A flurry of recent debate on the topic of cultural stagnation versus "the future is alive and well actually!"
Here's an interesting article by Gabriel Szatan at Resident Advisor from a few weeks ago
It starts with a electronic dance festival experience that feels blocked and static:
But by some deadening alchemy, the sets smushed into a homogenous paste, largely indistinguishable in tempo and tone.
From this, Szatan extrapolates to a general pervasive feeling of being stuck on a 7 out of 10 plateau, anxiously wondering when the distinctive and defining sound of the 2020s will surface:
No matter the soundtrack, the feeling echoed: this is good, not great. The lightning-in-a-bottle effect that animates club culture seems to be in hibernation and it's not just hampering nights out, either. As of late, electronic releases seem to exist on this same endless plateau. We have more music to enjoy than ever, but what's increasingly nagging at me is that this overfamiliarity is actually the problem....
Electronic culture finds itself in a strange double condition: hyper-fragmented in theory, yet consensus-driven in practice. What used to feel like solid land has given way to an archipelago of disparate scenes with little awareness of their neighbours and, broadly, only slight modifications to preexisting sounds...
It's worth asking ourselves what exactly the 2020s will be remembered for musically. If we're invested in breaking new ground, time's running out to get that in motion. The alternative is circling a familiar neighbourhood over and over, repackaging iterations of the same sensation until the culture ages out....
The problem isn't that electronic music has stopped producing quality. It's an issue of quantity. There's more than the culture can reasonably metabolise, and, at a time when many pockets of the underground are still rummaging through the crates of the past, this bottlenecks the potential for new movements to cut through. Without anything to act as both a galvanising force and, occasionally, an antagonist to challenge, a lot of cultural motion effectively peters out....
Five of the revitalised sounds you're liable to hear back in the hands of DJs at, say, Houghton right now — tech house, dub techno, dubstep, minimal and prog - lack a clear aesthetic identity and, you could argue, lack risk too...
2026 lineups heaves with talent, yet the presence of artists who released their most crowd-animating work 20 or 25 years ago pops out more than usual...
In reality, it's little more than a revolving carousel heading nowhere fast with diminishing returns.
Szatan references "retromania" not as a book but as a genre, or an artistic mode cutting across genres:
The '90s has been well turned over by now, so what can we learn from the previous decade? At least three substantial, unique movements were generated in the 2010s: EDM, hyperpop and retromania, all large and notable enough that dozens of variants fold into, and spin off, from them.
The slipperiest of the three is retromania, less a hard sound than a change in mindset as nostalgia ran rampant, and expanded archives pulled whole histories of sound into circulation. In the 2010s, a flood of reissues met a desire to gain a multipolar understanding of music history.
... multiple scenes, including drum & bass, are threatened by "homage [as] the new product," per dBridge...
Then back to the main theme:
the fracture of universal experience means we may never see a coherent sound of the decade again—in this or any decade. Without that, culture risks becoming even more aleatory than usual....
Essentially, as the world gets more expensive and progression stalls, we get sucked into cultural stagflation.
...it feels evident that electronic music's oversupply and option paralysis is causing damage.
We may have arrived at a point where knowledge and adherence to form leave people unable to conjure visions beyond the old frame.
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These are just snippets from a much larger, in-depth exploratory piece that is well worth your attention (as is the companion piece, its part 2, "No Music On A Dead Internet", which explores archiving and the impacts of AI).
(Some of Szatan's observations chime with my own recent Instagram-as-window onto dance culture thoughts)
I think this was a brave piece to write as the editor of a magazine that is right in the thick of the dance industry - a downer overview rather than rah-rah-rah boosterism.
The sensations Szatan describes from going to festivals or working through new releases... bustling activity and superabundance combined with a sense of blockage and redundancy.... the creeping feeling that nothing is quite new enough... these are familiar sensations to me, from starting to feel them with some acuteness in the late 2000s. (I don't feel them so acutely these days, but that may only be because I'm not tracking the now and putatively "new" with anything like the same obsessive intensity)
Those back-in-the-day frustrating sensations are what caused me to come up with the term "hyperstasis".
At the time I wondered if hyperstasis was a superstructure to substructure equivalent to this economic malaise of the 1970s called "stagflation", a term Szatan drops in his piece. Stagflation is an economic paradox, what really shouldn't happen: the combination of low growth and inflation (usually inflation is a sign of economic growth - like the economy is running a fever).
But I don't think it is really a sound parallel. Hyperstasis is more to do with the horizons of what's musically thinkable, a feeling that no one can get to the next level of the 'game' but is just scurrying around on a plateau. That said, stagflation is such an evocatively gross word, it is tempting to deploy it in this context. .
Even one as semi-detached as myself can think of at least a few candidates for the New Defining Dance Sound of the 2020s. There's amapiano and bruxaria. The former is one where I do have that "ooh, this is different, this is new" reaction. While also finding the initial excitement will fade a bit as the DJ mix chunters on - it starts to feel plateau-y (part of its innovation I suppose - the diffusion of climax). Still, the basic template-structure is a new way of organizing a groove. Then bruxaria - well, that has aspects that feel like irritation-as-aesthetic - the extreme sidechaining, the nagging GIF-like vocal loops - and seem explicitly designed to drive away the elder ear. This is one way that the New has announced itself - a harshness, a rhythmic disruption of groove, that you have to recalibrate your hearing for.
There is a follow-up feature, a third in the series, with Resident Advisor staff offering ideas on how to change things for the better. "Consider this our contribution to the discourse landfill", jokes Michael Lawson.*
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And so to the refutations ** of the "cultural stagnation" perspective...
Published last week, The Future Is Not Lost, by Matt Bluemink, grew out of online essays that sparred with Mark Fisher's thinking, starting with the unfurling of the concept of "anti-hauntology" as an alleged genre represented above all by SOPHIE, along with Arca and Iglooghost.
Here is Bluemink (what an amazing name - can it be real?) at his Blue Labyrinths blog describing the scope and themes of The Future Is Not Lost.
"The book is a collection of my essays focused around the idea of the future as it relates to music, technology, architecture, and philosophy. The book itself is split into 3 chapters on a variety of interconnected themes:
1. Anti-Hauntology: The first section explores the idea of ‘futuristic music’, including artists like SOPHIE, Arca, and Iglooghost, and provides a critique of the nascent pessimism in the work of Mark Fisher through the philosophy of Bernard Sitegler.
2. Spatial Imaginaries: The second section uses the ethos of solarpunk to criticise the dystopian aesthetic of cyberpunk that has become actualised, not just in films, literature, and games, but in architecture and urban design. It also provides a reading of Peter Sloterdijk’s theory of foams, atmospheres, and desert islands to show how spatial philosophy can provide solutions to the climate crisis.
3. Individuation: The final section introduces the work of Gilbert Simondon and its influence on Bernard Stiegler and Gilles Deleuze. This section provides the theoretical underpinning of many of the previous chapters. It shows how individuation, conceived as an on ongoing metaphysical process, can lead to a fundamentally progressive form of understanding which allows for the creation of better futures.
And here's a bit on how hearing SOPHIE helped him formulate a counter-view to Mark's pessimism:
"From the very first moment I heard SOPHIE’s music I knew it was something different. It felt fresh. It felt new. Listening to Faceshopping was like being transported into an alternate reality that approached popular music from a radically novel perspective: a transgressive perspective. The old structures and forms were there, but shifted, changed, and morphed into something unrecognisable. Electronic music was finding a way forward, not only in some distant, abstract or academic sense, but in popular culture itself. Aspects of the experimental and avant-garde were being brought into popular consciousness in entirely new ways we couldn’t have expected. I had discovered the music of the future.”
Since Mark died a year before SOPHIE's "Faceshopping" came out, it's hard to know how he would have reacted to it. For what it's worth, I suspect that he would have been bowled over by the track and its video as a tour de force of audio-visual-conceptual provocation - as I was. Especially as it is a song so bound up with his beloved glam - ideas of artifice, plasticity, surface versus depth, theatricality etc. It is practically an audio-essay dramatizing the ideas of Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life but updated for the age of the influencer. InstaGlam.
Whether "Faceshopping" would have been enough to spark Mark to a rethink of his fundamental ideas about retro-paralysis, lost futures, hauntology... it's hard to say.
But I think "anti-hauntology" is an odd way to frame this music, since I rather doubt it was motivated by a desire to refute hauntology. I wouldn't be surprised if it emerged as an aesthetic in almost complete unawareness of the hauntology discourse - it has far more to do with long-running aesthetics of camp and plasticity, drawing on precursors like electroclash, Fischerspooner, drag and vogueing and ballroom, New Romanticism and the Blitz scene, avant-garde fashion, Warhol and the Theatre of the Ridiculous.... . As well as many mainstream manifestations, from Bowie to Madonna to Lady Gaga. In some ways SOPHIE is Gaga but with music that actually lives up to the rhetoric.
Talking of rhetoric... I think it would have made more sense for Bluemink to come up with a genre term that expresses the positive and substantive properties of this new sound-and-vision, rather than define it reactively against something that may not have impinged on its creators' consciousness. The term "anti-hauntology" creates the impression that SOPHIE, Arca et al exist primarily to be recruited to Bluemink's attempt to refute K-punkian pessimism. But they might have their own reasons for doing what they do, completely unconnected from the debate about retro and lost futures.
And if you'll forgive me tooting my own trumpet a bit... the aesthetic of what Bluemink calls anti-hauntology is already strongly hinted at in my Digital Maximalism epic of December 2011 - using Rustie’s Glass Swords and various others I identify the hallmarks of a new sound - ultrabrite, shadowless, plasticized, denatured, 2D cartoony, “dry” i.e. reverb-less. An overloaded concatenation-agglomeration of every past idea of "future music" into a kind of ultrafuturepop.
I'm writing here a couple of years before SOPHIE’s first releases and before PC Music get started.
This emergent hyper-gloss maximalism is contrasted with the deep-and-dark minimalism dominant in 2000s dance, e.g. the dank and shadowy reverb-chambered sound of dubstep. I don't mention Burial but I could easily have done.
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And then a few months back there was Audrey Wollen in The Yale Review asking "Is the Twenty-First Century a Creative Void?" and taking issue with Mark Fisher and myself again but mainly with W. David Marx's Blank Space, his history of the C21 so far.
Wollen notes a paradox about Marx's book that I also noticed:
"Blank Space offers 281 fast-paced, rollicking pages that provide an overview of an extraordinary number of cultural events—including the flourishing of reality television, Web 2.0 and social media, monumental social and political movements from Occupy Wall Street to MAGA—only to culminate with the bewildering conclusion that nothing artistically transformative has occurred."
"If the second half of the twentieth century was a rushing river of culture, many feel that the present has become a brackish wetland, a marsh."
Then she tries to repositivize this trope in terms of moist fecundity:
"Maybe
we are living in a marshland. Many creatures do.
Then there is the decelerationist argument, the zero growth / downshifting / permaculture polemic applied to culture itself as opposed to agriculture.
"It does not surprise me that millennials and zoomers might be wary,
unconsciously or otherwise, of contributing anything “new” to a stretch of
history that has voraciously eaten newness only to cough up suffering. What
about the past fifty, seventy-five, one hundred years makes barreling toward
the future seem like a good idea? The Doomsday Clock reads eighty-five seconds
to midnight, and for many across the globe a more local apocalypse has already
arrived. Some of the archive fever of the past twenty-five years might be a
form of emotional anti-accelerationism, a generation desperately trying to
produce a wind drag on the forward velocity powered by the deathly machinery of
the twentieth century. I can already feel the ground
underneath my argument growing a bit soggy—I am, after all, a product of the
cultural marshland of the 2000s. My perspective is history logged, mushy and
inexact, my style is patchworked and gleaned, my analysis makes most sense
mapped as doodled spirals. I find the declarative mode that is necessary for
the construction of an avant-garde (or the loud lamenting of a lack thereof )
kind of cringe, to be honest, not because being born in the early 1990s made me
allergic to earnestness, as is often presumed, but because of its absolutism,
its unquestioned reverence for clarity and category"
And then a note of "OK boomer" condescension:
I can empathize: it must have felt comforting to imagine there was a way to
dress and a type of music to listen to and an art to make that situated oneself
inside of history in a legible and linear way. But it was always an act of
imagination (as evidenced by the various revolutions that once felt inevitable
and around the corner, but never actually occurred), just as this whirlpool of
stasis is a kind of imagining as well. The fact of the matter is that kitsch is
now so overabundant that to not use or misuse it is to leave money on the
table, so to speak — stacks of meaning-bucks, just sitting there. What’s
difficult to accept, for those not from the marshes, is that subculture, and
its glowing nimbus of futurity, has become a kitsch object as well. Not merely
the specifics — the hedgehog prickles of a hairstyle, the fog of bass rolling in
over a crowd—but the form itself.
The "kitsch" - meaning much the same as "cringe" - is a reference to Clement Greenberg's "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" essay of 1939, which paved the way for his championing of Abstract Expressionism. In other words, exactly the kind of Movements that the likes of myself mourn, as we do Militant Undergrounds and Subcultures-as-Vanguards. The very idea of these are now considered corny.
(An erudite letter writer to Melody Maker once accused me of becoming the Clement Greenberg of rock criticism, trapped in my own dogma - this at the height of my push for the becoming-abstract of blissrock / shoegaze, Seefeel-as-Rothko).
Finally, the essay deploys an obscure musical reference, a Los Angeles band called Purity who specialize in cover versions of songs from subcultural sounds like hardcore punk and postpunk:
"A cover of “Dance This Mess
Around” is a repetition of a repetition, a warping of the warp, a slow decay of
the slow decay. The listener descends into the mulchy bog, wet and thick. But
this mire unexpectedly greens into acute feeling: somehow, Purity turns the
lyric “I’m not no limburger” into one of the most wretched, mournful lines of
any music I’ve ever heard."...
I have to salute how deftly Wollen sustains the marshland / mire / boggy ground *** tropes throughout the essay...
She concedes that Purity's strategies would not placate the declinists.
"[W. David] Marx would probably agree on a more Greenbergian line —yes, exactly, old
cultural forms of radical possibility have been resurrected as half-hearted
ghosts! Tragic! But what he misses, fundamentally, is the vice versa, the
backward loop, that is also true: the kitsch object, the dancing shadow of a
certain subgenre of rock and roll, is transformed through (re)restaging into a
new, sprouting form of subculture, if that can be defined as what goes on
underneath the opaque layer of mass commerce."
An aside: Purity remind me slightly of another painfully knowing band, Bodega, who put out the album Our Brand Could Be Yr Life. - which if nothing else is a pretty funny album title.
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It does amaze me sometimes that this debate is still going on - it will not go away. To use a Wollen-ism, we are bogged down in it.
I personally can't seem to get away from it - I regularly receive requests to talk on Retromania-ish topics. Often from newspaper journalists looking at specific revivals or retro fads. Sometimes PhD students or film makers.
I do sometimes also wonder if, say, Mark or I had both been killed in freak accidents in 2005, i.e. before the retro/hauntology discourse kicked off in earnest and well before either of us had written our book length disquisitions on the subject... whether this debate would have emerged in quite such a pronounced way.
But then I think, it obviously would have done. Partly because there were from the start other people making similar points - Momus, Adam Curtis - independently and in parallel with myself and Mark. Work based around ideas of lost futures, ghosts, reenactment, ruins, the archive, etc was already going on in the art world - Leckey's Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, Deller. We weren't pulling this stuff out of our arses, you know!
The objective conditions of the culture would provoke such a critique (and then the inevitable counter-critique). It might have been differently inflected - figures like Burial and The Caretaker, who are currently having PhD's centered around them, as a knock-on of Mark's enormous and ever-growing influence, they might not have been so prominent in the debate. But the tropes that Wollen simultaneously parodies and attempts to reverse / re-positivize , these would have sprung up almost organically, like moss on peat.
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FOOTNOTES
* The very first comment in the RA pt3, which advises deejays should play at least 50 percent new material per set, takes off from a Fred Again performance that brought out onstage legends Thomas Bangalter, Underworld and Mike Skinner and played all their golden oldies. Rachel Grace Almeida sez: "it felt a lot like hauntology playing out in real time, at scale. Have we stopped imagining new futures, and accepted nostalgia and retromania as cultural benchmarks forevermore?.... it's time to ban overreliance on the '90s in dance music!... Classics are classic for a reason, but all I'm asking for is 50 percent less ghosts haunting sets."
** Less recently - a few years ago now - there was a book-length refutation in the form of the Liam Inscoe-Jones Songs in the Key of MP3 which is explicitly framed as a younger's riposte to elders like Mark Fisher and myself, blinkered by our depressive perspective. Inscoe-Jones's overall angle and outlook is "behold the plenty!", pointing to a panoply of pioneers from the late 2000s onwards such as Danny Brown and Oneohtrix Point Never (the latter actually prominent in Retromania of course).
That's all fine. Still, I can't help wishing Songs in the Key of MP3 had engaged with my thinking subsequent to the 2011 publication of Retromania, e.g. the Auto-Tune epic, or the whole book’s worth of counter-evidence marshalled in Futuromania - my own partial auto-refutation. (Still In A Dream also contains a chapter that dissents with Retromania, looking at how acute consciousness of history can be a basis for attempts to do new things - the chapter is titled "Revisionaries")
But that's how it works, of course - people selectively create a cruder, starker version of their opponents (in this case, me) in order to have the arguments they want to have, the arguments they think they can win. I've done it many a time, with my own combatants!
The title Songs in the Key of MP3 rings out a bit oddly - the reference to MP3s feels already somewhat dated in the age of streaming. I still have a shitload in my computer, FLACs and WAVs too - but I should imagine most in the generation that Inscoe-Jones is writing to and for (in terms of elevating generational morale and pride-in-their-time) would not own music in either material or immaterial form, but be fully adapted to streaming modes of organizing their listening. (The concept of streaming doesn't appear in Retromania - Spotify existed but had not taken off at the time of writing, 2010).
*** This idea of rotting decomposed material as a source of cultural energy reminds me of Eno's analogies comparing art-making and composting - he likens culture to a compost heap, the accumulation of past forms fermenting new life through decay and incremental developments. The eco-friendly slow-core trope of the compost heap contrasts with imagery of innovation that is accelerationist - an autobahn to tomorrow, missions into outer space, the artist-as-astronaut. Burning up and blasting into the unknown.
