hop but I think you're using that as an example of what's been happening happening generally yes and you came up this idea of a kind of cyborgs trying to break free from their casings or base which I thought was quite powerful image and one thing I noticed this week while I worked there was a placement student wearing a rage against the machine t-shirt who must have been about 18, and that's a single that came out about 25 years ago, obviously. And the main thought that went through my head when I saw that was the T-shirt should say,
I agree with my parents when they said, F you, I won't do what you told me. And I was wondering if you had any thoughts about that, if there's the idea either that the cyborg breaking free is something where it's like, oh, is this okay? Can I do this? And if there's a loss of anger, and if that anger has turned into depression in culture. Yes, good question. The T-shirts thing I think is really interesting and very symptomatic. Postmodernism is one easy lesson. Actually, I've got a student who's working on this. Why do Topshop start selling like Ramones T-shirts? You've probably seen these around now, Ramones, Roxy Music. Total example of free floating signifiers, right? And I imagine most of the people who are buying those T-shirts have not heard the music at
all. But it's interesting that what—it's interesting on lots of levels why that would be, isn't it? Why it's necessary for these kind of traces of formal moments and it would be music. Even if people haven't heard the music, nevertheless, the iconography, the signifiers, something that people want to be associated with. And that partly is the traces of the counterculture, isn't it? Music, it wasn't just music. Music carried this Promethean countercultural ambition to change every aspect of life or whatever. And it's that that people want to associate with. But I think that the specific example of Rage Against
The specific example of Rage Against the Machine, of course, that came up again with the X Factor, right? It was re-released, wasn't it, in some form? Well, it was a campaign, wasn't it, to get that single to be number one instead of the standard X Factor Christmas single or whatever. I can't even remember if it succeeded now. But, yeah, I think it was symptomatic of where was the present day equivalent. I mean, some of us wouldn't even think Rage Against the Machine was that interesting in the first place. But... They were a major label band at the time anyway. They were signed to Sony. Yeah, but I mean, I guess that itself can be interesting.
the extent to which dissent was in the mainstream at a certain point. But I think it's obviously problematic, isn't it? People have to reach back that far, but I think it's part of a generational thing. I think it's problematic, but that's because I'm embedded in a certain model of historicity and cultural time, I think. And that's what I'm arguing, that this model of cultural time has disappeared. That people don't have, that I think increasingly people don't have a sense that things are out of date or outmoded. And they don't have a sense of things belonging to a specific historical period.
In a sense, why would you, if there isn't anything that sounds specifically 21st century, Why would you think, why would Rage Against the Machine sound out of date by comparison with any number of other things which are accepted as contemporary? That's what I'm sort of arguing, the whole category of retro has disappeared. Everything is retro practically now. Since everything's retro, nothing can be identified as retrospective. I mean, it's retro by comparison with what, I think, would be the question. For me, I guess part of the... In my work and in this book specifically, I can't adjust to this. I can't adjust to a situation where a record that sounds like it could come out 30 years ago
can be just played and not be the Shawaddy Waddy or the shannon-ah of 21st century. But everything's shannon-ah now. Just to think about the t-shirt type issue, is this something which pop culture has not always done, that people have taken t-shirts of bands who are no longer cool and sort of spun them around in a certain way. Thinking about, let's say, 80s hip-hop, guys would sometimes wear 70s rock t-shirts in a sort of ironic way, but sort of pledging their allegiance to ones which they thought were really good in some way. Has pop culture not always done this kind of thing like the rage and machine?
Yeah, but I think that was a canonic intervention. Those sort of things you were saying are a canonic intervention. Whether it's irony or a demand for revaluation, I think there's something going on there beyond specific gestures involved and specific interventions. It wasn't just wearing those T-shirts as if we were back in the 70s and there was no issue. This stuff has been undervalued. I'm wearing this to revalue it now. One couldn't say the same about the Rage Against the Machine T-shirt, which is being... It's an attempting and ingenuousness which is not really possible. It's attempting to act as if the record had just come out. and so it's not a historical intervention in quite the same way I think.
It's precisely that spinning for me that is missing there. You know, there's no spin at all. It's this just dehistoricised artefact which is, you know, being worn with a limited sense of the, well, you know, a limited sense of that kind of historical crisis. Well, no sense of the historical crisis that it's part of. of. Okay, thanks very much indeed. Guy at the back with the cap on the side. Hello. Hello, good morning. I don't know if this is a question or an observation, but I think the 20th century has been about the future. If you look at technology in music,
you went from the cylinder to the flat disc, you went from mono to stereo, you went from one track to multi-track, from analog to digital. So it was like the future was pulling us all the time. And the 21st century seems to be about the other way around. It's about the building of memory. We went from the diskette to the CDR, from the CDR to the multi-gig pen, and now from the pen to the cloud. And we have so much memory available that what's now pulling us is the past. So we have the past at the distance of just one click.
For a while, the future was pulling us, and now it seems like it's the past pulling us. Don't you agree? Well, I mean, I think that's essentially Simon Reynolds' argument in RetroMania, isn't it? that it's the gravitational weight of, it's the sheer weight of a now immediately accessible past which kind of generates this immense gravity which doesn't allow cultural producers to find their own space or the new. And it's clearly, there's an element of that which is true. But I mean, I think we also need to say what, well, another angle on this is just,
it's not only the sort of distant past that is there, like it's this impulse to immediate, it's the immediate past as well, right? Like the, just if you think about the amount of archiving of the last five years, it's just immense, isn't it? Like, who is this for? What possible subject could access even a tiny part of the massive digital archive of the past few years? So we're weighed down not only by the far past, but by a kind of immediate past. Probably an attention to posterity that wasn't necessarily there. What do you put that down to?
Is that the lure of the technology offering easily available opportunities to do that? Or is that something about the people themselves, the agents, all of us wanting or needing to look back in some way? Or a bit of both? A bit of both, I think. But then, you know, obviously it's partly about capacity, isn't it? It's partly that we can now, because of digital compression, we can archive this stuff in a way that we couldn't before. it can be immediately accessible and I think then we can, we feel the weight of it in terms of this incessant demand, you know, particularly via social media that we access these archives, which is plainly impossible. No one can do it and that partly leaves us with this sense
of perpetual dissatisfaction and failure, you know, because we're, in any given day there's so many things we're being asked to look at which is just obviously nowhere anything like, is it, when they were close to be able to do that, a friend of mine once said, look, if you had a physical form, all of the books that some, all of the books or articles someone had asked you to read on social media in a day, you clearly look at them because there's no one going to read these tonight. Because they're in a form of links, I think we sort of think, well, we could do it. But it's, I come up with all kinds of different responses to that about, you know, I read it later, or you try and get some sort of pat response to books you might have read or music you might have heard in order to feel kind of forearmed kind of thing.
Yeah, I mean, I think that this we'll do it later thing is probably the standard thing, but there is no later. That is the thing, because I think there is no later. When we say that, we think that we'll have access to that time that I was referring to, a time of reflection, condensation, synthesis. But we don't have that time, because we're always in a time of new stuff, new demands coming in. And I think that's actually a case of rehabituation somehow. There's no automatic access to that time, especially given the current kind of techno managerial configuration. We'll always be locked into this demand that lock us into
the near past. If you're on Twitter or whatever, you're locked into the near past, aren't you? Half of the time on Twitter is spent, what the hell is this about? So you're going into, you're trying to discover the context. You're always late, is the point. Social media are almost always late. You're always behind. And the sense of being behind, trying to catch up, et cetera, et cetera, you know, is prevalent. And that's a big stress there, I think. And the other thing that, you know, the other time, that later, I think that's what we need to somehow re-habituate ourselves to experience that time. And that's probably, we need to impose rules on ourselves to do that, because clearly the limitless nature of cyber-spatial imperatives won't automatically do anything bad.
Especially if we're all, our retirement dates are getting moved back every year, more and more and more. Where is that later? Anyone else got a question? Hi there. at the back on the left. Hi. Hello. I think it's very interesting to hear you talk about how 2008 versus 2003 versus 2011. Could you speak up a bit? Sorry. I was interested in the fact that you were talking about various years, you know, post 9-11, that you're struggling to find identifiable music concepts, whatever doesn't exist.
It's very hard to identify those if they did exist at all. I wonder, I think in terms of what you talked about, depression, that, you know, sorry, I'm not going off on a tangent. So you could say that this lack of identifiable moments in a year, you could say that was due to the internet because it's changed but you could also say it's true of depression itself
because it's you know time is irrelevant to some extent if you're in a catatonic depressive state so I think that's definitely interesting it's a depressive thing where it's hard to create new memories and so on and so forth you've written about people like the caretaker exploring that kind of thing Maybe you'd like to just comment on that. Yeah, yeah, I think that, just to come back to this other question of memory here, I think it's, in many ways at the current moment it's defined by memory disorder rather than memory. We can't, we lack a capacity for sort of historical narrative in the way that we did before.
So, you know, it produces this feeling of, well, what year was that? So rather than, you know, an kind of increased capacity, while we have a technologically increased capacity for memory, I think we've got a decreased capacity to narrativize that memory culturally. Producing this, I mean, you know, Bruce Sterling says it's atemporality now, and he thinks that's no longer post-modernism. I'd say it's just post-modernism, a naturalized form of post-modernism. In terms of this question of depression, I think what I'm trying to
get to in that piece specifically about R&B and about super mainstream pop is the disavowed form of depression, really. And I think one of the forms that takes is lowered expectations, which we've all got. We used to be waiting for the new Beatles and we really thought that that would happen. We used to be waiting for the new punk and we really thought that would happen. Not something that would just be a pale echo of punk but be the structural equivalent of punk. But at some point we stopped waiting for that. Or rather we stopped expecting it anymore. And we kind of, we adjusted ourselves to this postmodern temporality where the real
greatness in music would be in the past, and we'd be in the era of the quite interesting forever. We'd be in the era of footnotes. We don't expect that there's a riot going or anything like that to appear next year. But it wasn't so long ago when we did expect that, I think. And those lowered expectations, I think, are signs of a kind of cultural depression. And, you know, I think it's functional. It's a kind of functional depression if our expectations are low. You know, corporate capitalism can meet those demands. Essentially, it can meet the demand for a new iPhone.
It can't meet the demand for, you know, there's a riot going on, public enemy, whatever. It can't meet the demand to produce that kind of thing anymore. But it can meet the demand for technological upgrades, basically. Okay. I think you've got your head up there. Yes, just at the back on the left, near the microphone, makes it easy. I'm really interested in the links that you're making between depression and the lack of newness, as you've very eloquently put forward. Depression and anger are actually the same thing. One goes outwards, one goes inwards. and this whole idea that we do not have time of repose,
we do not have time to feel that we as an individual can actually act on our circumstances. And I think that, in particular, I think that's crossed the whole gamut of society. But talking about music, I think the newness comes from people having the ability to be able to get their work out there. Those venues, those ways of getting newness out there are being taken away. And it's to do with the economic situation that we're in, as well as in the cycle. And that links with the psychological situation that we're in. So I think these are very, very complex things that you're touching on. It's fascinating to hear them. And I think the main thing is to keep hope alive. And we've got to keep saying that it can be done.
You've got to keep going. And that's linked in with depression. If you're depressed, you have no hope. And that's the difficult one that we have to crack, I think. Right, and I think there's a crisis of, you could say, of public time as well as of public space, and they're linked together. And that, you know, at a certain point in music culture, when there was a strong infrastructure with an appetite for new kinds of live music, there's an appetite for live music, but it's not particularly associated with newness, I think. then, you know, this was clearly this shared experience,
and an experience of sharing. I think that alongside this kind of absorption time, which that also was, that capacity for shared time in a physical space, that is eroded as well. I mean, we can feel that if we go out. You can feel the lack of, you can feel the deflated intensity in a room via smartphones. So I think it's this new form of loneliness, isn't it? That you're connected but also lonely. Which is really an inverse of a lot of what music culture used to do, I think. I think it's very hostile to music culture and the conditions of music culture, actually.
not the dominant trends in communicative capitalism, so-called. Thanks very much. We've got time for maybe just one sort of quickish, shortish one. You were a millisecond before your mate. Yes, here, thanks. Cheers. I was just wondering if you perceive any counterculture to this nihilistic mainstream culture that you were describing? Where is the counterculture these days, if anyway? Well, I mean, it's not there, but I think that's... I know there's a kind of paradox about the counterculture originally, wasn't there, that it was... The counterculture wanted to become the mainstream culture, the counterculture wanted to take over things.
And maybe a lot of the melancholy underlying... A lot of that underlying melancholy that I've talked about is to do with the failure of that. that didn't happen. If you ever read Alan Willis, music critic and cultural critic, he's very good on this. In the 60s, people really thought that they'd get rid of the family. They thought they'd get rid of it in a generation, and when it didn't happen, there was this crashing disappointment, return of the old-school traditionalism in the worst way, Reagan, et cetera. You know, I think that, you know, we lack the stuff out there, but it's, I think increasingly, the, you know, conditions of cyberspace provide this kind of comfortable ghettoism in a way.
We can all find a sort of audience for ourselves that provides this level of satisfaction, but which doesn't necessarily impinge on the mainstream culture. So there are pockets of stuff, but I don't think it yet amounts to a counterculture which could be hegemonic. And that's what's sort of lacking. I think this comes back to this other question about why go back to Rage Against the Machine, because that belonged to a moment where things were hegan-like. And in fact, on a major label, it was part of that in a way. The mainstream dominant culture had to bargain with this to some degree.
It doesn't really have to in the same way anymore, I don't think. Well, thanks, everyone. Thanks for the questions. It was great to hear. Yeah, good questions, everybody. Thank you. I've got to move along really. Nick coming up.