A megamix of thoughts from interviews done for the foreign editions of Futuromania
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The name Futuromania is a playful twist on Retromania. Its contents – essays celebrating various forms of electronic music from the early 1970s to almost the present - offer a corrective to the gloomy tone of that book. In another sense, Futuromania help to explain the kind of expectations about music, and the hopes invested in music, that might lead someone to write a disappointed book like Retromania, a critique of stagnation in modern music that now seems to me like an emotional history of the 2000s.
The full title of the book is Futuromania: Electronic
Dreams, Desiring Machines and Tomorrow’s Music Today. But it isn’t about
where music is going, about how it’s likely to develop going forward. Prophecy is a fool’s game, when it comes to
music. Rather, it’s a collection of pieces about music that felt to its makers
and its fans, at that particular point in history, to be a sonic glimpse of the
future. Vanguard genres and heroic innovators
whose discoveries eventually get accepted by the wider mass audience. It’s also about the way music can stir
anticipation for a thrillingly transformed world just around the corner: a
future that might be utopian or dystopian, but at least will be radically
changed and exhilaratingly other.
But just like with science fiction novels and films, “sonic
fiction” is really a reflection of contemporary anxieties or desires. Ideas
about “the future” tell us far more
about the present in which they’re formulated, as opposed to predicting accurately
what is going to happen in the chronological future.
In the book, then, I’m exploring the interface
between pop music and science fiction’s utopian dreams and nightmare visions.
But there’s a consistent emphasis on the quirky human individuals abusing the
technology as much as the era-defining advances in electronic hardware and
digital software. Partly that comes
through having doing books on postpunk and glam rock, where my imagination was
captured by the stories of heroic individuals struggling to do adventurous and
subversive things with music, often in challenging circumstances.
Whereas back in the ‘90s when I first wrote about electronic dance music, ultimately feeding into my book Energy Flash, my focus tended to be on genres and subcultures. I was reading a lot of French theory suffused with what’s been called “The Antihumanist Tone” – a tendency to depersonalize and to see the world as governed by abstract impersonal forces, and to take an almost perverse ideological pleasure in downplaying the role of human agency.
So I would write about jungle or
gabber almost as if these genres had a kind of purposive sentience, like they were
evolving according to their own agenda, hurtling into the future and carrying
both the music’s makers and the ravers dancing along with it. That’s why the phrase “desiring machines” is
in Futuromania’s subtitle – a nod to Gilles Deleuxe and Felix Guattari.
As well as theorists like Deleuze & Guattari
and Paul Virilio, there was a lot of cybertheory around in the 1990s which had
the same sort of vibe: this feeling that we are heading into a posthuman
future, leaving behind recognizably human emotions and maybe even ultimately
transcending the “meat” of our embodied existence. Like many others, I was fascinated by these
sort of ideas, reading magazines like Mondo 2000 and theorists like
Arthur Kroker and Donna Haraway. I found
a similar sort of depersonalized intensity in the delirious writings of the Cybernetic
Culture Research Unit, the renegade theory collective out of which emerged figures
like Mark Fisher (K-punk) and Steve Goodman (Kode9, founder of Hyperdub etc).
But I have different perspective on it now. Partly I’m
influenced by life – seeing children grow up, while other beloved people die.
You become more conscious of the uniqueness of each human personality. But the
other change has been a growing conviction that digital technology and the internet
hasn’t really radically transformed humanity.
Some years ago, I was very struck watching The Social Network,
the movie about Facebook. At that time, I had been watching a TV drama set in
Ancient Rome just a century or so after the birth of Christ. And watching the
Social Network, I realized that if you altered the details. the essential plot – or at least the
motivations of the characters – would fit perfectly into the world of Rome – it
would be completely recognizable to people 2000 years ago. Because it’s all
about power, glory, money, betrayal. The actual motivations that fuel Facebook
and social media in general are similarly rooted in things like status, vanity,
attracting the opposite sex, clique-ishness…. but also loneliness and the need
for connection. Wasn’t Facebook started, or at least germinated, through
Zuckerberg being rejected by a girl?
Since that film came out, so many subsequent developments
with the internet and social media –
everything from influencers to memes to deepfakes - have confirmed my feeling that human nature
hasn’t fundamentally altered. Technology is just the ever-changing arena in
which all these abiding, all-too-human emotions - id-energies and ego-motives - find
expression. Even AI is just another
tool, its “intelligence” sourced in the human databank and its potentials
mostly deployed for dark ends - profit and power. AI is the servant of human
ambition.
The thing about that phrase “desiring machines” is that
machines themselves don’t have desires or goals or intentions or will –
technology is a product of human desire. Machines themselves are fetishized
objects of human desire, often because they seem to give us god-like powers.
The machines allow artists to pursue their creative desires and fantasies and
perhaps achieve other worldly desires too (for status, fame, wealth).
The machines aren’t taking over…. certain people are
using them to further their own ends, whether creatively, or in terms of
politics. Certain human beings are
taking over, using machines as weapons or superhuman powers.
But going back to the music…. One paradox
that emerges with electronic music as it develops is that “futuristic” becomes
a fixed style with certain sonic and rhythmic associations – cold, glossy synth
textures… mechanistic rhythms… the absence of “human touch” in the sense of hands-on playing of
instrument… But by the 21st
Century this was already a well-established, cliched idea of “future music”,
with a long history behind it. It was something that could be reinvoked and
harked back to – hence the rise of retro-futurism.
One response, or at least a different path, that we saw in
the 2010s, was the rise of a kind of
digital abjection – electronics sounds that are maculate, oozing,
disintegrative. You got this from artists like Arca. But this style too has
forebears: the gnarly, slimy, gross and grotesque noises made by industrial
groups like Throbbing Gristle and Skinny Puppy.
There is a counter-tradition in electronic music that is the opposite of
sterile and shiny. Indeed I would see
many of the artists that I wrote about under the conceptronica banner, like
Arca, Chino Amobi, and Amnesia Scanner, as having more in common with
industrial music than dance music – it’s content-heavy, at times didactic music
that often involves an assaultive, confrontational aesthetic.
Futuromania covers
everything from first-wave industrial, Kraftwerk, and Giorgio Moroder’s
electronic Eurodisco sound to the Auto-Tuned rap of the 2010s, via dub reggae,
synthpop, acid house, jungle, grime, gabber, footwork…. I also have essays on
the science fiction movie soundtrack and
on science fiction writers’s attempts to imagine music of the future.
I guess what links it all is my own
futuromania: being addicted to this sensation that certain music gives off. It’s
not necessarily “futuristic” in the obvious and now cliched ways I was talking
about, it could be radical or innovative in some other way – but there’s a
feeling that it’s part of a music culture that is moving forward. And I’m being
carried along with it, propelled into a wide-open space. A world that will
be radically different in feeling from
the present. The sound of the music itself is like the herald, or promise, or even preview, of a different reality. And it
might also have futuristic themes in the lyrics or the artist’s image and
record artwork. But often it doesn’t – it’s just the sound itself that feels
like it’s a glimpse of tomorrow.
This future-buzz is related to
those sort of adolescent feelings of restlessness and discontent with the
banality that surrounds you – the music provides escape and energy, in a
similar way to science fiction novels, comic books, videogames. Science fiction
has historically connected with a certain lineage through pop music -
psychedelia, glam, postpunk, synthpop, electro, rave. Music’s science fiction
fiends include Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, Human League, Goldie, Missy Elliott,
and Daft Punk, to name just a few. With the books, the films, the music, there
are these same desires for mutation and disruption, wonderment and disorientation. In his study of science fiction Archeologies
of the Future, the theorist Fredric Jameson talks about “the desire called
utopia”. Perhaps there is a displacement of energies that could and should go
into politics and the long hard slog towards change. But music and s.f. both provide
instant results: you’re taken out of your current situation and into a changed reality
right away.
4 FUTUROMANIAC MOMENTS
This stands in for the entire genre of acid house, which was
a sound that seemed to come out of nowhere and involved the uncovering of
potentialities in a piece of technology, the Roland 303, that the manufacturer
had not been aware of. Listening to acid house, it felt like a completely
posthuman or beyond-human sound, expressing the emotions that might be felt by
a black hole or a sub-atomic particle. Of course, I love the name Phuture –
spelled with a “ph” to make it seem more futuristic, I guess!
Metalheads -
“Terminator”, 1992.
Hardcore rave turning into darkside jungle, this tune by
Goldie and a couple of his comrades involved what I called “rhythmic
psychedelia” – the use of pitch-shifting to make the beats feel like they were
speeding up, even as they stayed in tempo.
The main device Goldie was using was a machine called the Eventide
Harmonizer – earlier used by David Bowie on Low and by the postpunk
group This Heat. Where Phuture indicated
their awareness of their own futurity by calling themselves Phuture, in the
case of Goldie’s track the idea comes through in the concept – and conceit – of
the title: like the killer cyborg in Terminator, this track has arrived from
the future. There’s a sample from Sara
Connor taken from the movie saying “you’re talking about things I haven’t done
yet”.
I love the fact he calls himself Future (and also sometimes
Future Hendrix, showing he knows he’s part of a lineage of black innovators
that includes Jimi). The artist name makes a nice circle with Phuture. This
record awoke me to the resurgence of Auto-Tune as a creative tool. There was a
whole wave of AutoTuned trap music on
the radio in the late 2010s that requickened my interest in pop – artists like
Migos, Playboi Carti, Young Thug, Travis Scott. In some ways, Migos went the
furthest out: tracks like “T-Shirt”, “Bosses Don’t Speak”, “Motorsport”, “Top
Down on Da Nawf” use Auto-Tune to turn the human voice into a quivering alien
jelly. In “MotorSport” Offset describes
himself as “no human being, I’m immortal’ and the non-verbal gurgles and moans
he and Quavo emit do seem to come from some astral zone.
SOPHIE – “Faceshopping”, 2018.
Although the track alone sounds amazing, in combination with its video “Faceshopping” represents the audio-visual totality that is modern electronic music. In some ways, it relates even more to my glam book: it’s a consummate work of 21st Century digi-glam. Formally, in terms of the hyper-glossy yet warped sounds and the video with its deconstruction and reconstruction of the posthuman visage. But also thematically, in terms of the concept of “faceshopping” and the commentary on social media and how we present a kind of “flat” 2-dimensional image to the world that has increasingly been digitally enhanced. There’s a contradiction between a love of the theatrical presentation of the self as this glamorous super-creature, versus a belief in authenticity, which is always weakness and vulnerability and damage. The sound palette in Sophie plays around with this tension between immaculate and maculate: shiny contoured sounds versus abject noises and shredding beats that seem to flagellate the listener. “Faceshopping” is a literally stunning – the sheer audio-visual assault of it - commentary on today’s “Instaglam” culture of artifice and self-selling. About the gap, the fissure, between the selfie and the real self, the fact that the song's stance feels undecidable, neither critique nor celebration, is part of the power.
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