WWMFD
I don't generally like to write about annoying things on the internet, but I want to make an exception because this particular instance patched into something else which annoyed me on the internet.
There's a bad piece in Jacobin about how rock is back, the nails are in the coffin of poptimism, and it's all bound up in the 2016 election. I'll leave it to others to pick apart the relative merits of poptimism vs rockism. My own take is a pox on both houses. The whole debate is a rubric designed for a bygone age, which is no small irony given what I'm going to spend the bulk of this post on. As it turns out, every artist is starving and there's no unsullied form of artistic expression left, nothing pure to point to. And, in any event, conspicuously left out of the pro-rock angle of the article is Poison, the execrable late era Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, and a whole host of rock bands who the early punk rockers were mostly worried about (see Paul Gilroy's "Rhythm in the Force of Forces" for a first-hand account of just how unworried the late 70s punkers were about the purity of their rock as they hung out with dancehall, reggae, and dance musicians).
A bit of throat clearing. I owe Jacobin a lot. My first two pieces were there. I did several more, pieces I'm proud of. I defend Jacobin quite often, but something badly wrong seems to have happened to their quality control. There are still some thought provoking and thoughtful pieces there, but they're increasingly sandwiched between simply "provoking" pieces. This is one of them.
What I want to take direct aim at is the author's misuse of Mark Fisher. Right out of the gate, he invokes Fisher's work on hauntology and Capitalist Realism to scaffold his argument:
This isn’t to say it was bad music just because it drew from older styles. Much of it was good, even excellent. Retro-ness had a darker side, though, what cultural critic Mark Fisher identified as a melancholic component, as if certain artists were not just remembering the glory days but finding themselves “haunted” by a “future just out of reach.” For Fisher, this backward turn was a testament to the “slow cancellation of the future,” the death of a meaningful alternative to capitalism.
Skipping ahead two paragraphs:
Retromania is definitely back, as new artists produce atmospheric, churning hardcore and other sounds of a bygone musical age. A survey of contemporary rock music shows artists aren’t just searching for old-school musical inspiration, let alone mourning history’s lost relics. Instead, they are producing music that is vital and relevant to life in the 2020s.
The author continues, eventually citing The Strokes' resurgence as a marker of rock's renewed vitality and eternal relevance. All of which makes for an inexplicable use of Fisher. He hated indie rock. Want to know how I know? Because he said so, mostly using The Strokes' contemporaries, The Arctic Monkeys (rather ironically, the last big Manchester band to be signed to Fisher's beloved Factory Records), as his go-to example of rock's stasis:
The thing about retro is very interesting because there have been retro groups for a long time, certainly at least as far back as the early ’70s, but the thing is at least then they were positioned as retro. Whereas something like the Arctic Monkeys, there is no relation to historicity. They’re clearly a retro group, but the category of retro doesn’t make any sense anymore because it’s retro compared to what? ...
... I don’t think Burial can get us out of it. Nobody could get us out of this. But it is to do with an awareness of time I think. Whereas Arctic Monkeys airbrush cultural time out and appeal to this endless return and timelessness of rock, for me what’s significant about Burial is a relationship to the near past, a relationship to what Simon Reynolds called the hardcore continuum of the British dance music underground – passing from jungle to garage to 2-step.
I added the bold for what I think are the most salient points. 2000s indie rock represented a hollow substitute for the churn of Fisher's youth. Retro, yes, but retro compared to what? And here he specifically calls out any essentializing of the "endless return and timelessness" of rock. While Fisher wasn't a poptimist, the notion that he offers any succor to the rockist camp is simply ludicrous. I'll leave the actual eternal return in the piece being the 2016 election and not rock as self-evident weirdness. Phantom limb politics.
Which gets me to the real nub of this post: Fisher is endlessly used and misused for whatever axe people have to grind. I don't know that I've seen a contemporary critic so endlessly revived in strange ways like this. What's strangest is that it's almost always a misuse. The man was very plain about his politics and artistic preferences, yet there's always something garbled. Fisher must always be lionized (as in the Jacobin piece) or demonized, never anything in between.
As an example of the opposite impulse, when Russell Brand recently went viral for his fumbling attempt to find a favorite verse in his crisp, new Bible, discourse about Fisher's (bad) Vampire Castle essay burbled back up. This happens every now and then, but now it's paired with other things: he was in the CCRU with Nick Land and Nina Power, so surely he would be an anti-trans techno-fascist like them. And he would surely be at Brand's side right now. Surely. Surely.
It's maddening. On the one hand, a secular intellectual saint to be invoked as proof of seriousness. On the other, a secular demon made of pure misogyny. In the darkest of ironies, Fisher has become the 21st century's Ian Curtis, lead singer of his (and my) beloved Joy Division. Both dead by their own hands, both a mix of unrealized potential and never to be done future acts, overrated by some, underrated by others, tragic figures who were both more and less than what they appeared to be, legendary perhaps only through the tragedy of their suicides. But also perhaps not.
This is the thing. You don't know what he'd end up doing. I don't either. Nobody does. He's dead. What we have are the (copious) words he actually wrote. The best critiques of his work are the ones which engage with them, which aren't speculative about the awful things he would've done in 2026 or which so lionize him that they pluck him from the context of those words to make rote arguments about everything sucking now but, in the proximate cause for this post, we might make it because "rock is awesome". Fisher can say, did say, that he's not attached to any formal nostalgia for his youth and is instead interested in what conditions of possibility allowed for formal artistic foment and people will dismiss him as a hopeless nostalgic. In the interview I quoted above, he says art alone can't save us, yet rock's revival is heralded as the death of Clintonian politics. These are bizarre, ultimately bankrupt ways of engaging with anyone's work.
Em Colquhoun, who writes an awful lot about Fisher's work, has it best, and I encourage you to read her entire piece on the Vampire Castle, with her assessment of the underread things Fisher wrote to correct what he realized was a mistake and where to actually place his work:
That is the travesty of its impact on Mark’s reputation after his death. One grumpy essay blocks him inside two caricatures — anti-feminist or cancel-culture warrior. Both appear moronic when taking into account his whole life and work. That doesn’t make Fisher perfect or beyond critique — no one is — but like so many other brilliant thinkers at our disposal, with complicated lives filled with successes and failures, we can still use and reflect upon his work anyway. That is to say, we can use his work by thinking with and through it. It’s a task that requires a philosophical ethics — not simply a thoughtful ethics but an ethics of thought; a guiding principle that shines a light but doesn’t necessarily lead the way. That’s the difference between ethics and morals, for me. That’s the difference between enlightenment and being blinded.
Who is right, who can tell and who gives a damn right now?
