Death of Next

Another interesting Real Life piece, this time by Mitch Therieau. It predicts - but also calls for - "the end of the trend piece" and declares that "if the past two years have produced any genuinely new development in the history of the future, it is perhaps a widespread, if faintly felt, consciousness of stagnation; a growing conviction that a sweeping Next Thing is not forthcoming."  

It starts with references to "living through a long crisis of futurity" and the idea that "the future has been 'cancelled': foreclosed, rendered all but impossible to imagine, or at least not in ways that can help us create a better world in the present." 

Then moves to challenge this long established and differently  inflected notion of a "unitary Next Thing: a totally new 'world' where everything is either transfigured, or restored to how it used to be", which has been boosted by speculations about what will transpire post-covid. 

But "it turns out that there is no one future so much as there is a series of ongoing crises smoldering in the background, distributed unevenly at every level", and as a result, "speculation on the Next Thing has become an increasingly tough sell. "

Attention then turns to the pop culture genrescape: 

"If the 2010s introduced -cores and –waves to popular culture, with slightly facetious tags like normcore and vaporwave laying claim to free-floating elements of the zeitgeist, the pandemic years have seen an exponential multiplication of these suffixed “aesthetics,” beyond what any one person could hope to keep up with. ... The styles that have recently risen out of this internet soup and into the sphere of trend pieces have reflected a certain fatigue with the churn of trend itself." Goblincore is cited as evidence of this. 

"Across all these -cores and -waves that have spread like the mushrooms goblincore adherents admire so much, a quiet consensus emerges: there will be no Next Thing. Only detritus — old books, pressed flowers, dirty clothes — piling up in the here and now....  Future vertigo gives way to future fatigue."

Then Allison P. Davis’s “vibe shift” piece is considered. 

Nice bit on the trash heap of promised futures that never transpired: 

"Untold millions of former Next Things languish in dusty magazine archives, cached away on orphaned webpages, buried in a drift of ahistorically sorted content. There is no kitsch quite like the artifacts of a promised future that didn’t pan out... As the junked Next Things continue to pile up around us..., it may be that the realm of online trend is the place where an ambient loss of faith in speculation’s power has found its first vernacular expression....

(Hat tip to genre-spotter Kieran Press-Reynolds for alerting me to this). 

A lot of the micro-genre action in recent years feels unserious to me - not based in a genuine "looking for the new thing" hunger or wanting to propose one's scene-let as a real candidate for Next Next Big Thing status. Rather ,it's more a playful exercise in meta-genre. These jokingly purported genre flaunt their constructedness, their lack of basis in real social energy. They treat genre formation and genre-naming as a daft game. 

Seapunk feels like the first one where it seemed to be spoofing the very idea of genres and scenes, while also seeing how far it could fool people. 

So I don't know if there's really an underlying sadness at stagnation at work, or a frustrated futurism coming up empty. Then again, the flip  attitude could be a terminal syndrome in itself.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Here's another Mitch Therieau piece about vibes and the occult for The Drift. 

further to the post on Bat, Bean, Beam and the "don't be a dick" video -- are we no longer allowed to disapprove of or even critique mass taste, or the cultural likes of specific populations? - the big spat between Nicki Minaj and Hot 97 threw up some relevant matter.... check some of Minaj's rebukes of the Hot Jocks "this ain't real hip hop" on-air dissing of "Starship":

• "I'm a grown-ass woman, and everyone is grown enough to keep their opinions to themselves in order to give people a great time. I've traveled all around the world, and people come with one agenda, and that is to have a good time. Not to have their favorite artist be ridiculed or be made fun of.."

• "When you disrespect Nicki Minaj — and I don't care if it was in front of 2,000 people, which can equate to 2 million people when it's streaming live — you're disrespecting my fans. See, I don't have a problem with anyone saying what they have to say to me. But don't make those 3 million people that downloaded 'Starships' or whatever they downloaded, don't make them feel like they're inferior in any way for their personal taste in music."

this basically boils down to "don't be a dick about what other people like"

which has all the problems that Tiso brings up 

as does Minaj's repeated reference to the number of records she's sold and amount of money she's made

as if that made one immune to criticism!

it's basically 50 million Elvis fans can't be wrong

but surely criticism should cling onto the possibility, remote as it is, that 50  Million whatever-fans might actually be wrong (i  felt really tempted and almost compelled to place scare quotes around wrong but then the very point i'm making here, or toying with, is the idea that wrong might really be wrong... so no Rorty-esque equivocations here)

political criticism after all always contains the possibility that very large proportions of the population -- sometimes entire populations -- can be completely wrong in their ideas about the economy, how a society ought to be run, what is sexually proper, the respective roles of men and women

and in pop cult, 50 million people being wrong about something is naturally worth analysing,  it is highly interesting in fact, something to take seriously, it might actually tell you something about larger phenomenon ... you might get something out of being not tolerant of, but literally understanding vis-a-vis that mass wrongness

i should say at this point that I generally really like Nick Minaj and "Starships" doesn't bother me at all, it's fun

but it's intriguing and striking, the utter elasticity of her persona/music

i wonder, is it strategic, in a kind of board-room, market-positioning, maximum-market-penetration kind of way (as has been the norm since Thriller, arguably) ? or is this lack of stylistic integrity  actually more "authentic" in that she is just a product this Shuffle-culture....  so it's more like an integral dis-integration of taste (cf Grimes,. "post-internet" etc)...  unrealness (in all senses) is her real

but back to the meta-critical issue

something about the uniformity of the pro-Minaj/anti-Hot97dicks position taken by all critics everywhere makes me uneasy...

well, they're professional generalists, most of them, so naturally they are pre-disposed to the idea of genres not having borders, "death to the taste police", etc....  there's an occupationally-acquired reflex to reward those who don't stay stuck in one genre, aren't purist, exhibit diversity and versatility in their albums...

that in turn reflects on the kind of flexibility and open-ness required to actually do that kind of generalist job

it means that you can't actually ever become fanatical about one kind of music, you can't become a genre-ist -- because you are required to cover everything and find something non-dickish to say about as many things as possible

that may or may not be a virtue in the critic... or a life-advantage for the punter


on a purely philosphical level, if hip hop can encompass absolutely anything, what does hip hop actually mean?  

can we have identity without essence?

and regardless of whether the Rosenberg dude is a right dick and Funkmaster unFlex is the rap equiv of  ye olde punke roquer or not ....  there's a larger question:   if the idea of "the streets" in rap is an ailing, obsolete fiction.... because music can go anywhere and be heard by anyone....  what does that mean for the streets themselves, the real-world referent for that musical concept now said to be detached and set free into the infosphere?    those streets still exist