Fisher-talk (and a bit of Retro-Talk)

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... 

retrochat

I had a very interesting and jolly chat with Adina Glickstein for the arts magazine Spike on the subject of nostalgia and retrokultur, touching on many topics including techbro futurism and the Zone of Fruitless Intensification. 

The whole Spike issue is themed around nostalgia and related subjects and well worth a peruse.

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

I suppose it's nice to have done a book that enjoys a half-life or two... it is surprising how often I still get asked to comment on these sort of themes: retro-paralysis, cultural stagnation, hauntology... 

I don't mind, but in truth my mind has moved on to other preoccupations... mainly the ideas surrounding the new book, due out in June next year. 

Which as it happens has a completely different perspective on "the rhetorics of temporality"  than Retromania. 

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

Keeping the retrochat going have been other writers with books that either extend the polemic or refute it.... 

In the first camp, there's W. David Marx with Blank Space: A Cultural History of the 21st Century, for which I gave this blurb: 

“The first quarter of the 21^st Century had a paradoxical feeling – so much happened and yet nothing happened at all. A triumph of forensic research and pattern recognition, Blank Space cuts through the bustle and the babble, makes a senseless time make sense. W. David Marx diagnoses the malaise and even proposes a course of treatment. This is a book that’s fun to agree with and even more fun to argue with.” 

Here is a fairly positive response to Marx's argument from Celine Nguyen at Asterisk and a far less friendly take from Emily Watlington at Artnews. Here's an extract at The Atlantic.

(The one thing I didn't get with Marx's book is why he titled it Blank Space, which to me seems like either a positive image - possibility, an open frontier - or a neutral one. As a trope of barrenness in re.  the first 25 years of the 21stC it doesn't quite compute for me).  

As regards the counter-argument, the Full Space perspective -  "these be years of plenty, innovations up the wazoo, you just need to  gouge loose the wax clogging up your ears, O geriatics" - there's the fairly recent book Songs in the Key of MP3: The New Icons of the Internet Age by Liam Inscoe-Jones. 

Here is a wide-ranging discussion Inscoe-Jones had with Chal Ravens at Tribune a few months ago, and which has suddenly jumped out from behind the paywall. It's title is Has Pop Finally Eaten Itself?  (Variations on that trope certainly have eaten themselves by this point!)

The piece's url, I note wryly, includes the words "after-retromania". 

Would that we were! In both senses of the word -  the discourse, and the underlying phenomenon itself.

Clearly there's enough evidence - currently, but probably at most moments in the history of pop culture, apart from very obvious surge phases like mid-Sixties or punk/New Wave -  that could be marshalled to sustain either argument.  

There's always a ton of lame stuff around - revival, retread, remake, etc.

Equally, you can always point to people doing cool things in music - even during the years when I was writing Retromania, I never had any trouble coming up with a substantial end-of-year list of music I liked and thought was doing interesting things.  Inventive, if not quite innovative. 

The problem is more on the level of: what is the most that you can imagine happening with this cool / clever / inventive / conceivably even innovative  music? Is it going to break out all across the surfaces of everyday life? Shake things up? 

I would say "is it going to change the sound of the radio?" (thinking of Timbaland, or New Wave, or psychedelia - the instantiation of a new sonic template on a culture-wide basis). 

But radio isn't a thing anymore. Who listens to the radio?  

That is the big structural problem, which Ravens and Inscoe-Jones touch on in their dialogue. Monoculture still exists, but its mechanisms now - TikTok etc - agitate against anything lasting or substantial. 

In terms of "change the sound of the radio" - the last time that happened as far as I can tell is the Auto-Tune trap moment. (Which is the last moment I personally listened to the radio regularly). (And which was also my kind of "psychedelic rap" as opposed to the stuff Inscoe-Jones reps for - Danny Brown etc). 

But then again.... doesn't it all seem so trivial, as something to be concerned about, next to what's happening in this country, and in too many other places around the world - including the UK? Political retromania is the true nightmare.

futuromania versus retromania - a diagnosis

 

W.H. Hadow - "Some Aspects of Modern Music", published January 1 1915, in The Musical Quarterly, Volume I, Issue 1

(via Sean Albiez)

Woah that is freaky, the perennial application of this - and how well it captures this kind of evolution in the way you respond to music. What is unsettling to me growing older is a kind of stolidity that creeps in. You just become constitutionally less susceptible to being blown away.

I think it's like a weakening of the cathexis faculty. you can't bond in that really super-intense way that you could do. I guess that is because early on music is bound up with identity-formation - whereas once you are fully-formed (or more or less formed, let's say) which is usually by late '20s, you simply aren't using music in that profound way. it's just stuff that's nice to listen to. There are advantages - I've become way more open and wide in my listening - but you don't get that visceral bonding process of 'this is my music, this music explains me' or that it represents some kind of dream vision of how you'd like Life / your life to be.

If I look back at my end of year lists of faves from the 2000s when I was in my late 30s / early 40s, the lists are very long, reflecting having listened to tons of stuff, but an awful lot of it I can barely remember, it hasn't lasted - whereas things like Slits or Ian Dury or later on jungle - these I could more or less "perform" the songs vocally in their entirety (an excruciating thing for anyone else to hear or witness obviously!) but a sign of how deeply they were imprinted. Some of them I could almost  instrumentally 'perform' (via the voice or physical mimesis aka 'air' playing - again not a pretty sound / sight - but shows how all the parts of the music are so embedded in your being - the drums, the guitar riffs, solos, the structural tension and release).

With aging, much of the urgency and obsessive fixation inevitably fades away. You tend to have a better sense of proportion. When I wrote my early stuff, my life was empty in lots of ways. I was involved in relationships at various points, but the writing and the music took precedence. Nowadays I simply don’t have the huge space of time or of emotional energy that I used to fill up with music-obsession. When you are young, music plays a major role in identity formation but as you get older, your identity is (hopefully, by that point) formed. You’re not looking to music to be a savior or the primary source of excitement and solace in your existence. 

I also know a lot more about the history of music and have heard so much more, so things become more contextualized. There's an ingrained sense of how cycles repeat in rock culture, how they exhaust themselves and then reconstitute themselves with a slightly different inflection again after an interval. So that breeds a certain serene detachment. You are also less easily impressed. Perhaps that good - I don't know... 

the Ice age

“I call it the lost generation, because from 2000 to 2017, nothing really defines that whole generation in pop culture. Like, how would you look back at 2000 to 2017 and remember anything? How would you see somebody wearing some gear and say, ‘Hey, that’s gotta be from 2014?’ There’s no music there, there’s no pop culture, there’s no fashion that defines the generation. I look at the Nineties like it’s the last truly great decade." -  Vanilla Ice

That's like a vernacular version of the Gospel according to K-Punk and Simonretromania being ventriloquized through Vanilla Ice's mouth there!

Ice is quoted in this piece by Rob Sheffield for Rolling Stone about Nineties revivalism, the Nineties nostalgia circuit that Ice and others are doing very nice business on, and decade-consciousness.

Mark McGrath of Sugar Ray also quoted on the Nineties:

“It was the last heyday of the music business. When you were a kid in your garage, you could pick up a guitar and dream of being part of that. I compare it to these young kids playing basketball, wanting to be in the NBA – then all of a sudden the NBA disappears, and the NFL disappears. Now people are still playing basketball, but it’s the local rec league; people are still playing football, but you gotta go find some guys and get some games together. The infrastructure of stardom is gone. So you look back on that – not just as a business, but romantically. ‘Boy, that was fun, going to Tower Records to see what’s new, watching MTV for a world premiere.'”

Sheffield lays on McGrath this idea of Nineties as the last proper Decade with a sense of itself c.f. first two decades of the 21st Century being Zeigeist-ly amorphous:

 “Right – what would you call it, the Noughties? The 2000s? No one knows what to call it. No one knows when it started or ended. It took a while for the stink of the Nineties to go away, because nothing replaced it. The industry imploded, so there weren’t new bands coming up. Name the last rock star. The top ten touring bands in Pollstar – it was still the Chili Peppers, it was still Soundgarden – God rest his soul, Chris Cornell – it was still the Dave Matthews Band. Nothing replaced the Nineties, even though the decade was over.”

This doesn't seem true to me, seems a bit of a self-serving fiction - there are plenty of definitively 21st Century pop stars, some of whom have taken on and taken over the old functions of rockstardom (excess, outrage, political statements, being taken seriously / taking themselves very seriously) ....  indeed Rockism is alive and well in pop itself, ironically (and boringly)... rock anthems of the 21st Century is a shrinking category, true... guitars are rarely heard in the Top 40, for sure....

As for the no-feel-to-2000s/2010s ... I guess we'll have to wait a bit longer to see if early-Noughties nostalgia kicks in. Won't be long now, if the 'stalgia is already settling in on the late Nineties, eve of Y2K moment.

YeahI wouldn't be surprised if a certain look (to clothes, hair) and feel 'n' finish to entertainment products will start to become apparent as we move into the future - something we couldn't put our finger on at the time, what with the welter of revivalism and pastiche

the clunkiness of an era becomes its charm

(although films and TV of the late Eighties and early Nineties often look really shit)

Seeds of Retromania, #1

from an interview I did in 2006 around Rip It Up and Start Again

"I had this experience recently in a bar in the East Village.  I go there a lot, it's a basement bar where hip people go to transcend the game of hip -- they play really rocking, All-American tunes there -   Aerosmith and James Gang and AC/DC.  Anyway, this song came on and I recognized it and it was driving me nuts, I couldn't place it. So I had to go ask the guy at the bar what it was. The barman didn't know and was too busy to look at that moment. But this twenty-five year old guy hanging at the bar, he wanted to help me out. And he suggested, "it might be The Fall, or possibly The Alarm, but I don't think it's The Fixx”.  Now, being a rock critic and having come of age as a rock fan during the Eighties, those three bands don't seem like they'd be capable of being confused with each other at all. But it was also very obviously, to my ears, a 70’s sounding song. You could tell by the production, the style of playing -- it was pre-punk.  Old Wave. That struck me, the fact that for this young person who clearly knew quite a bit about music -- he'd heard The Fall, at any rate - the history of rock could be jumbled up like that.

"Then the barman came back and he still didn't know but he'd managed to find out that it was from the soundtrack to Goodfellas . And then it clicked, it was the soundtrack to that exciting sequence of scenes when Liotta's character is coked-out and frantic  -- the paranoia and the pasta sauce and the helicopters overhead.  The song was the song that wasn't The Stones, "Monkey Man" -- it was the other song. But I still didn't know what it was. Later I found out it was Nilssen, 'Jump Into the Fire". So definitely pre-punk. 1971, in fact.

"In Rip It Up, there is a strong differentiation between music in ’78, ’79, ’80, '81. But I lived through that sequence, through the big changes that happened each year, the memory of that is still vivid to me, the distinctions very real.  I think young people now hear stuff from so many eras at once all jumbled up, those distinctions don't matter to them. All that is unrecoverable, the sense of historical sequence.

"Its fascinating to me.  It's actually something I’d like to write a book on – time, nostalgia, timelessness… "

Retro Active: Longing for cycling’s golden era -"Steve Hall looks at why the bicycle is both a rejection of the modern and an embrace of a disappearing set of values"

Inside the print edition of the new issue of The Point, there's a superb essay on Retromania by Ben Jeffery.  Online there's an excerpt from the essay plus a dialogue between me and Ben about music criticism.

"Not wishing to resurrect some ancient notion of creativity ex nihilo, but underlying and unifying all the above, I sense a tendency towards entropy: indistinctness, inertia, ultimately indifference. Whether it's good (Since I Left You) or bad (most bootlegs), what we're witnessing is the kind of sonic grand bouffe only possible during a late era. Could it be that the age of retro-mania / file-sharing / sampladelia--where time has effectively been abolished--enables us to use the abundance of the past to obscure the failings and lacks of the present? Well, it's a thought..."

The germ of Retromania?  That was written in early 2002, for Unfaves of 2001 (it's in the section called "Lameness on the Horizon",  about mashups, or as they were called then, bootlegs / "bastard pop")

Well, it's one of the germs--these questions have been a back-of-the-mind preoccupation for ever, really, and sporadically a front-of-the-mind preoccupation for a really long time too.

In fact I discovered recently that the working title for a piece I wrote in the early Nineties (pegged to the launch of mags like Mojo and Vox, but also dealing with reissue-mania, reformations, etc) was actually "Retromania". But the Guardian went with something else as the headline.

^^^^^^^^^^^

I suppose I do sort of wish to resurrect some ancient notion of creativity ex nihilo

Or at least, I'd rather not unilaterally abandon the idea... I don't quite get the appeal of dancing on its grave with merry abandon, proclaiming good riddance to bad rubbish, and  it was only ever  a myth in the first place, and an oppressive myth that's "holding us back"

The talk I did in Central Europe was a kind of remix of the Slate piece on recreativity plus elements on the all-new chapter  I did for the Ventil Verlag edition of Retromania plus other stuff that occurred to me since. And one of the ironies I pointed out was that :

The old-fashioned ideology of innovation/originality/genius remains the best way of encouraging people to produce new-fashioned music

Whereas the (allegedly) new-fashioned notions of "everything's a remix/we use the old to make the new/"even the Beatles were derivative, were retro", these are a sure-fire route to fostering old-fashioned-music,  old-fashioned anything...  they are propaganda in favour of underachievement

(Actually, my further point was that these seemingly cool, latest-thing, trendy, hot-off-the-academic press ideas about appropriation/quotation/"unoriginal genius", etc are in fact rather aged themselves -- you could in fact just as easily talk about old-fashioned postmodernism as you could of old-fashioned modernism)

Which mindset gets the best results, that's the question, I think...

Choose your illusion, the most useful delusion...


^^^^^^^^^^^

Speaking of  "time has effectively been abolished"...

Here's an interesting interview Bruce Sterling did about atemporality with Renata Lemos-Morais

Retromania tour Mittel Europa updated information

Oktober 16 to 26, the Retromania tour takes in 11 cities across Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Luxembourg. Here's the schedule with more information on times and venue addresses. Please note the Munich event has moved to a different venue.
The events involve a new talk + readings from the book + Q/A with the audience.

16. Oktober: Berlin, Festsaal Kreuzber, 20-30 Uhr 
skalitzerstr. 130, 10999 berlin

tel  +49 30-61656003 www.festsaal-kreuzberg.de

                                                           

17. Oktober: Hamburg, Golem, 20.15 Uhr

Große Elbstraße 14, S-Bahn Reeperbahn (Ausgang Nobistor)

 www.golem.kr

18. Oktober: Köln, King Georg Klubbar, 21 Uhr 
Sudermanstraße 2, 50670 Köln,
www.kinggeorg.de 

with Olaf Karnik
                                       

19. Oktober: St. Gallen, Palace St.Gallen,20.00 uhr doors/21.30 event 
Zwinglistr. 3, 9000 St.Gallen, 

tel: + 41 71 222 21 23  www.palace.sg) 

after the talk, the Nightingales perform

20. Oktober: München, Milla, evening (info tk)
^^^^note: event at a different (and larger) venue than previously listed^^^

Milla, holzstr. 28
info: shop.optimal-records.de

with support from  a band comprising ralf summer (zündfunk), didi neidhart (skug/vorwort der deutschen ausgaben) und christos (optimal-records)

21. Oktober: Wien, Phil, 20.00 Uhr 
Gumpendorfer Straße 10-12
www.phil.info

22. Oktober: Wels, Alter Schlachthof Wels, evening (info tk)

Dragonerstraße 22, 4600 Wels

Tel: +43 (0) 7242 67284

www.youki.at) 

23. Oktober: Nürnberg, Musikverein,einlass: 20 uhr / beginn: 20:30 uhr 
festsaal im künstlerhaus (k4), königstr. 93, 90402 

www.musikverein-concerts.de

24. Oktober: Marburg, Trauma, evening (info tk) 
Affoellerwiesen 3a
www.cafetrauma.de

25. Oktober: Frankfurt, Orange Peel, 8.30 uhr

Orange Peel

Kaiserstraße 39  

www.orange-peel.de

talk + dialogue with Klaus Walter

26. Oktober: Luxemburg, Exit07,  evening (info tk)
1, rue de l'Aciere
www.rotondes.lu)

Retromania translator Chris Wilpert will be present for all but the last date of the tour. 

Retromania is out now on Ventil Verlag 

 

at SPIN online, Marc Hogan finds "5 Signs of Retromania" in SoundScan's 2012 Mid-Year Report

the short version

1. Vinyl and Digital Album Sales Increased. Vinyl went up by 14.2 per cent.

2. This Year's Only Million-Selling Album Came Out Last Year. .ie. Adele's 21 . And it's retro-soul.

3. The Top Three Non-Adele Albums Were By Lionel Richie, Whitney Houston, and a Boy Band. LR's Tuskegee sold nearly a million.


4. The Best-Selling Vinyl Album Was the Vinyliest of the Vinyl. i.e Jack White's  Blunderbuss, followed closely by Black Keys's El Camino.

5. The Most-Streamed Digital Song Was the Viralest of the Viral. Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe"  -- I don't get why this is a sign of retromania, to be honest. 

^^^^^^^^^^

 

in other retro-y news:

 

MTV's Retro Mania slot includes Daria (proper 90s alt-nostalgia), but also programs as recent as The Hills. 

 

That Rock of Ages Eighties-hair-metal/Sunset-Strip-nostalgia-mining jukebox musical got turned into a movie

People have written that I coined this word "retromania", but that's not the case.

I've seen vintage clothes boutiques and retro bric-a-bric shops with  the name
Retromania.

There is also a Def Leppard bootleg that came out in 2010 called Retromania, what looks like a collection of rarities and alternate takes, the title obviously a play on Pyromania. (The band also officially released a rarities/B-sides collection in 1993 called Retro Active).

So the word has been floating around for a while. However I did recently discover, when going through some old pieces of mine, that I wrote a piece in the early Nineties whose working title was "Retromania" (it ended up being printed, by the Guardian, under another headline). But even then I think I was just picking up on a word that was in the air. As coinages go, it's a pretty obvious, occurs-to-many-people-independently type word.

But in other Def Leppard news, I learn (via Marathonpacks) that the group are doing a Gang of Four/Return the Gift and are recording forgeries of old hits like "Pour Some Sugar On Me" and "Rock of Ages", in order to get back at the Universal Music Group, who own their catalogue. Full story at Billboard.

Joe Elliott explained that the dispute is over proper compensation for digital rights (which has resulted in a deadlock where none of Leppard's studio albums are currently available as downloads)

"When you're at loggerheads with an ex-record label who...is not prepared to pay you a fair amount of money and we have the right to say, 'Well, you're not doing it,' that's the way it's going to be. Our contract is such that they can't do anything with our music without our permission, not a thing. So we just sent them a letter saying, 'No matter what you want, you are going to get "no" as an answer, so don't ask.' That's the way we've left it. We'll just replace our back catalog with brand new, exact same versions of what we did."

Shades of Borges!

 And it's challenging too:

"You just don't go in and say, 'Hey guys, let's record it,' and it's done in three minutes. We had to study those songs, I mean down to the umpteenth degree of detail, and make complete forgeries of them. Time-wise it probably took as long to do as the originals, but because of the technology it actually got done quicker as we got going. But trying to find all those sounds...like where am I gonna find a 22-year-old voice? I had to sing myself into a certain throat shape to be able to sing that way again. It was really hard work, but it was challenging, and we did have a good laugh over it here and there."

But that is not the limit of Leppard's retro action"

"Elliott... is also working on a second album of Mott The Hoople-related covers with the Down 'n' Outz, his side-band project with members of the Quireboys that he expects to release in 2013."

A second album of Mott covers?!

I knew Leppard were obsessed with glam 'n ' glitter

They did this rather decent and intelligent version of David Essex's "Rock On" a while ago