In the comments to the previous post about Robyn Hitchcock and his attempt to perpetuate 1967... Phil Knight mentioned that there was quite a bit of it - back-to-psychedelia (specifically English psychedelia) in the early-mid Eighties.... Television Personalities... The Cleaners from Venus, The Monochrome Set...
Quite a bit of it - indeed there was, indeed there was.
Focused on the UK Eighties uptake of the UK Sixties vibe, what follows is not even the complete inventory...
First line of this references Rita Tushingham... Second verse references David Hemmings and David Bailey... the title nods to one of the Men From UNKLE. The entire lyric is a phantasmagoric montage of Sixties references
Patrick Macnee and Twiggy on the cover, not a collage but apparently a shot taken at a fashion shoot dedicated to the Avengers style...
This song by Billy Childish's early band the Pop Rivits might actually just precede the Eighties but I include as a nod to that whole Milkshakes et al scene
"I know you'll say I'm living in the past / But those Beatle boots were made to last"
An Englishy Beatles (psych-era) flavour crept into XTC's albums from Black Sea onwards and then eructated in Dukes of Stratosphear , a side project that was pure Rutles really.
Then there was the neo-psych DIY loner Nick Nicely.
From the 1982 album Psychotropia, "Hilly Fields" is the tune that has cult love
Vocal's a bit Buggly for me...
"Nick Nicely" sounds like the title of one of those character-sketch songs that were rife in UK pop circa 66-67. Or something off the shit McCartneyfied side 2 of Abbey Road.
Nicely popped up again in the "nice one, top one, get sorted" era, as part of the breakbeat house outfit Psychotropic who did the classic rave track "Hypnosis" .
Another Nick doing neo-psych in the early-mid 80s was Nick Haeffner who if memory serves I met at a party - a very quiet fellow, who shyly spoke of his music... and who then materialized a few years later with an elpee on Bam Caruso. Paul Oldfield gave it a generous hearing.
The Great Indoors is a good title - indeed I might have nicked that phrase for something or other, now I think of it
Paul mentions Julian Cope in the review and he would indeed have been the great example of a laughing-madcap-wannabe of the English Eighties.
As Copey put it in an interview I did with him in the '90s, his thinking circa Teardrops / early solo elpees was "the accumulation of all of my heroes would be one hell of god to be" - the heroes being Barrett, Roky Erikson, Skip Spence, et al, whose heroic intake he tried to match in pursuit of druggy divinity.
Liverpool really was the first of the several New Psychedelias of the decade: Echo and the Bunnymen and then all the other non-starter groups with daft names like A Shallow Madness. Even Liverpool groups who weren't psychedelic had psychedelic sounding names - Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark
On the less Cope-ious intake committed to journeying up the road of excess end of things, there was the whole Mood Six / Doctor and the Medics scene around the club Alice In Wonderland. Clothes horses and London scene-fabricators rather than real rainbow-chasers.
Soft as runny shite
More of a loner, there was The Bevis Frond - leaning towards acid rock rather than paisley psychedelia, heavy at times
The Legendary Pink Dots - who I rather liked. Edward Ka-Spel had a more expansive conception, informed by Krautrock and experimental music and possibly Hammill and Supersister, as much as by the Barrett side of psych. The track below is from the 1985 album Asylum - as Paul Oldfield, a Dots supporter, pointed out, an ambiguous word, suggestive of sanctuary but also a place of confinement for the mentally disturbed. Madness as visionary state but also estrangement and exile.
On the mainstream tip and far more superficial - a fleeting fancy - there was Prince with Around The World. Lamentably there was also "Sowing the Seeds of Love" by Tears For Fears.
Veering away from the flower power moment to something a little hairier and heavier, there was the Cult, conjuring up Steppenwolf and early Led Zeppelin and such like... much more cock in this rock than the psych boy-men. But they were bandying around words like "Love" and "Revolution" and even the cult-of-Native-Americans ("Spiritwalker" etc) is rather late Sixties, Jim Morrison's souls of dead Indians jumping into his child's "fragile eggshell mind" etc etc.
I did quite like this, more for the tingly filigreed intro than the pumping main groove-drive
I was quite won over by the "boogie 'til you blow chunks" of the next album Electric (1987), when Rick Rubin got them to strip the sound right down.
Astbury has lungs like bellows and the guitarist can screech, but the swing and smoky thickness of sound that Steppenwolf had is completely flattened out -
Groups like Walkingseeds were referencing Blue Cheer (the title of a song on their 1987 album Skull Fuck... more prosaically they also had a number titled "St. Albans").
But I've veered into the American Sixties...
While this was going on you had the label Bam Caruso and the related magazine Strange Things (Are Happening)doing the heavy work of historical excavation: digging (for) freakbeat on the Rubble comp series, John's Children anthologies etc.
And that reminds me of Richard Norris, who was Bam Caruso's label manager, and who then teamed up with Genesis P-Orridge - Psychic TV already on this tip with their Hyperdelia concept: the Brian Jones tribute "Godstar", the cover of "Good Vibrations" - and together Gen and Richard did Jack the Tab, which was sort of but not really acid house.
The Shamen also plunged into the techno-house sound, with better results than either Jack the Tab or The Grid. But back in the Eighties - when I saw them about four times, always as the support or middle of the line-up group - they were total psychedelic revivalists, always performing with Op Art projections.
"Young 'Till Yesterday" - hark at the 67-reference there.
The guitar are quite nicely overloaded and frazzled - Electric Prunesy, White Noise-y - but the songs and the singing are faint and feeble.
This next one is transitional, when they are starting to get into beats and samples, but it's more industrial in feel than it is house-groovy. The title "Christopher Mayhew Says" is about the Liberal MP who took mescaline as part of a Panorama experiment for the BBC.
It was their pre-existing interest in hallucinogens that drew The Shamen to the new dance-drug culture.
And it was at one of the Shamen's Progeny events - them plus Orbital playing live but also loads of deejays - that I had my rave conversion experience in the autumn of 1991.
Good Lord, from "Pictures on My Wall" and "Sleeping Gas" through to the Second Summer of Love (1988) and the Second Second Summer of Love (1989 - getting our heads untogether in the country), the Eighties really was Sixties flashbacks all decade long, from start to finish...
(And then, crikey, it carried on into the early '90s with baggy and Inspiral Carpets with their pudding bowl haircuts and sub-Seeds keybs.... Candy Flip covering "Strawberry Fields Forever")
Still, I suppose, bringing it back to where this all started- conceivably this makes Robyn Hitchcock a pioneer of sorts, the earliest of adopters - with the Soft Boys, the first to go back to this particular moment.
If I recall right, the advert for the debut Soft Boys single - released as New Wave was in full swing - bore the proudly untimely slogan: Psychedelic Music.
The second single's title is flying the phreak flag quite fervently.
But perhaps they weren't the first "acid-punks" after all.
Wire's Chairs Missing got criticized in some quarters for having gone in the space of a year from Pink Flag to Pink Floyd - not just for the whimsied picture-lyrics, but for the glassy, heavily effected guitars (using delay and flange, which is just a frostier version of 1960s phasing) and - the horror - for using keyboards.
The Stranglers were all Doorsy with the rippling grandiose organ solos and weird FX on the vocals ("Peasants in the Big Shitty"). In interviews they gruffly stated "we're into acid".
The Fall were "pickled" (Martin Bramah's word) in shrooms and LSD as well as amphetamines. Indeed Mark E. Smith's vision-thing was a catalytic influence on Julian Cope and Ian McCulloch. For a time they followed the Fall around from gig to gig.
And then out of The Fall sprouted The Blue Orchids, the truly great and genuinely psychedelic band of the Eighties.
(Them and Meat Puppets. But we won't go into the all the American acid-punk contenders - Chrome et al)
But I have now thought of something else...
The psychedelic revival was started not by New Wavers after all - but by a handful of Old Wavers who had lived through it the first time round as participants.
Todd Rundgren
That's 1975
1976 - wholly pointless recreation of the original!
And closer to the English source...
Steve Hillage (who didn't so much return to psychedelia as he simply stuck with it)
That's 1977 and it's produced by Todd Rundgren
Brian Eno and Phil Manzanera, with the short lived 801, covering "Tomorrow Never Knows" in 1976
Goodness, that's awful....
Meanwhile...
Eno was one of the first, circa his early solo albums, to talk of the enduring influence of psychedelia on him. So (as per Hillage) it's not so much a revival or a return, it's a continuation. Much of the pre-punk scene is post-psychedelic....
Still, doing the cover versions is a retro move.
Blimey, ahead of the pack in going back, you of course have David Bowie with Pinups.... That is 1973, harking back to less than a decade earlier, to 65-66.
"Shapes" - or "shipes" as Bowie ridiculously pronounces it - "shapes" not of things to come, but of things that have been and gone.
Twiggy on the cover too, almost a decade before Television Personalities.
And Roxy, pastiching and parodying everything under the pop sun, also did a psych-era style "false ending" on "In Every Dream Home a Heartache". With a swirl storm of phased drumming and phased guitar like "Itchycoo Park" and Todd's own Nazz track "Open Your Eyes". That's from For Your Pleasure, 1973.
This experience of "retro" receding deeper into the past is familiar to me from researching Retromania ... as soon as I thought I'd established a hinge point, "the rift of retro", I would realize there was an earlier one.
In rock I managed to trace it (i.e. rock referring back to itself, its own history - not some other earlier sound like music hall) definitively to the Beatles doing the Chuck Berry soundalike "Back in the USSR" and to a 1967 Move B-side that pastiched the Beatles themselves circa "Daytripper" i.e. two years earlier. That was the ground zero point of retro and meta in pop music.
So a kind of Sixties revivalism starts in the Sixties itself...
Saw Robyn Hitchcock doing "Brenda's Iron Sledge" on Old Grey Whistle Test and took against it. Witnessed a support slot for R.E.M. in '87 and that sealed the aversion. Then I'd run into college rock types in America and be mystified by their veneration for his Eighties albums. Even hardheads like Forced Exposure - who usually disdained college radio lightweights like Let's Active - reckoned Robyn to be some sort of visionary.
But in recent years I have found myself warming to the honest way Hitchcock describes himself as a man out of time, an epigone, someone gleaning up in the wake of visionary pioneers. Viz his memoir part 1...
In a recent Guardianinterview around his memoir part 2, Stranded in the Future, he says:
“Although my prime influence was Bob Dylan and Dylan showed me what I wanted to be, Syd Barrett showed me how I could be it. And I actually wound up sounding like John Lennon. To me, the Beatles are at the beginning and the end of everything. But my role has always just been to carry on a certain kind of music, which appeared in 66 and 67. My influences are all those old dead English blokes, basically....
"I didn’t invent this field of music, but I’ve perpetuated it. I wanted to maintain a tradition and do new work in that tradition. But the guys I worship were innovators. I’m the opposite. I’m sweeping up after them. It’s like, ‘Oh God, here comes Hitchcock with the broom.’”
That's admirably clear-eyed, isn't it?
About his Eighties success in America:
"It’s funny when people think of me as an 80s artist because I think of myself as a 60s artist. I literally am the last to hatch out, I think. I should be in a museum with Ron Wood. I was never actually a pop star. I was on MTV quite a lot in the States in the late 80s and early 90s, but that’s a long time back. I always manage to dodge the extreme limelight. You know, in some ways I’ve avoided both success and failure. It’s fantastic. And it’s always a bit of a shock when somebody identifies me. Mostly they think I’m Nick Lowe, which is great. But then occasionally people then think Nick is me. I’ve signed an autograph as Nick Lowe once or twice.”
I can feel myself relenting... actually considering listening to the solo albums.... perhaps even "Brenda's Iron Sledge" will get its second chance!
I will say, Hitchcock did record, with The Soft Boys, at least one stone classic. And it doesn't actually sound that 1967, it feels very much of whatever the year it was it came out.
Going back to this idea of being an epigone, the honesty and even honour of accepting that you are a secondary artist, tilling terrain opened up by pioneers....
An intriguing thing that emerged in another recent Hitchcock interview, with Mojo, is that although he is an overtly psychedelic artist, he was relatively inexperienced with psychedelics:
“I hardly took any acid at all. I don’t think I need hallucinations. Sometimes I just feel I am one.”
That adds another dimension to the idea of being a "secondary artist". You skip a stage in the process...
Instead of "taking drugs to make music to take drugs to" - the mission statement and modus operandi of Spacemen 3 - you absorb it via the sonic encoding of hallucinatory experience in select Sixties recordings. The music is the drug.
In a piece on Rock and Self-Destruction in the new issue of Vice, I wonder the extent to which this was widely the case with the Still In A Dream groups...
A phrase I use in the book for the era is "a second psychedelia". But in quite a few cases, I imagine it was also a second-hand psychedelia.
Some of the groups were doing acid. For a few, harder drugs. Spacemen 3 energetically explored the whole pharmacopeia (Sonic Boom even experimented with chloroform!). But I'm guessing that a possibly surprising number were getting it indirect, vicariously, via the records and the records alone.
Prompted by the way the music was going, I got into using Sixties lingo in my writing - mind-blowing, kiss the sky, blissed out, far out, tripped out - for quite some time before I could answer Jimi's question in the affirmative...
People are constantly asking me for my thoughts on Mark Fisher.
Only a slight exaggeration.
It actually got a little wearisome and I had to start saying no.
But then I seemed to get a second wind. Or maybe I just found it easier to comply than to write the note explaining why I couldn't.
Here's some thoughts requested recently by a European journalist - I have no idea if she used them. Waste not want not, as me old mum says....
1. Fisher seems to have a lot of impact on younger audiences, even among those outside academia. Why do you think his work resonates so much with a generation that were still quite young when he passed away?
I think it’s the way Mark used his personal experience - depression, dealing with bureaucracy in the workplace, etc - as a basis from which to write outwards, as it were, towards larger principles and a systemic and structural analysis. It is very relatable and accessible, it helps readers understand abstract ideas. He was also a stylish, yet crystal clear, writer - it is entertaining as well as illuminating.
He writes about depressing things but the effect is not depressing - even just apprehending things clearly is energizing. And usually there is some kind of hopeful aspect.
The idea that your depression and anxiety is not the fault of personal insufficiency but caused by systemic tendencies is a liberating message.
Another thing that makes it relatable to young people is the way Mark used music and popular culture (mainstream films like The Hunger Games) to make ideology and political structures legible.
Another factor is that Capitalist Realism is very short - it’s only about 80 pages long. You can read it in an afternoon.
2. Since Mark's passing, pop music has taken on new paths -- including new chaotic and fragmented genres like hyperpop, rage, etc. Do you think these new genres and cultural phenomenons still have echoes of "hauntology" and "retromania" that was discussed by both of you in the 2000s and 2010s, or do they mark a departure from these frameworks?
Well, retromania and hauntology are not music genres - they are culture-wide formations, manifesting in quite disparate areas - music but also fashion, TV, film, visual art, literature, videogames etc.
At the same time, neither retromania nor hauntology apply to the entirety of popular culture, or explain everything that is going on in the culture or society. They are tendencies or currents - structures of feeling that can seem dominant at certain points and then prominent but not dominant at other phases.
I would say peak retromania was from around 2005 to 2013 - I see Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories as the absolute zenith but in some way the swan song of retromania.
But even during this very retromanic time (conditioned by the emergence of YouTube, then streaming, among many other things) there were things going on in music and the culture that are not retro or that are even anti- retro. A genre like footwork would be one example. ASMR videos is another new cultural form that has nothing retro about it.
Around 2011 there was also a trend for what I called digital maximalism - ultra-bright, crisp, slick, glossy sounds (very different from the sound aesthetic of hauntology which is foggy, soaked in reverb, faded-sounding). Artists like Rustie and Skrillex. Hyperpop is an extension of that glossy, dry (no reverb) aesthetic but combined with a Baudrillardian simulation politique that parodies consumerism, glow-up glamour, and influencer culture (InstaGlam, someone called it).
I would say the Auto-Tune trap of late 2010s - Future, Migos, Playboi Carti, Young Thug, Travis Scott - is another formation that has nothing to do with retro. But unlike hyperpop, trap is minimalist and hypnotic. A new kind of woozy psychedelic ambient music with post-verbal vocals chirruping ecstatically.
3. There's been a lot of discussion about how music criticism has "softened" over the last couple of years. Fisher could be a very rigorous and, sometimes, unforgiving music critic (I remember, as an example, a specific article he wrote for k-punk on Glastonbury). How do you think his writings fit into this new music criticism landscape?
One of Mark’s most potent concepts was nihilation - the idea that music culture is driven by dialectical energy and that critics - but also musicians (who are in a sense active critics) - operate by opposing the things they don’t believe in or respect, and that their goal is to discredit their ideological foes. He didn’t believe that that everything was equally valid and everybody should get along nicely. He didn’t believe in that “each to their own” idea - he wasn’t into tolerance or acceptance. So yes he was “unforgiving” to things he thought were mediocre or a waste of time or actively pernicious. Like many of us who grew up on the UK music press, he had a bi-polar relationship with music - he thought some things were great, heroic, inspiring, and other things shit, lame, depressing. And he thought there were ups and downs in culture, not a steady state of quality. Exhilarating phases alternated with down periods - crashes that follow the manic collective high.
4. The way Fisher mixed cultural criticism, political analysis, and personal writings about his own mental health was distinctive. What do you think made him such an interesting and compelling writer?
I think I already answered that in the first reply and then throughout.
But a few other thoughts.
Penetrating clarity of intellect combined with style and a certain savage humour. His stuff is entertaining to read, it doesn’t feel like hard work.
He had an ability to come up with snappy catchphrases - slogans, memes, aphoristic sentences. “The secret sadness of the 21st Century” is a good example and it sounds beautiful in English - all the ‘s’ sounds, the sibilants.
He could write very well about the details and particularities of a work of art or an auteur’s oeuvre, but his superpower was to extend that to larger abstract principles. You sensed that he was always taking things to a higher level, building towards a total understanding of culture / politics / existence. The scale of the ambition was thrilling.
I'm a meme, or at least I'm riding shotgun in a Mark-meme.
I forgot to click on the full caption and so I don't know what exactly contemporary art "keeps" doing...
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).
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."
But then that is hyperstasis, isn't it? A roil of activity, but nothing that really surges into the unknown.
Wollen picks up on the kind of swampy metaphors that I and others use (in the intro to Retromania, I describe Time becoming like a sluggish river that meanders and forms oxbow lakes)
"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.
^^^^^
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.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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-JonesSongs in the Key of MP3 which isexplicitly 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.
