Part One
Part Two
Part Three

“We should have another quarantine where nobody dies.”

“Yeah, where everyone’s locked-in.”

— Jane Remover and d9lton

To counter the acceleration of networks and circuits the world will seek slowness, inertia. In the same movement, however, it will seek something more rapid than communication: the challenge, the duel. On the one side, inertia and silence. On the other, challenge and the duel.

— Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication

I threw my phone into the sea…

— Porter Robinson, ‘Knock Yourself Out XD’

Coda

A culture shift, but also a considerable vibe shift…

Still in London for a few more days, Byro takes me to see Porter Robinson at Brixton Academy. Support comes from underscores, who we blogged about together last year, flirting obliquely, nurturing a romance that spread from comments to DMs to posts to the IRL.

I was new to the worlds of six impala, dariacore, digicore and the other vectors of a post-hyperpop generation back then, but have found myself exploring their depths over the nine months since.

Byro makes a sign to celebrate the full-circle moment. Since we are seated so far back, we don’t end up unfurling it, but the fact we’re there together is enough.

The whole time, laughing together on the Victoria line and into the night, with all the thoughts that have made up this series so far still percolating, I have snippets from a recent podcast with Jane Remover and d9lton going ‘round and around in my head… “We made it off the Discord!”

“The Internet’s where home’s at”

“For my birthday, I plan on making a video, like, ranking every year of my life, and I think 2020 is an S-tier…”

“Lowkey, yeah.”

“I just really feel like it was so fire.”

“Yeah, I feel like it was like a net-negative for the world, but like, I think, like, for the individual… If you know what I mean…”

“I was starting to feel ashamed of, like, being on the Internet all the time, but when Covid struck is when it became the lit thing, and when I reconnected with everyone, like we’re on Discord until, like, 3am, and I’m meeting new people, and [there’s] things like e-festivals. I’m like, nah, this is home, this is home base, I know where home’s at, the Internet’s where home’s at.”

“I feel like 2020 was such a formative year. Whether you like it or not… Like, I know some people didn’t have a good 2020. Me personally, I feel like 2020 was, like, the most important year of my life, probably… Now that it’s, like, 2025, and it’s like, I feel far removed from it, in a sense where it’s like, I don’t really know how to use Discord anymore, you know? Like, I don’t join VCs… I’m actually, like, scared of VCs… But now it’s like… I don’t wanna say ‘nostalgia’, cos nostalgia feels like… Saying the word ‘nostalgia’ feels like acid coming down your throat… It’s a fond memory.”

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This has been the hardest part in this series to write, because I have been attempting the near-impossible task of not sounding old… But it is hard to avoid the fact that my experiences of the early pandemic were very different to those younger than me.

It’s actually pretty funny, thinking back on it. In 2020, I was newly 27. At the end of the previous year, my first book had been announced and gone to print. Thinking it would be too performative to keep up my online anonymity, I threw off four years of facelessness and published under my own name. Events were soon organised and I hardly wanted to talk about the book in person whilst wearing a mask or something, MF Doom style – although the thought had crossed my mind…

I flew to Berlin to speak at the January 2020 edition of CTM Festival in Berlin, somehow keeping my cool when I got there, looking out on a sea of faces, many of which belonged to artists I recognised and loved. I could get used to this, I thought, flying back to London 24 hours later, feeling completely wrecked after a night in Berghain – but I never did. On March 10th, I spent the whole day being interviewed for an unreleased Mark Fisher documentary, before speaking to Kodwo Eshun on stage at a sold-out event at the ICA. The day ended drunk, brain-fogged, and paranoid about the virus in some crowded Soho club. I felt the overwhelm start to chip away at something.

One week later, newly un-anon’d and ready to face the world, we all went inside for a year and life was more online than it had ever been before…

The period of time between Mark Fisher’s death and Covid was such a pressure cooker — those were undoubtedly the most formative years of my life thus far — but the difficulty of the last 2/3 years post-lockdown has been figuring out how to not get stuck there and reinvent myself now that every single thing about my existence on this planet has irrevocably changed.

It’s been an uphill battle and I’ve recounted the particulars on here many times before — too often, probably, but I’ve yet to neatly resolve these experiences. The repetitious going-over of everything is probably a lingering trauma response, since I still can’t narrativize the weirdness of those wilderness years — and clearly not for lack of trying. The Internet was home before 2020, and then I wanted to get away from it but couldn’t, and now I don’t know if it’s home or not. It is, as it has always been, undecidedly unheimlich.

Extracting the digiCore

Enter a loose group of artists who have not been so stricken by self-consciousness on the other side of the pandemic…

Who am I talking about? They’re a difficult group to categorise. Jane Remove, six impala, underscores, Porter Robinson (tangentially), and a legion of anon Soundcloud producers making digicore, dariacore, hyperpop, jersey club – whatever you want to call it…

Jane Remover is the lodestar; her output in particular, over the last few years, has been astounding. Her summer 2024 singles — ‘Flash in the Pan’, ‘Dream Sequence’, ‘Magic I Want U’, ‘How to Teleport’ — were on constant rotation for me, soundtracking the early days of a love affair. But I was surprised to hear that she’d trashed the whole album in favour of something(s) more ‘herself’ — that is, in all of her fragmentary and unstable glory.

So far in 2025, they have released two singles for a wholly new record called Revengeseekerz, which grab a life offline by the throat — ‘JRJRJR’ and ‘Dancing with your eyes closed’. But Remover’s year began with something very different: Ghostholding, an album released under her venturing alias.

The latter was initially a hyperstitional, memoradelic shoegaze-y project that sought to manifest a discography for a non-existent band “formed in small-town Britton, South Dakota (pop. 1,215) … active from 1990 to 2002”; a kind of midwestern Memorial Device that “consisted of the fictional members Melanie (vocals), Fawn (guitar), Daisy (guitar), Barney (bass), and Steve (drums)”. It is fascinating to have an artist invent a record that… How do I even put this, whilst holding onto some kind of sense?… A record that anachronistically conjures up and invents one of her own influences…?

The record was prepped to slip into the convoluted streams of a time-spiral, but with its release, the message from Jane now is “no more lore”; it is no longer an album aping the Internet’s resurgent fascination with ‘lost media’. “This is just a Jane Remover album now under a different name … I didn’t feel like telling a story anymore”. It is likely the album I’ve listened to most so far this year, eagerly awaiting whatever is coming next. Her productivity boggles my brain (and that’s coming from someone whose productively has a tendency to boggle everyone else).

In the aforementioned podcast interview, Jane explains that the album she originally intended to release was so good that it was likely to jettison her into the pop stratosphere — a claim that doesn’t sound implausible, going by last summer’s singles. Wavering, however, and considering whether this was something they really wanted, she instead opted to carry a certain facelessness forward into the IRL.

I’m reminded of the slippery, fragmentary, multiplicitous identities of early Eminem, discussed in Part 3: Mark Fisher’s 2001 ode to a “dramaturgical proliferation of personae, or simpersonae”; the “seething population of virtual selves, fictional potentials given actualization”; the “revelling in ontological confusion and implex, whose deep schizophrenic truth is that there is no truth but the version, that there is no transcendence.” But whereas Eminem played with a series of masks within the confines of hip-hop as a genre, it is genre itself that becomes a plaything for Jane and those around her. They emerge from lockdown bedrooms not as fully formed artists, ready to take over the world, but as legion, each already multiple, riding the countless waves of schizo-frenetic productivity and experimentation, no pronoun preference, scrambling every code.

Bedroom Culture (redux)

“Girl culture starts and finishes in the bedroom” was the sociological mantra that sought to make sense of all cultural engagement that begins at home.

In their seminal 1976 essay, ‘Girls and Subcultures’, Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber write about the overt attention given to boys in the subcultural research of the mid-twentieth century, noting the “absence of girls from the whole of the literature in this area”. “When they do appear, it is either in ways which uncritically reinforce the stereotypical image of women with which we are now so familiar”. McRobbie and Garber instead begin to wonder how we are “to understand this invisibility.”

A faceless feminine is materially obscured by “the crucial dimension of sex and gender structuring”, they argue. Beginning in the 1950s, McRobbie and Garber observe that the subcultural options pursued by boys are the result of “the structuring effect of class”, but no less so for girls, whose positioning in different subcultures of the time “may be, not marginally, but structurally different”, since “their ‘involvement’ was sustained by a complementary, but different sub-cultural pattern.”

Whereas masculinist subcultures take to the streets and cafes and pubs, a feminine undercurrent engages in experimental practices that are unscene. “There was room for a good deal of the new teenage consumer culture within the ‘culture of the bedroom'”, McRobbie and Garber argue: “experimenting with make-up, listening to records, reading the mags, sizing up the boyfriends, chatting, jiving”. You know, girlie things… But these examples are only the beginning, the seeds of new forms of cultural tinkering and patriarchal resistance: make-up experiments as subcultural camouflage; listening to records as an immersion in more private sound-worlds; reading the mags to keep an eye to the outside; sizing up the boyfriends as an analysis of patriarchy; chat as knowledge exchange; dance as body autonomy… The boys don’t know what’s about to hit ’em.

Before long, a series of bridges emerge between the underground for girls and the overground for boys. First, subcultures shift from rough-and-tumble Teddy Boy gangs, renowned for their knife violence, to Mod culture — no less ready to go to war against the Rockers, but also “a ‘softer’ working-class subculture … in which girls did much more openly and directly participate”. Next, a middle-class Hippie subculture featured women and girls even more prominently, no doubt owing to the concomitant Sexual Revolution that the Hippies remain associated with. Then came “the growth … of ‘Unisex’ styles”, and “the rise, within the pop industry itself, of the deliberately ‘feminine’, camp, or bi- and trans-sexual singer and star”, like David Bowie most famously.

McRobbie and Garber conclude: “We feel that when the dimension of sexuality is included in the study of youth subculture, girls can be seen to be negotiating a different space, offering a different type of resistance to what can at least in part be viewed as their sexual subordination.” But all of this nonetheless hinges on more expansive forms of pop-cultural representation. Participation is still judged on visibility. If you want to join our scene, first let me see your bedroom…

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A few decades later, cyberculture becomes all the more closely associated with the invisibility of the feminine. Sadie Plant’s Zeroes + Ones remains the most invigorating overview of a countercultural history of women’s technocultural resistance in this regard. It beings with the following:

Those were the days, when we were all at sea. It seems like yesterday to me. Species, sex, race, class: in those days none of this meant anything at all. No parents, no children, just ourselves, strings of inseparable sisters, warm and wet, indistinguishable one from the other, gloriously indiscriminate, promiscuous and fused. No generations. No future, no past. An endless geographic plane of micromeshing pulsing quanta, limbless webs of interacting blendings, leakings, mergings, weaving through ourselves, running rings around each other, heedless, needless, aimless, careless, thoughtless, amok. Folds and foldings, plying and multiplying, plicating and replicating. We had no definition, no meaning, no way of telling each other apart. We were whatever we were up to at the time. Free exchanges, microprocesses finely tuned, polymorphous transfers without regard for borders and boundaries. There was nothing to hang on to, nothing to be grasped, nothing to protect or be protected from. Insides and outsides did not count. We gave no thought to any such things. We.gave no thought to anything at all. Everything was there for the taking then. We paid no attention: it was all for free. It had been this way for tens, thousands, millions, billions of what were later defined as years. If we had thought about it, we would have said it would go on forever, this fluent, fluid world.

The indeterminacy of this opening paragraph is already so provocative. It seems to be Plant’s description of a kind of state of unnature; formless, unrepresentable, feminine soup. Then access to a solidarity without solidity is revoked by masculine power. A blackout begins, before the ‘net opens up new egresses to a space that is out from under the shadow of a towering Phallus.

When the desktop computer finds its place in the corner of the family living room, and later in the teenage bedroom, the scrambling of codes once confined to domestic privacy leaks out into the ether(net). The subordinating polarity of binary gender is reversed, and only partially eroded.

The Internet today has arguably become increasingly rigid, relative to its fluid beginnings, where old binaries struggle to reassert themselves, unable to retain their desired stasis for long on a quantum plane. This stasis isn’t only the product of a manosphere that attempts to colonise all visible terrain, however; it finds its corollary in wilful dissenters who claim that, today, “everyone is a girl online”.

Alex Quicho:

As a term, “girl” is polarizing: feared for how tightly it connects youth and desire, reviled for its infantilizing, passivity-inducing properties. On the face of it, girlishness is simply dismissed as being frivolous, immature, unmasculine, disempowering, reductive. At worst, the girl is an apolitical neutralizer of direct action. At best, she is simply enjoying herself with the junk society has given her. In either state — harmless or neutralizing, hedonic or willfully ignorant — the girl becomes an attractor of hatred, envy, and fear. As opposed to mainstream narratives of female empowerment and their sliding scale of access to power and resources, the girl is a far more politically ambivalent state.

Quicho then lays out three errant categories of online girlhood:

One: Consider that the girl is a symbolic category, unfixed from biological sex or social gender…

Two: The girl is a consumer category that can’t be delinked from capital… She is a “living currency,” a “war machine,” and a “technique of the self” driven by the “desire to be desired”…

Third: The girl is an inhuman category… To survive and thrive, the girl encodes language, invents behavior, manipulates social codes, and, most importantly, shares and intuits this information. As such, we can consider the girl to be a subject condition that is closer to that of collective or even superintelligence.

But girlhood becomes a mixed semiotic in this instance, splicing references to Klossowski, Deleuze-Guattari, Foucault and Lacan to make a heady elixir that struggles to make coherent sense. A disjunctive synthesis? More needs to be said…

Sadie Plant:

Lacan lays down the law and leaves no doubt: “There is woman only as excluded by the nature of things,” he explains. She is “not-all,” “not-whole,” “not-one,” and whatever she knows can only be described as “not-knowledge.” There is “no such thing as The woman, where the definite article stands for the universal.” She has no place like home, nothing of her own, “other than the place of the Other which,” writes Lacan, “I designate with a capital O.”

If everyone online is a girl, and desire, for Lacan, is only the desire to be desired, what happens online when there is no longer any phallic presence to court? It appears that not only is everyone online a girl, but everyone is also gay. This rings true; isn’t the implicit sexualisation of girl-culture as bedroom-culture not underwritten by the male fantasy of girls making out with each other behind closed doors? And what becomes of this tacit lesbianism when it is reduced to a performative otherness for the pleasure of the male gaze? And this is inseparable from capital? (Interestingly, Žižek has an post that takes all these elements together in a reading of Ayn Rand’s novels, and that seems to resonate with a techbro view of the Internet’s feminine power.)

But the other side of this, removed from male fantasy, is a militant lesbianism lurking behind a lot of 1990s cybertheory; both Sadie Plant and Nick Land refer to Monique Wittig’s 1969 novel Les Guérillères in their writings, in which a band of women violently fight for their autonomy in a war between the sexes, but in a manner that seeks to override sexual difference as natural category altogether.

What happens, then, if, instead, we truly consider the Sapphic girl online as an empty (albeit positive) signifier to be filled with whatever you wish, in such a way that girlhood is devoid of the ‘natural’ characterisations that otherwise define it (something Quicho pays lip service to, but struggles to keep at bay)? What happens when bedroom culture, which is girl culture, is recognised as the persistent hole in cultural discourses that it is, and thus not simply a site of consumption but also (re)production and anti-production?

I’m reminded here, perhaps controversially, of de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, in which he writes of the boudoir’s ultimate secret, which is that the most delectable pleasure to be explored by women, who are nonetheless subordinates, is sodomy. Here too I am reminded of Deleuze’s famous acknowledgement that his philosophical operations within the history of philosophy are a kind of buggery, taking thinkers from behind.

Zero, the set of all sets, is not only the vulva but also the anus. Plant turns to Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-production through this same mixed semiotic, driving a stake through Quicho’s logic trap of singles and multiples when she moves away from Lacan to Deleuze and Guattari:

Zero was always something very different from the sign which has emerged from the West’s inability to deal with anything which, like zero, is neither something in particular nor nothing at all. And it is certainly the case that,
with or without the signs that represent them as inert negativities, holes themselves are never simply absences of positive things. This is a purely psychoanalytical myth. For Deleuze and Guattari, it is not even enough “to say that intense and moving particles pass through holes; a hole is just as much a particle as what passes through it…” Holes are not absences, spaces where there should be something else. “Flying anuses, speeding vaginas, there is no castration.” Adrift in the doped lattices of a silicon crystal, a hole is a positive particle before it is the absence of a negatively charged electron, and the movement of electrons toward the positive terminal is also a flow of holes streaming back the other way. Holes are charged particles running in reverse. For the quantum physicist, ”holes are not the absence of particles but particles traveling faster than the speed of light.”

We have yet to fully reckon with the full force of this framing, perhaps because this discourse around the errant feminine is closed off from other theories of Otherness, which are further along in the process of analysing the kaleidoscopic consciousnesses of now… In fact, by recalling Gilroy’s address of essentialist versus pluralist conceptions of race, we can perhaps find a similar flaw in the logic of Quicho that replicates an essential binary, albeit with strategic elisions to suggest otherwise.

Malcolm Bull, for instance, problematising the sliding back into dichotomies that arguments like Quicho’s are prone to, provides some clarity regarding the stakes of her wildly combinatory theory, which is made less dynamic than it appears by the legacy of Lacanianism. Bull writes: “The problem with these arguments is that they progress only by exploiting the ambiguity of the terminology and moving from a whole/part distinction via the unity/disunity opposition to a single/multiple dichotomy.” This is precisely the same move seen in the new discourses around a digitised sexual difference. The masculine One, the figure of the Phallus, is contrasted to the feminine Zero, the vulvic multiple. The binary is not overcome; it is only shifted on its axis. How, then, to properly scrambled the codes? To wilfully confuse flying anuses and speeding vaginas? How to erase the difference between productive and unproductive holes in our discourse?

This is an important consideration for us, if we are to rescue the bedroom from the gendered discourses of a second-wave sociological feminism, which has surely been unfolded dramatically by the Internet, and allow the bedroom to become a space not only for the brewing of girl culture, but also, as Kodwo Eshun pointed out, black culture, by way of Detroit techno, trip-hop, and many other kinds of ‘headmusic’.

This is something I hear in the bedroom culture of a post-Covid generation of Internet musicians, who nonetheless refuse to be contained by the particular circumstances of this or that event and this or that postmodern space. Theirs is a music, after all, that makes good on the blissed-out 90s cultures that previously operated distinctly and yet in alignment; here I am thinking of Simon Reynolds’ debut, looking at “the raptures of rock”, which dissolve through egresses into hip-hop and hardcore, acid house and acid rock, shoegaze and dream pop. What I love about this generation is that they pass through these various genres fluidly, combining the cutting edges of each of these genres together to produce a sound that is so achingly and shockingly contemporary.

Art and Critique

We don’t name genres like we used to. For better or for worse, we might have Simon Reynolds to thank for that. Critics who take up the task of naming genres perhaps have a more taxonomic approach than those who emerge from such scenes themselves. “Post-rock” is clearly a critic’s term, as is “hauntology” even more obviously; both lack the nonsense of new nomenclature that proliferates more comfortably around ‘hip-hop’ — the silliest of genre names, if you allow yourself to stop and think about it — and its offshoots (drill and bashment are too more recent terms that no critic would invent with a straight face).

Names are conspiratorial. Something is offered up, but it takes a corral of interlocutors to agree to keep using it. The names we give genres of music are also, in this sense, musical in themselves. Hip-hop remains a good example. Think of that viral Hannibal Buress clip lampooning early hip-hop: the name of this sound is almost onomatopoeic, as the jagged cadence of the word has a swing to it that immediately mirrors early rap verses. The same can be said of other hip-hop subgenres too — drill, again, feels apt for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on. Even earlier, ‘bebop’, ‘free jazz’, etc., carry this same tension between onomatopoeic and process-music.

But it is a disinterest in categorisation from artists themselves that gives way to critics attempting to assign more molecular names, not to sounds or processes but categories of relation, all of which carry with them a kind of afterwardness. The prevalence of suffices like ‘hyper-‘ and ‘post-‘ are, in this way, a nod to a relation to prior forms themselves; something which perhaps began with ‘fusion’, as the most literal genre name for postmodernist recombinatory tendencies in and beyond jazz. It’s vague, but appropriately so, even if a name like ‘fusion’ may well, like other genres, slip into a kind of nominative determinism for all that follows in that same vein. Indeed, what happens when, with the passage of time, we start to feel like all artists are ‘post-fusion’ now?

There are nonetheless three worthy questions we might ask ourselves, lurking behind any desire for categorisation: What is the sound of this music? What are the processes through which it is made? What is its relation to cultural time — music’s past, present and future? Regarding the generation of musicians currently of interest, the first resists easy answer, although ‘hyperpop’ might do; the second and third questions, taken together, lead us to conveniently place them in the camp of ‘post-Internet music’, but again, more can be said here.

It is in this arena that the writings of Deleuze-Guattari become relevant again. How to write of a music that defines all criteria for nomination?

For Kant, “[t]here is no science of the beautiful, but only critique, and there is no fine science, but only fine art.” This is where we find ourselves in trying to understand a set of cultural currents that resist all criteria for nomination, and it is also with this quotation from Kant that Steven Shaviro begins his book on the topic, Without Criteria.

Drawing on the philosophies of Kant, Whitehead and Deleuze, Shaviro gives a compelling account of why contemporary artists might seek to resist categorisation quite so adamantly. Indeed, we might note the difficult relationship between artist and critic as being like that rehearsed by Deleuze in his analogy of the wasp and the orchid — the ways that orchids mimic and exaggerate the alluring characteristics of wasps to encourage them to copulate non-reproductively with flowers, who then proliferate themselves. This is different to the relationship between bees and flowers, whose pollination is a by-product of bees’ use of pollen to make honey as a source of protein. For Deleuze-Guattari, the wasp and the orchid instead provide an example of interspecies reproduction and anti-production.

Shaviro:

The orchid “adapts itself” to the way the wasp apprehends it; as a result, the wasp finds the orchid beautiful. The orchid isn’t beautiful in and of itself; it is only beautiful for the wasp (and perhaps, too, for us). The orchid’s interests, however, have nothing in particular to do with the wasp; the orchid only uses the wasp as a vector for its own pollination. It suits the plant just as well if a human being, having been seduced by the flower’s beauty, pollinates it instead. Thus the orchid is indifferent even to the existence of the wasp; the exchange between the two organisms is what Deleuze and Guattari, quoting Rémy Chauvin, call “the aparallel evolution of two beings that have absolutely nothing to do with each other.”

Critics may think of themselves as bees, but they are wasps or gardeners, drawn into the beauty of musical production by “a lure of feeling” (Whitehead). But rather than pouring scorn on the critic tout court — particularly as someone who thinks of all art as encounter, enjoying the resonances between practices of writing and photography, at once critical and creative — we must acknowledge that artists themselves are caught in a similar set of processes:

The orchid is not beautiful in itself: but something happens to the wasp, or to the gardener, who encounters the orchid and feels it to be beautiful … Beauty is therefore an event, a process, rather than a condition or a state. The flower is not beautiful in itself; rather, beauty happens when I encounter the flower. Beauty is fleeting, and it is always imbued with otherness. For although the feeling of beauty is “subjective”, I cannot experience it at will. I can only find beauty when the object solicits me, or arouses my senses of beauty, in a certain way. Also, beauty does not survive the moment of encounter in which it is created. It cannot be recovered once it is gone. It can only be born afresh in another event, another encounter. A subject does not recognize the beauty of an object. Rather, the object lures the subject while remaining indifferent to it; and the subject feels the object, without knowing it or possessing it or even caring about it. The object touches me, but for my part I cannot grasp it or lay hold of it, or make it last. I cannot dispel its otherness, its alien splendor. If I could, I would no longer find it beautiful, I would, alas, merely find it useful.

The conceptual engineering of genre nomination is itself a creative act, but too much critique looks for what is useful in enacting it. It fails, repeatedly, inevitably, to cage the encounter it seeks to designate and singularise. In this way, although an understanding of the orchid-wasp encounter is as relevant to artists making music as it is to critics hoping to write about it, it is artists who linger among the noumenal essence of their own activities, far more so than the critic who wants to be useful, naming qualities whose only function, in being beautiful, is to elude us.

All of this is to say that I don’t think it matters what we call this music — or rather, it shouldn’t matter, if we hope to remain attuned to the uncategorisable nature of postmodern sonics — but the aforementioned questions are nonetheless interesting ones to ponder, as we try to situate ourselves in a dizzying present, and since I feel like the most integral context for understanding this movement is the period of online gestation made possible by the pandemic, I’m going to refer to theirs as a post-Covid sound for easy reference.

Although such a decision equally runs the risk of overdetermining this music’s circumstances of emergence, it nonetheless feels fitting to tentatively name it after an event. In fact, to speak all the more generally, it is precisely a music of events and encounters that takes shape here. If this music feels so achingly present to me right now — more so than any other subcultural current — it is because I hear in the output of these artists a persistent and constantly adaptive attempt to make themselves worthy of the things that happen to them. No nostalgia for what came before, only an errant play in the wreckage of all pop culture that straps together modes of expression to respond to the circumstances they have been through — whether that is lockdown, as was the case between 2020 and 2023, or the strangeness of going overground that has defined their experiences from 2023 to now. (Note the distinct lack of party-hauntological overtones, like those found on Brat, which Byro contrasted to underscores’ Wall Socket — more on this later.)

Indeed, from this confluence of events, we can draw out many other names — names for other processes, for other kinds of encounter. Another one could be post-videogame music, but again the same problem of over-determination persists. Still, this helps illuminate — all too usefully and unbeautifully — the various strands of a knot in the process of tightening.

Pocket Monstrosities

“I’m not gonna lie, fuck the music, bro. What’s up with Pokémon? Why do you like Pokémon so much?”

“I just think it’s hard, and there’s so many of them, and they all look cool.”

As a generation of Covid artists escape the bedroom and offer up the fruits of their sequestered productivity, all the activities that take place in the bedroom gesture to relations with the outside world, each informing the other. All become tenuous ways of referring to modes of facelessness.

This is something we can demonstrate by way of Burial’s music, for example — and his forthcoming collab with Harmony Korine is moving him in a direction that feels tangential to this post-hyperpop current. Yes, he samples videogames, but the samples themselves are also telling: a shadowy, quasi-anonymous producer builds a song around a sample from a covert stealth simulator like Metal Gear Solid 2; an artist wandering through the oneiric nightmare of modern life opens his second album with dialogue from David Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE; a hero to many, who plays with the constraints of a singular sound by trying on the garb of other genres, samples the cackles of Skull Kid in The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask.

Shifting this kind of consideration to an artist like Jane Remover, the influence of Daria on a genre like dariacore is already obvious, but the various Pokémon samples are just as enlightening.

Games played at home start to feel like training simulations for the world at large. But since the world itself is a simulation, everything perused in the bedroom is also brought into the light. The bedroom becomes a virtual domain, jettisoned as a hole-particle that passes through everything actual, and so Remover’s love of the Pokémon franchise soon begins to feel like an affection mirrored in the wider scene’s approach to cultural salvage, montage, bricolage and de/reconstruction.

The story goes like this: You wake up in your room. There’s your bed and a computer. Your mom is downstairs wondering when you’re going to start your life. The mad professor wants to see you, and before long, you have a choice to make. You begin an adventure out into the world, navigating creaturely companionships as you train different genres of friend before duelling with your heroes.

But Pokémon is not a game for the bedroom, for the home console. The franchise dramatizes its own escape; the game’s pocket-monsters are a reflection of Nintendo’s innovation of the pocket-console; of handheld devices that are inherently portable. The sheer excitement of 90s tech was that your bedroom could now come with you. The Gameboy and the mobile phone set the world along a pocketable path, followed by the mp3 player, on which your home hard-drive, containing all of your pirated music, is now transferred to your pocket also. Everyone is and carries with them a pocket-monster. (Pokémon Go and the home-world hybridity of the Switch take this even further; Animal Crossing‘s significance during lockdown brings with it additionally worthy considerations.)

The familiar premise of any given Pokémon game is not, then, a replacement for one’s IRL adventures but an analogous training simulator for the aspiring cultural producer. Monster battles give way to sound clashes as you organise your team. There is no escapism here, but an interrelation. Bedroom culture and pop stardom come together apiece — but I’m not about to suggest we refer to all this as “post-Pokémon music”…

“So Online It Hurts”

There is now a mass of former Discord-dwelling pop meddlers making moves to break into the overground, pockets brimming. A lot has been written about these ‘online’ artists over the last few years, but not a whole lot of it has been interesting or has really understood the implications of the hole-context they emerge from. So, let us briefly consider what has been said nonetheless, to provide some contrast, before turning to what I think is the most intriguing thing about the culture shift they represent — that is, the ways in which a decisive dissolution of on/offline dynamics cuts through a persistent (and arguably outdated) interest in ‘cyberculture’ as its own discrete domain.

This perversion of the on/offline is undoubtedly a wilful reaction to the context into which Jane and others were initially placed by the music press, owing to an irreverent undercurrent that wants to perpetually resist categorisation, or rather laughs in the face of a music-journalistic hesitancy to do so, confounded by the swarming processes that define so much contemporary music’s confusing and conflating nature.

For example, “Digicore Hero dltzk Is So Online It Hurts” is the typical headline of an early interview with Remover (under an older alias) for Pitchfork in 2022. But even with just a few years hindsight – the speed of this amorphous scene’s development is extreme – it’s a journalistic context that feels like it has not yet adjusted to the climate of (post)lockdown life, which is surely when everything changed; when being online was not an escape from the ‘real world’, but the knotted entwinement of a new normal:

Their mom and dad might not know it, but over the past year [Jane] has become one of the faces of digicore, a scene of zoomer SoundCloud artists who make agitated, mercurial music usually featuring blown-out production and sullen, Auto-Tuned singing. Listening to some of their songs can feel like blasting through TikTok at supersonic speed, a sensory overload that could very well send your elderly neighbor into cardiac arrest.

Note the familiar distance — the Othering — sketched between those online and offline, between young and old. This binarization continues when the article splits their musical output into “two camps”:

There’s the prankish mixes they put out under other aliases (leroy, DJcoolgirl9), like their “dariacore” mash-up compilations, named after the ’90s animated series about a sardonic teenage girl … The style is something like future bass meets Jersey club meets SoundClown shitposting — sped-up versions of the music [Jane] was fascinated by when they were 9…

Then there’s [their] more personal, original dltzk material. Dealing with the disorientation of adolescence and the stultifying sense that they had no real future ahead of them… [Their debut album Teen Week] bears the imprint of their EDM obsessions, especially the galactic electronica of their idol, Porter Robinson, and embraces production elements that have been trendy in underground online communities, like breakbeats, stutters, and bitcrushing.

But are these two ‘camps’ really so different? Is this not Jane negotiating the divergent standards of contemporary music production and its outputs / outlets? Yes, a dizzying array of influences are heard on almost every track, and the most sample-heavy tracks are released for free or more ephemerally to avoid copyright litigation, but it seems like a mistake to place a wedge between their various outlets on the basis of a strategic negotiation of legalities alone. (I want to nod to Byro’s brilliant thesis on dariacore’s relationship to copyright here, which was the reason we first came into contact.)

Everything released and given a life beyond the bedroom, whether physically or on a multitude of SoundCloud accounts, emerges from the same melting pot. Indeed, for the listener immersed in the activity of these artists as a whole, there is a clear sense that what emerges for public consumption is only a series of free radicals that gather enough momentum to break free of a more primordial soup where everything is available everywhere all at once. So much remains unseen; unheard. The bedroom is a nexus from which only a few things are afforded escape.

By way of another example, take the following attempt to describe Remover’s third album, 2023’s Census Designated, in Paste magazine:

Critics have found it impossible to talk about Jane’s music without grasping at the straws of comparison. There’s little singularity between the names that have been thrown around, even in talking just about Census Designated: Slowdive, yeule, Ethel Cain, my bloody valentine, Deftones, Midwife, Ethel Cain again, Bladee and Ecco2k, Porter Robinson, Puce Mary, A.R. Kane. It’s hard to talk about Jane’s music without making references to those other artists who have influenced and been influenced by her style, but it’s also hard to talk about her music with reference to the people who surround her. The truth is, she just doesn’t sound like anyone else. Census Designated is so masterfully disconcerting that, even as we try to grasp onto snippets of sound that could possibly remind us of something familiar, we fail to clasp our fingers around a single beam supporting our feigned acquaintance with her sound.

So much of the music press over the last two decades has continued to reproduce this kind of cop-out. This was far more pointed when I was in my teens, when every young music journalist trying to make their name seemed to think cultural commentary was a way to obliquely flex your own music knowledge, slotting the new into one’s own overbearing sense of a canon, whilst name-dropping underground darlings to tickle the ego of those also in the know.

The Spotify era of algorithmic taste-making has made this worse, since it thrives on comparison explicitly, but in response, the music criticism of the 2010s thankfully changed tack in exciting ways. (I’m thinking of Boomkat’s wonderful album write-ups or the much-missed tone of FACT mag’s Singles Club.) Here in Paste mag, however, the tendency re-emerges for the 2020s – even this move of listing comparisons before negating them in the same breath is painfully familiar. The following paragraph, however, discussing Jane’s own derision of genre categorisation, starts to reveal a sense of what is so enthralling about this scene:

When I talk to Jane, she’s deliberate with her words, taking care not to usher herself back into the boxes inside of which she has previously been contained. In our near hour-long conversation, words like “hyperpop” or “glitchcore” don’t surface once. Even terms like “shoegaze” or “rock,” the latter of which Jane has been more eager to embrace as a baseline descriptor of Census Designated, are set aside, replaced by ideas like “art-making,” “fulfillment” and “community.” The way we talk about and classify music in the age of the internet is steeped in an abbreviated ephemerality. “Hyper-,” “digi-,” “glitch-,” “chill-,” and “break-” get attached to “-core,” “-wave,” “-gaze,” “-step” or “-beat” in some sort of do-it-yourself genre of mad-libs that, in a search for uber specificity, ends up becoming utterly meaningless. These clipped word labels get cycled in and out as fast as attention spans wane, and internet kids get tired of one thing and madly seek the next amalgamation of clips and fragments that excites them.

Here again, however, there’s that Millennial situating of a generation alongside its folk-pathologies: digital natives with no attention spans becomes a backhanded compliment that fails to grasp the accelerated recombinatory tendencies on display. That is, it becomes a way to explain (away) an irreverent attitude towards received information and a disinterest in prescribed categories and pedagogic authority.

This constellation of attitudes is far more attuned to the present than older generations tend to acknowledge. Never has a generation been so wantonly dismissed for its school-time apathy, but also celebrated for its political militancy with respect to the ‘outside world’. It’s a conflicted pomophobia extended towards an irreverence that emerges from the kaleidoscopic syncretism of a world that further scrambled what Paul Gilroy called the black Atlantic.

Just because their elders cannot recognise their strengths and the general fortitude of their strategic engagement with social infrastructures does not mean that these considerations are absent. Indeed, it is a novel approach to the cultural detritus picked up and reworked that is lurking behind the artist comparisons here for me. Take the vague emphasis Remover places on “art-making”: what are the processes involved here, exactly? They might not care to express them like a critic or cult-studs professor, but you can hear them if you park any desire to contain them within over-familiar signifiers and aesthetic criteria.

For example, does Jane’s music sometimes sound like Deftones? Yeah, kinda, if you squint your ears. But more broadly, her music feels indebted to the culture clash of 2000s nu metal and the bastardised stylings of 2010s EDM / nu-rave emo and hardcore. How to theorise the nu metal moment? I’m not sure if anyone — outside of academia — has tried, or — within academia — been all that successful, at least beyond the acknowledgement that it is a fusion sound that recombines every significant musical innovation of the 20th century. Its manner of doing so has hardly inspired a great deal of cultural theorising, since its ambivalence to the neatness of aesthetic categorisation resists codification at every level, but here we find the knotted culmination of submarine currents and processes brought to light by Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, double-cupping the club and the bedroom in a way that makes the two seem inseparable, or as two sites of molecular-cultural emergence interlinked.

Post-Post-Internet

“What I really liked about hyper-pop was how important it was for a lot of queer music and how it never felt like a revival. There was some nostalgia to it, but it always sounded like 2020. I want to carry that on, take older ideas to create something new. I want everything to feel like hyper-pop, even if it doesn’t sound like it.”

Returning to an aforementioned attempt at categorisation, we could choose to align this errant set of cultural tendencies with what Michael Waugh has called “post-internet music”, but a generation of post-hyperpop artists differentiates themselves from this association by refusing to make their technological allegiances so explicit.

This is a current that overlaps considerably with what Simon Reynolds infamously called “conceptronica”; artists, Waugh writes, prone to “self-consciously highlighting Post-Internet themes in their work [my emphasis]”, who “fuse the posthumanism of Post-Internet identity with the fluid gender deconstructions of queer theory … inspired by the ability to perform multiple ‘selves’ in the (relative) anonymity of virtual spaces, as well as the emotional and symbiotic relationship that the Post-Internet generation holds with its technological devices.”

“Thinking ‘in the fashion of the network’ occurs organically for those that accept the ‘centrality’ of the Internet within contemporary culture as a commonplace aspect of everyday life”, Waugh continues. But the culture shift for a post-post-Internet generation is one that profoundly lacks the aforementioned self-consciousness that otherwise characterises the contexts in which more well-established artists have found their footing. Indeed, the artists that Reynolds brings under the cover of the ‘conceptronica’ umbrella — a move none of them seemed to appreciate — are grouped together on the basis that the white cube of the art gallery has become the space in which they explore the intermediation and interrelation of “[t]he bedroom, the party, the dancefloor, the rave: [those] labs where the 21st C nervous systems assemble themselves,” to again quote Kodwo Eshun.

But a new generation has no such aspirations. No less a cultural vanguard, they burrow further down into the trash stratum of a bedroom culture that is less ill-at-ease with itself and its outside than it is with the elevated spaces a preceding generation has sought to nest in.

The Great Psychic Outdoors

Bedroom culture is still an integral starting point here. When Jane Remover’s record Frailty is described as “exuberant and kaleidoscopic” with “lo-fi passages reminiscent of the Microphones”, the shadow of another bedroom lineage — lo-fi — sneaks into view here.

Enrico Monachelli’s The Great Psychic Outdoors — the title of which wonderfully encapsulates the tension I’m interested in here — is a core text on this, with the book’s first chapter, “Teenage interzone: On lo-fi and escape” being indispensable. I often think back to the way Enrico synthesises his interest in bedroom culture with the radiophonic more generally — the sense in which the bedroom is one island among an archipelago; home base for the cultural radar; Mark and Justin Barton’s line: “Send a few clicks into the unknown. See what comes back.”

In an interview on the concept of adolescence, the philosopher and clinician Felix Guattari claimed that adolescence “constitutes a real microrevolution, involving multiple components, some of which threaten the world of adults. It is the entrance into a sort of extremely troubled interzone where all kinds of possibilities, conflicts and sometimes extremely difficult and even dramatic clashes suddenly appear”, an outsideness, psychedelic and dizzying, unbound from any sort of “specific phase”, natural cycle or physiological period, always pressing against the dreariness of so-called normal life.

Monacelli adds later:

[Guattari’s] interest in free radio, this ancestral predecessor of lo-fi production, was a love affair deeply rooted in his personal and theoretical life. Free radios were an integral part of his redefinition of politics and political involvement — a post-political politics, if you will. He would often state that the appearance of a free radio “betrays, first of all, a collective sense of being ‘fed up’ with official media”, a will to redefine our communal lives outside of State-and-Capital-sanctioned modes of existence. And he would insist that producing something like a free radio (or a lo-fi record, we might add) was not just a “symbolic” protest against the status quo, but a direct act of escape from the quotidian. A jailbreak, so to speak, that he would define as a “molecular” movement, a drifting outside of normality’s strictures and coercions through the irreverent use of each and every eccentricitym technical quirk and opening in the fabric of everyday life. An escape that could virtually produce new, freer ways of being one’s self.

Adding further context, Monacelli quotes Guattari at more length:

“What characterizes the ‘molecular’ is that the lines of escape combine with the objective lines of deterritorialization of the system to create an irrepressible aspiration for new arenas of freedom. (One example of such an escape line is the free radio stations. Technological development, and in particular the miniaturization of transmitters and the fact that they can be put together by amateurs, ‘encounters’ a collective aspiration for some new means of expression.)”

Guattari returns again in the book’s final paragraph:

Just like Guattari predicted, there’s already something political about ditching the drudgery of how things are normally done, whether you’re a kid fixated on black metal and lean or a kid with a free radio. “Push it further, make it uglier, do it yourself”… Even if guitar music is dead and the times are a-changing, our luddite, acid calling isn’t. This all might substantially change once the capitalist culture industry and economy at large dies out, either by natural causes or under the pressure of some revolutionary action we are currently unable to imagine. That’s a given. But until then, our ethos will change its sounds but not its method. Break the machine. Make it work otherwise.

Mountains and Websites

I think that the pandemic, whilst not sounding the death knell for the capitalist culture industry and economy at large, has certainly changed the sounds of an adolescent ethos. Indeed, the stylings of a new generation of artists do not sound so recognisably “lo-fi” anymore — not entirely, anyway, which is undoubtedly because the grit of analogue technology has been replaced by the digital, allowing for a maximalist DIY that may not be distinguishable from pop fodder, but nonetheless repurposes the sounds of a pop that has embedded itself anew in the bedroom, veiling the egresses of old in the shine of contemporary simulacra.

I see Jane Remover as an artist who moves seamlessly beyond the self-consciousness of early lockdown along these more bombastic DIY vectors — a self-consciousness that became, for me anyway, far more pronounced when the pandemic first hit. Indeed, my posts on the blog back then trudged nostalgically through the sounds of (my) adolescence, as I sought to make sense of this unexpected return to the bedroom, interspersed with adventures into the barren solitude of a Yorkshire wilderness; into the vast psychic outdoors where ‘social distancing’ was not only possible but also exaggerated to become a joke that was a little on-the-nose.

Various self-conscious refrains floated back and forth across my brain in 2020… Most regularly, I held onto an earworm of the way Phil Elverum pulls back the curtain that quivers between nature and culture on ‘Through the Trees, Pt. 2’, given new significance as the space between home and world felt more pronounced, but only because attention was drawn to the process of its steady erasure:

And it’s hard to describe
Without seeming absurd
I know there’s no other world:
Mountains and websites

Or the way Grouper pines for “the place the spirit meets the skin” on ‘Living Room’, or the un/natural stalking of wild and domestic interzones on Animal Collective’s Campfire Songs…

Then came the post-lockdown culture shift, where that distinction faded once again into the background… Yes, lockdown rebirthed a bedroom culture, but not the one I once knew. It was something else. Something defined by work and study, rather than a place to escape those things. Thus, the ethos of lo-fi culture had to necessarily change — a change spearheaded by those who were coming out of adolescent during that period.

Nature Nurtured

Again, a lot of this has a tendency to make me feel old; it’s true, I am no longer an adolescent, although I try to cling onto the microrevolutions adolescence makes possible. But one of the benefits of age, of direct experience of what came before, is that I can also feel more sharply the emergence of an entirely different set of sensibilities for a generation that found lockdown to be a time of accelerated gestation rather than a stopgap. Indeed, we share a great deal in common, but our differing experiences of lockdown become a hinge around which a far more condensed set of cultural crisscrossings have taken place, and it is amidst these differences that a vital exchange of sentiments can take place.

For example, Porter Robinson and I are roughly the same age, although we travel through very different worlds. His sound is also quite different to the likes of Jane Remover and others (although Jane’s earlier releases do very clearly demonstrate his influence; see “kodak moment”.) Indeed, it is due to these subsequent differences that his influence on and championing of a generation that follows in his wake cannot be understated. The affective concerns of his music are all familiar, but there is a generational disjuncture at play here, with Robinson laying down a blueprint that a new generation has run far with. It is partly for this reason that I have found myself so obsessed with his hyperpop stylings over the week that follows the gig Byro and I attended in Brixton, and have been most surprised to find an aesthetic syncretism in which web-surfing and grass-touching become powerfully blurred.

Take Robinson’s 2021 album, Nurture. Emerging mid-lockdown – seven years after his EDM-flecked debut, Worlds – the album reflects on its own protracted gestation openly, at the same time as the timing of its release feels like a happy accident in speaking to the subcultural nurturing of a generation of lockdown musicians, who aren’t so terminally online, but rather explore the world with as much wonder and irreverence as an open-world videogame.

Immediately, the album begins with cheery piano melodies that remind me of wanders through Hyrule towns, fields and villages in Breath of the Wild, and the songs’ lyrics themselves are liturgical odes to the great (psychic) outdoors that is as deeply rooted in videogame exploration as it is in an affirmation of IRL adventuring.

‘Look at the Sky’, for instance — the album’s opener, following a brief, introductory instrumental — could easily soundtrack like the first steps taken on a hero’s journey, with Robinson offering himself up as avatar, as we explore videogame and real-world with equal wonder. (It’s a coupling that is boosted further by the unintended context of album’s release, if we maintain the uneasy comparison between Breath of the Wild and the Covid years, have succumbed to a pervasive, life-diminishing scourge.) The lyric video is itself a well-paced walk through a videogame environment, but a self-consciousness with regards to the escapology afforded by the virtual and the actual sit in tension with one another here.

“I cherished the flowers beneath my feet / But then something must have changed in me”, Robinson sings, which seems suggestive of the uneasy pull of a bedroom culture and the depressions that may well be weathered there. However, whilst so much of the album is wistful and melancholic, it is nonetheless brightly so. A track like ‘Musician’, by way of another example, could well slide into the party-hauntological self-consciousness of Brat, but instead seeks to lighten the load of pop fame; there’s even a shade of Mark Fisher’s (post-capitalist) desires here:

No, I don’t miss the feeling anymore
Yeah, I want something new to love
I was so nostalgic
But I’m fine without it
You don’t really want what you think you want

Okay, maybe the pop life isn’t all its cracked up to be, but it is a vector for amplifying a microrevolutionary adolescence:

No, I don’t wanna lose it, this emotion
Yeah, I just wanna do everything
I get so excited
When I finally find it
It just gets brighter from now on

The pressures of the adult world still come calling:

Then you sigh
“You know I love you, so I think I should tell you, Porter
This life, well isn’t it time that you grow up?”

But catching a wave to success is no reason to forget what buoyed you to the surface in the first place:

Oh, it’s calling
I just can’t stop, I’m sorry
I can feel a new day dawning
I burn up, burn out
I shouldn’t do this to myself

But sincerely
Can’t you feel what I’m feeling?
I can see my life so clearly
I burn up, burn out
I shouldn’t do this to myself

Well, this is why we do it for the feeling
How do you do music?
Well, it’s easy
You just face your fears and
You become your heroes
I don’t understand why you’re freaking out

It’s a sentiment taken up powerfully by Robinson’s wandering understudies, who are moving out of formation to take the lead. As Robinson’s world tour comes to an end, it’s not him on the cover of the UK’s NME; it’s April Harper Grey aka underscores. She talks about “once [being] just a playful member of several artsy, experimental online collectives” — “‘Collectives were huge. Everyone from 2014 to 2020 was making a fucking collective,’ she laughs. ‘And I was in, like, three of them'” — and “speaks fondly of those early, ‘low stakes’ days holed up behind the computer.”

But these aren’t the days of bedroom culture anymore. Unwilling to lose ‘the feeling’, she turns it inside out on a debut album that

sees Grey, a self-confessed “woman of American circumstance”, observe the fictional town of Wallsocket, Michigan, where three suburban girls come of age and reckon with religion, violence, class dissonance and feminine rage. She pertinently critiques the tensions of Middle America, which proved popular among her politically informed audience. “Exploring those little pockets of frustration is important,” she asserts. “I was thinking a lot about the cards that are dealt in America. The US has a unique lottery. Everyone’s a victim of American circumstance.”

It’s a great feature that gets to the core of the new direction these bedroom-dwellers are taking: “a one-woman musician behind a computer, straddling the line between fiction and reality, wielding the satirical boisterousness of hyperpop to critique the surreal, contemporary American landscape.” But it’s a joyful assault on the complexities of life. Like Robinson, the tensions are brought to the fore, at the same time as any joy possible is eked out what might otherwise be a deeply depressing time to be a victim of American circumstances.

Indeed, at a time when a mantra like ‘joy is a revolutionary act in the face of despair’ bears no teeth before the material struggles that face many Americans and others around the world — trans people and racial minorities especially — underscores finds a heartening balance between fun and fury. Though sharing a hyperpop upbringing with the likes of Charli xcx, Byro was right when they observed that “the lyrical bratiness of underscores brings into view more sharply and bites down into capitalism as a domineering structure inducing anger and insecurity by contrast to Charli xcx.”

The coupling of videogame aesthetics and real-world critique becomes all the more powerful here; a world of escape given a real political edge, perhaps not unlike that explored by Kode9 on Escapology and Astro-Darien, at least in principle and with a very different sonic palette; an approach less Death Stranding and more Grand Theft Auto.

The Holiday is Over

The first third of the Porter Robinson gig is given over to songs from his latest album, SMILE! 😀, featuring a menagerie of digital-maximalist pop-punk numbers that are, like those on Nurture, as indebted to video-game soundtracks and other sonics familiar to the terminally online as they are about wrestling with contemporary measures of arrested development like daily screentime and the dopamine hits procured by being a Face online.

I wasn’t actually that familiar with Robinson’s output before attending, being more familiar with underscores, and was actually surprised by how well the band translated to the stage, compared to the digitality of the record itself, which I’ve had on repeat ever since. He has a fantastic live show and the sense of intimacy conjured in a space as huge as Brixton Academy, especially given his subject matter, was less saccharine than one might think on listening to the album, and instead far more galvanising and inspiring. Byro and I — not the most comfortable people in crowds — opted for the balcony over the pit, but perhaps came to regret this. Porter was adept at elevating everyone out of a seated repose.

Perhaps it’s silly of me to be so surprised by this. What I heard, but did not expect, was a music that moved seamlessly between listening stations, traversed intersecting nervous systems, at once achingly pop and subterranean, alive with the contradictions of an era, and above all, an range of antidotes to the pervasive malaise of now. It felt cute/acc. It was tender and enlivening.

“Don’t kill yourself, you idiot” is, at one point, beamed out from the stage in dayglo pink and black. There is a sense in which the pupil becomes the master here, following the lead of a younger prodigy. After underscores runs (quite literally) through their underground hits (and some covers by others more overground) during her half-hour support slot, Porter opens with Smile 😀 cut ‘Knock Yourself Out’ — its opening line: “I threw my phone into the sea…” This is sound more defiant than on Nurture, but for all flirtation with luddite tendencies, the now-familiar immersion in on/offline worlds has been transformed less into a scornful and haranguing view of the present than it is an attempt to wrestle back some autonomy from a totalising touchscreen capture.

It is the feeling I am enraptured by for most of my remaining time in London, feeling somewhat off-grid, or at least firmly off-the-clock; feeling more immersed in the present and all its has to offer than I have been for years. Perhaps Porter Robinson is a surprising vehicle for getting there. His fluency with all the dominant pop tendencies of now may well sounds cringe… But it is free!

What is left unacknowledged throughout all of this is how difficult I found it to descend into the air-conditioned boxes of London’s galleries, as I took in exhibitions for The Face and Noah Davis. The desire to write about it all — about the faces and the faceless, the critical and the joyful — was only an excuse to linger longer in the spring sun, lying on my stomach to tap away and touch grass. All of this was written by basking in the moment. It has felt good, and it feels good to make things under the big sky.

But nothing lasts forever. The situation engulfing Repeater and Zer0 Books meant this post took longer than anticipated. But even then, the joint statement was drafted in London sunshine too. The future feels bright for so much of this world, for my world, for my love. So much else is shrouded in shadow. The future of Palestine, in particular, is clouded. I long for a future without Israel…

The future (and its joys) are already here, but they are so painfully far from being evenly distributed. Still, it is all mixed together, the joy and the terror, and as I board my train back to Newcastle, and for many days on end alongside, a tender moment of audience participation at the Porter gig lingers in my ear: a wistful chant of wish-fulfillment…

What’s left is go out and make it all happen, to manifest, to materialise and immaterialise, on- and offline. The spring sun warms gently with its baroque sunbursts, as sun rays hint and glint, not so much at a spectre, but at a playable avatar, already in a world that is and could always be more free.

Over the last few weeks, Watkins Media has faced criticism in light of a report from former staff about the suppression of pro-Palestinian sentiment at its imprints, Zer0 Books and Repeater Books. These critiques were brought to wider attention when former social-media manager Adam Jones, author of The New Flesh (Zer0 Books, 2024), used Repeater’s channels to criticise Watkins CEO Etan Ilfeld, his censorship of expressions of pro-Palestinian solidarity, and his Israeli venture-capital firm that invests in AI start-ups behind the backs of its own staff, authors, and readership. In a statement posted on social media, Watkins – wearing the mask of Repeater – has sought to distance itself from Jones’ actions. At the same time, they have reaffirmed their commitment to “bold, challenging ideas” – so long as they do not openly challenge Watkins itself, of course.

Jones’ book is a searing critique of the infrastructures that Watkins’ CEO invests in, illustrating its complicity with apartheid and genocide. His actions on social media were celebrated by many, recognising that Watkins’ contradictory principles – publishing books that critique its own practices; using the radical sentiments of its authors as a smokescreen for its own actions – have tainted and are now destroying the legacy and reputation of Repeater and Zer0 Books. But Watkins have instead sought to paint Jones as a ‘lone wolf’, claiming that the since-deleted social-media posts “did not represent Repeater Books or Watkins Media.” 

The erasure of pro-Palestinian sentiments is a familiar strategy to those involved in the protest against genocide in Gaza. Let us recall the slaughter of Palestinian journalists who would otherwise have been able to provide in situ coverage of the unfolding situation within their country, or the targeted electrical outages during Israel’s early bombardment of Gaza in 2023 to prevent coverage and response. The night before Repeater Books’ statement denouncing Jones’ actions, the ICE in America arrested Mahmoud Khalil for his involvement in student protests against the genocide. The BBC, too, faces backlash after removing a documentary on Gaza from their streaming service. The practice of isolating and censoring pro-Palestinian sentiments is not a practice unique to Repeater and Zer0 Books, but it is one that their owners ignominiously reproduce.

Who, then, truly represents Repeater and Zer0 Books? Is it its authors, its readers, or its unseen ownership? We, the undersigned – authors, editors, collaborators and former staff – would like to express solidarity with the people of Palestine, with Jones, and furthermore, express our collective dissatisfaction with the ownership’s handling of these treasured imprints. We are Repeater. We are Zer0.

Signed

If you’re an author, contributor or former member of staff at these imprints and would like your name added, please get in touch on social media or via matt@xenogothic.com.

Photos taken between 13th and 16th February.

Part One
Part Two

The Black Atlantic’s Submarine Cabling

Break it down… Roll it up…
Pass that shit… What the fuck…

I’ve been reflecting on the argument made in my Sonic Faction essay a lot these past few weeks: an argument for ‘double-cupping’ cultural forms and modes of production in the twenty-first century.

There, the focus is on the seemingly divergent tendencies of a label like Hyperdub – or rather, between Hyperdub and its sublabel Flatlines – and the resonances nonetheless found between them along hardcore (dis)continuums.

The essay (appropriately) has no central point or foundation, swimming around in the middle of an accumulative moment, but I have since been reading outwards from the essay’s brief discussion of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, in light of comments made by Kode9 in a 2022 interview for The Skinny:

Hyperdub started as a kind of umbrella term to talk about the electronic music of the Black Atlantic that had converged into the 90s musical singularity of jungle. In a counter-parallel to how English had been the lingua franca of the modern world, the lingua franca of electronic dance music is the music of the Black Atlantic.

That network, spanning the Americas, Europe and Africa, is composed of lots of different continua. The hardcore continuum (hardcore, jungle, garage, grime, dubstep, UK funky, UK drill etc) is one UK lineage, and other important musical hubs on that network have their own, such as Chicago (house, ghetto house, juke, footwork etc), Detroit (Motown, electro, techno, ghettotech etc), New York (disco, garage, hip-hop etc), Jamaica (ska, reggae, dub, dancehall etc) or South Africa, which has its own lineage that goes from Kwaito and evolves more recently through gqom and amapiano and so on.

There are loads of these local scenes which innovate their own new traditions. The internet and social media has led to a viral, cross-contamination between a lot of these musics. What’s been interesting in recent years is that the traditional sources of influence of British dance music are no longer just America and the Caribbean, but also from the African continent. And that reflects in the influences on many artists we’ve been working with on the label for the last 15 to 20 years. All those localised continua have become even more tangled up with each other.

Revisiting Gilroy’s book in the spring sun whilst holidaying in London, I was thinking again about the (dis)continuum felt between The Face magazine and Noah Davis, and the ‘place’ of the internet between them. Indeed, when wondering where my youth culture is in the midst of these engagements with the subcultural, I wonder if the difficult of representing it at all is due to the fact that these forms are similarly scattered through the cultural Atlanticism of the online.

This certainly seems to be the case for Ccru and the blogipelago that emerged out of it. I’ve even begun to see how Gilroy’s 1992 text holds a far more significant place in the corpus of Ccru than it is often given credited for. It may only be Ron Eglash who mentions it explicitly on the old site, but the hybridity of Ccru / Hyperdub’s sonic forms, the depersonalising and machinic (un)nature of jungle, the (dis)identity politics of race, the dance of creolisation – all of this comes together in Gilroy’s text as he attempts to find a productive (if somewhat disjunctive) synthesis between essentialist and pluralist positions of black culture.

Provocatively, Gilroy moves “against the ethnic absolutism that currently dominates black political culture” to consider black American and black English cultural fervours that escape national (and indeed racialised) particularities, in an attempt to name “processes of cultural mutation and restless (dis)continuity that exceed racial discourse and avoid capture by its agents”, “new analytic possibilities with a general significance far beyond the well-policed borders of black particularity”, and the ways in which “the peculiarity of the black English requires attention to the intermixture of a variety of distinct cultural forms”, which is most visible in its linguistic creolisations and recombinatory musical (sub[marine])culture(s).

Already, I used Gilroy’s work in the Sonic Faction essay to link the “double consciousness” of a black radical (dis)continuum and the more psychedelic double-cupping of footwork. But to go a step further, it’s worth highlighting how W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1903 conception of “double consciousness” has been further split and fragmented in twenty-first-century philosophy, with José Medina, most notably, discussing the “kaleidoscopic consciousness” of our present era, phase-shifting a Du Boisian uncanny and reversing its polarity into more psychedelic tendency.

This is useful as “double consciousness”, generally split along a white/black binary within black subjectivities, has since been further broken down and rolled up to consider the double consciousness of whiteness itself, or dissolved further into other racialised subjectivities. But just as this term has never been cleanly cleft from quotidian discourses, “kaleidoscopic consciousness” also wins Oscars; Everything Everywhere All At Once dramatizes this phenomenon magnificently to explore the surreality of cross-generational Asian-American experiences.

All of these tendencies are already found in Gilroy’s conception of the Black Atlantic, taken as “the rhizomorphic, fractal structure of the transcultural, international formation” of contemporary subjectivity, which he understands as the motor of “the specific counterculture of modernity”.

The distinctions between modernity and Modernism are integral here. For Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, reflecting back on their 1976 book, Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890-1930, in 1991:

The experience of modernity and modernization was not obscure. It happened in the streets, the homes, the factories, in the political and economic system, on the battlefield and in the world order. The experience of Modernism was, and to some degree remains, rather more obscure. It was an art that frequently began in sensation and outrage, or else displacement and exile. Much of it resisted aspects of the modernizing process, and a good part of it was, for various reasons, silenced, banned or suppressed.

Modernism’s fraught relationship with modernity was already a kind of double-cupping in this regard. Modernism was a response to the disorientation of modernity itself: “it was often a gamble with history and consciousness which depended on the expectation that one day — but not yet — its intentions and forms would be gradually understood”; a gamble that “has in fact paid off … It has become what it hardly have expected ever to be: a useable past, leading into the present and the future.”

The same could be said of Ccru’s online activities, finding far more traction long after the unit was disbanded, but the kaleidoscopic consciousness of post-modernity also complicates things. We seem less occupied by useable pasts than the sheer malleability of a useable present, which is at once a disorienting swamp and a prime position for immanent critique.

Resituating Gilroy in this context nonetheless, we could understand the various interventions of the Ccru as an emphasis on the then-new digitality of Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, and particularly in Goodman’s post-Ccru manning of the good ship Hyperdub. Indeed, the ship is also Gilroy’s “chronotope”, following Bahktin, for the Middle Passage, but also all other transatlantic forms of trade; “an optic for reading texts as x-rays of the forces at work in the cultural system from which they spring”.

The ship, although closely related to the image of the slave ship – particularly that supplied by J. M. W. Turner – is, for Gilroy, also an emblem of black culture’s oceanic drift through international waters:

The contemporary black arts movement in film, visual arts, and theatre as well as music … have created a new topography of loyalty and identity in which the structures and presuppositions of the nation state have been left behind because they are seen as outmoded. [But i]t is important to remember that these recent black Atlantic phenomena may not be so novel as their digital encoding … suggests. Columbus’s pilot, Pedro Nino, was also an African. The history of the black Atlantic since then, continually crisscrossed by the movements of black people – not only as commodities but engaged in various struggles towards emancipation, autonomy, and citizenship – provides a means to reexamine the problems of nationality, location, identity, and historical memory. They all emerge from it with special clarity if we contrast the national, nationalistic, and ethnically absolute paradigms of cultural criticism to be found in England and America with those hidden expressions, both residual and emergent, that attempt to be global or outer-national in nature.

To argue for an alternative chronotope might well erase some of the more specifically racialised concerns of Gilroy’s text — and his image of the ship remains integral for the ways it questions the novelty of the digital era to understand how a cultural transatlanticism is centuries old — but as a kaleidoscope consciousness further asserts itself in the popular imagination, exploring resonant but distinct vectors, I am left thinking about the Drexciyan focus on the submarine, and particularly the submarine communications cables that have accelerated a black-Atlantic scrambling of identity (for better or worse), decentring any single (or collective) subject-position.

White Rappers and the Other Side of Double Consciousness

The first iteration of Hyperdub – as music blog; not yet record label – investigates the early-twenty-first-century complications wrought upon Gilroy’s transpositionality explicitly. For instance, there’s an interesting 2001 essay from the Hyperdub blog by Mark Fisher (under his Mark De’Rozario pseudonym) on the pernicious double-consciousness of Eminem’s whiteness.

It is an essay that may well be a little dated; opinions on the figure of the ‘white rapper’ have never really settled. But whereas most disparage the white rapper for the ways in which they make hip-hop somehow more palatable to white audiences, appropriating black aesthetics, I think it is interesting how early Eminem, far more uncertain of his position in the culture, seemed interested in further exacerbating hip-hop’s surrounding moral panics by being far more puerile and shocking than was customary for the white rappers of the previous generation.

In light of this, Fisher’s interest remains with the slippery nature of pop-cultural identity and the forms it takes on this side of the millennium. “Like Presley, the Beatles, Madonna, Bowie and anybody else who has done anything interesting in pop, Eminem scrambles the codes”, he writes. “All expectations and assumptions about ethnicity, class, sexuality and gender – that is to say, about identity itself – go into the mix, and are melted, warped.”

This is most notable with regards to Eminem’s early splintering of his own identity, as Fisher argues:

Against the dictates of a confessional culture that insists that you be yourself, Eminem conjures a dramaturgical proliferation of personae, or simpersonae – a seething population of virtual selves, fictional potentials given actualization. Shady both is and isn’t Eminen, who both is and isn’t Marshall Mathers… All of them are, at one level, the ‘same person’, but what does that say about notions of sameness and personhood – i.e. identity? Instead of managing and selling him/his self, as the self-help gurus and therapists of managerialism exhort us to, Eminem is the chief barker in a carnivalesque dismantling of identity – a dismantling that includes the dismembering of ‘Eminem’ it/him/self. No-One is in charge of the factory of id/entity production on the Slim Shady and Marshall Mathers LPs: ‘Eminem’ is nothing more than the (brand) name for a revelling in ontological confusion and implex, whose deep schizophrenic truth is that there is no truth but the version, that there is no transcendence.

 Before long, Fisher turns to Gilroy (by way of Foucault):

Foucault long ago established that to define and proclaim your identity is to do power’s work for it, and to define yourself in terms of sexual preference is to overtime for the identicops. Gilroy’s recent transposition of Foucault’s arguments from sexuality to race shows that, since, like sexuality, race is not a natural category but a social production, the issue is the way certain groups are racialized: that is to say, turned into an effect of a represented category. And the way the (often socialist) media smuggernaut machine treats the white proletariat – especially those who dare to get above themselves, like Pamela Anderson or the Beckhams – is a clear case of racialization. This is, of course, not only a matter of lampoonery – we’re not in the pampered master-class world where the worst thing that can happen to you is that someone calls you a name – but of insults reinforcing a social structure which systematically denies life chances to the (silenced) majority.

These problems of identity haven’t gone away, although they have certainly been maligned following the advent of social media. Even in the case of Eminem, he has now been elected to the position of relatively pampered master class; the latter stage of his career seems to be defined by a far more fragile egocentric position, compared to where he started. Indeed, Fisher’s conclusion to this twenty-four-year-old essay is strange to read now, considering how 2000s rap has calcified and accepted its own facialisation:

The invisible, faceless drones who take away your garbage, who fry your burgers, those who are served up nothing but cultural shit and told that they are responsible for it, it’s their voice that Eminem speaks in: “and there’s a million of us / just like me / who cuss like me / who just don’t give a fuck like me” (‘The Real Slim Shady’). The white trash are well aware who and what the enemy is: the management class, the busybodies who want to organize their – and other people’s – lives around dubious (comm)unities (whether that be gay identity, moral majority, whatever). Fight Club showed the dangers of a too full-on military campaign against these managerialists – the terrifying possibility of anger calcifying into a nihilistic fascism – but this isn’t the inevitable consequence of white trash rage finding expression.

Fisher often wrote about the fact that this slide into fascism was not inevitable, although it is a difficult argument to maintain today, given that many of those he once backed — Kanye West, Russell Brand — have given into their more fascistic tendencies. But all the more reason that we have a lot to learn from 2000s theorising in this regard.

Class First

The conversations surrounding Ash Sarkar’s recent book release, for instance – at least those repackaged in the reductive terms of the liberal media – have suggested that a “class-first” perspective is coming back into vogue, eliding the failures of identity politics to resist the pressures of the social-media age, whilst continuing to flirt with red-brown allegiances that Sarkar has struggled, in the media at least, to extricate her argument from.

Indeed, although not in disagreement with this “class-first” argument in principle, I remain suspicious of how it has long been co-opted by reactionaries, overrepresented on Twitter, and further boosted by more conservative Marxists to disregard social-justice issues, as it is a discussion that seems to permeate the attention economy and the so-called “culture war”. Unfortunately, all interventions that claim to give a voice to the voiceless, more often than not, end up giving an essentialised face to the faceless as well, such that “class-first” politics slides contradictorily into a twisted identity-political posturing of its own.

This posturing runs in two directions, however. I should probably acknowledge that I too have been taken in by a misleading media narrative around Sarkar’s book. I have found much of the discussion unpalatable and murky — whether that’s due to reductive or seemingly contradictory statements made by Sarkar herself or the framing that her book has been given by her interlocutors — but I am also yet to read Minority Rule… It may have been reduced to a culture-war issue, but it’d be rich to suggest a personal immunity to the affects of this.

Shon Faye has an interesting post on how things are not what they seem in this regard, discussing the book’s context collapse and the ways that the arguments made on the book tour are somewhat different from those made in the book itself – if only because the book is far more nuanced than podcasts allow for. Intriguingly, it’s also a post that goes back to Mark Fisher’s “Exiting the Vampire Castle” essay, focussing on its relationship to Fisher’s interest in (dis)identity politics. Faye writes:

For Fisher, what distinguished this “bourgeois-liberal perversion” of material struggles against sexism, racism and heterosexism (which are important, he acknowledges) was its lack of class consciousness and obsession with reifying identity instead of seeking a total abolition of the class system which would liberate people from identity categories.

On that, I think Fisher was right, but it is worth echoing Faye’s nod to his acknowledgement of the importance of material (feminist) struggles, which he focussed on far more forcefully afterwards – something I wrote about for the New Statesman (and reproduced here on the blog).

The comparison is also interesting given the suggestion that both Fisher’s essay and Sarkar’s book have suffered from context collapse in similar ways – and I wonder to what extent this kind of “context collapse” is particularly difficult to avoid when one tries to represent a disidentity politics in the media. After all, for all these flippant dismissals of identity politics in general, the mainstream media is the primary mechanism through which these ideas are facialised and made reductive, highlighting the central paradox of their posturing.

The final paragraph of Faye’s post brings everything nicely into alignment in this regard:

As Richard Seymour notes, “[i]dentity is also work. The endless labour of producing an identity, a version of oneself that one finds worthy of respect, is not in and of itself a desirable thing.”

We might add a note about the endless labour of producing an identifiable argument here too, which Faye gestures towards when she continues:

[Seymour] rightly points out that “racism, sexism, and transphobia, for instance, all force a burden on those subject to ascriptive denigration, to explain, account for and validate themselves.” A politics of coalition and solidarity – where we do not have to be the same to work together and collaborate – is not the same as an imposed class consciousness (rooted in anti-intellectualism) that rolls its eyes at any discussion of social and economic reality as it is shaped by sexism, racism and so on. Identity politics is dead, but identity itself is still being inscribed upon many of us against our will and with deathly consequences. Sarkar’s actual book makes this very point, of course, which leaves me questioning if liberal media — in all its distortions — is the best vehicle for building a movement at all.

A more general point of interest here is that “an imposed class consciousness” more often than not transforms class into its own identity marker. Particularly in the UK, class — rather than referring, as it should, to one’s material conditions — is expressed through cultural signifiers divorced from those conditions. Indeed, in light of this, there should be more emphasis on class — that is systems of classification — but alongside that, what is needed is an even more rigorous materialism, and that is something that many critics of identity politics themselves lack, instead viewing economic and social relations are atomised forms of categorisation, rather than understanding the ways in which the economic is also social and vice versa.

How, then, to hybridise these discourses? Or, what’s more, how to acknowledge the ways in which they are already hybrid? Here again, Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic is of use to us.

Essentialism vs Pluralism

Whilst what I have been pulling out of Gilroy’s book risks decentring the particular attention Gilroy gives to our understanding of race, I want to reiterate that this is something that the book itself encourages, in emphasising the syncretic formation of categories of blackness in the West as such, leading Gilroy to reject “the ethnic absolutism that currently dominates black political culture.” And I would like to suggest that what current discussions of class are lacking – whether amongst Twitter’s class-first Marxists or in the context of Sarkar’s book tour – is a similar understanding of working-class polyphony.

This is something felt personally, in light of the current controversy engulfing Repeater / Zer0 Books – which has very much derailed the intended trajectory this series of posts was on, coming to the fore as I was writing a third part that was very different to what it has become, but such are the breaks.

Daniel Tutt and his “class-first” coterie, for example, love to question the working-class bona fides of their opponents, who apparently betray a “pseudoliberal position [that] reveals nothing less than the tyranny of the private academy and its commitment to censorial practices”, its “motivations” being “market driven” and “concerned with image maintenance, reputation management and purity testing which makes its rationale somewhere between spontaneous narcissistic censorship and private state censorship, even though they do not have any state power” — an ironic accusation, given Tutt is the only person to have asked for the suppression of speech online and his siding with the tyranny of Watkins’ venture-capitalist ownership in suppressing pro-Palestinian solidarity. (As I first wrote on this blog two years ago, critique of what he says isn’t an argument against his right to say it; he has the right to be wrong [and he is wrong].)

This was something discussed on Twitter in another context recently too, when Beatrice Adler-Bolton addressed the claims of one of Tutt’s interlocutors, Tyler Austin Harper, commenting on a book about Covid that, he says, contains “a frank discussion of how the Laptop Class championed policies — lockdowns and school closures — that primarily impacted the Have Nots, while the Haves enjoyed remote work, online shopping, booming stock portfolios, and groceries delivered by the poor.”

Adler-Bolton:

This classic shallow argument runs cover for real ways that the response to the Covid pandemic has been all out class warfare, and is the perfect example of lazy, superficial “class analysis” that ignores the basic material conditions which actually define class under capitalism.

The people who peddle this “Laptop Class vs. Working Class” nonsense faux class analysis are always either profoundly unserious or profoundly dishonest. A real class analysis starts with capital—who owns it, who profits, and who is forced to labor under what conditions and why.

[Harper,] with all their self-proclaimed wisdom, is taking great pains to intentionally side step or somehow fail to recognize the fact that class isn’t about aesthetics of Zoom or the perceived moral failures of “Laptop Class” workers. It’s about how people relate to capital […]

If you can’t or refuse to see how that relationship works—how the health of everyone (including the most exploited) depends on limiting mass exposure—then you’re not doing class analysis, you’re performing self-satisfied identity politics under guise of “working-class solidarity” […]

The working class isn’t just people forced into in-person work. It also includes disabled people, immunocompromised/sick workers, caregivers, and millions of others whose lives were made more precarious by reckless reopening. Class isn’t just “who has to leave the house” […]

In short: this tweet, this book, and every repetition of this shallow “what we learned from the pandemic” argument is a perfect encapsulation of class-ignorant, bourgeois hand-wringing that mistakes the appearance of “work-from-home” privilege for meaningful political critique. […]

First—class isn’t an identity or a cultural marker—it’s a relation to capital. Workers don’t become capitalists because they worked from home. Bourgeois capitalists, owners, managers, bosses & landlords are not working class champions bc they demanded ppl return to in person work

Tutt drudges through similar arguments often, and soon enough, the two positions erected as opponents – in this instance, a “working class” and a “laptop class” (which are they exactly?) – are immediately talking past each other, as he lumps everyone who disagrees with him and his own self-promoting, reputation-managing concerns into a singular mass, whilst claiming that the “ideological commitments” of those, like himself, “in proximity to dissident anti-woke leftism … are not uniform and they are not always formed around gurus, Internet warlords or parasocial cult leaders.” He thus asserts a pseudo-pluralistic stance against class pluralism, and as such, demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the differences between us, and the project that many of us have been trying to promote to the contrary of the class essentialists, which I think Gilroy does a good job of analogously ironing out – albeit, again, in the context of blackness specifically.

Most intriguingly, given Tutt’s animosity towards Deleuze-Guattari (or rather, the legion of “Deleuzian left-liberals” he inexplicably refers to in his recent screeds), Gilroy begins the section of his book in question by noting how, in the first English translation of Edouard Glissant’s Caribbean Discourses, “his translator excise[d] Glissant’s references to the work of Deleuze and Guattari … presumably because to acknowledge this exchange would somehow violate the aura of Caribbean authenticity that is a desirable frame around the work” – something Gilroy describes as a “typical refusal to accept the complicity and syncretic interdependency of black and white thinkers”.

It is this example that leads Gilroy to consider collisions between warring “essentialist and … pluralistic viewpoints”, which “are in fact two different varieties of essentialism: one ontological, the other strategic.” I think it is a similar kind of conflict we find in many contemporary discussions of class, and so — without wanting to slide into wanton relativism — lets proceed through this section of Gilroy’s work with an analogous reading of the dichotomy between essentialism and pluralism in mind, whilst trying to avoid any erasure of the specific concerns of his argument

From the perspective of an ontological essentialism, Gilroy asserts that “the black intellectual and artist” is seen “as a leader.” This position often

registers incomprehending disappointment with the actual cultural choices and patterns of the mass of black people. It has little to say about the profane, contaminated world of black popular culture and looks instead for an artistic practice that can disabuse the mass of black people of the illusions into which they have been seduced by their condition of exile and unthinking consumption of inappropriate cultural objects like the wrong hair products, pop music, and western clothing. The community is felt to be on the wrong road, and it is the intellectual’s job to give them a new direction, firstly by recovering and then by donating the racial awareness that the masses seem to lack.

In contrast, “a pluralistic position … affirms blackness as an open signifier and seeks to celebrate complex representations of a black particularity that is internally divided: by class, sexuality, gender, age, ethnicity, economics, and political consciousness.”

Here we have an analogous dichotomy to the class-first Marxists and those whose thought is supposedly overdetermined by identity politics. Gilroy, however, takes issue with both; although he admires the intentions of the latter, given his own theorisation of the Black Atlantic as a syncretic culture, he also notes its shortcomings. He continues, on the pluralist perspective:

There is no unitary idea of black community here, and the authoritarian tendencies of those who would police black cultural expression in the name of their own particular history or priorities are rightly repudiated. The ontologically grounded essentialism is replaced by a libertarian, strategic alternative: the cultural saturnalia which attends the end of innocent notions of the essential black subject. Here, the polyphonic qualities of black cultural expression form the main aesthetic consideration and there is often an uneasy but exhilarating fusion of modernist and populist techniques and styles …

As an aside, think here — to the contrary of the excessive attention given to Fisher’s “Vampire Castle” essay — of his far more consistent “popular modernism”. But there is nonetheless a tension in Fisher’s work here, and it is one that Gilroy notes also:

The difficulty with this second tendency is that in leaving racial essentialism behind by viewing “race” itself as a social and cultural construct, it has been insufficiently alive to the lingering power of specifically racialised forms of power and subordination.

An additional problem, however, is that essentialism does not offer a satisfactory correction for this either. Both sides of the debate, taken individually, ultimately fail “those who seek to comprehend cultural developments and political resistances which have had scant regard for either modern borders or pre-modern frontiers” — something that was forcefully perused by Fisher and many others within Ccru.

Returning to the ontologically essentialist perspective, then, Gilroy offers the following critique:

At its worst, the lazy, casual invocation of cultural insiderism which frequently characterizes the ontological essentialist view is nothing more than a symptom of the growing cleavages within the black communities. There, uneasy spokespeople of the black elite – some of them professional cultural commentators, artists, writers, painters, and film makers as well as political leaders – have fabricated a volkish outlook as an expression of their own contradictory position.

I see all of this in the enduring debates about what are the right-and-proper forms of solidarity we must take with the working class. How often do Tutt and his peers complain about leftist disunity, despite their contrariness itself being indicative of and a major contribution to this(!)?

Furthermore, the essentialism of Tutt and his associates similarly leans into volkish posturing, often based on the selective bolstering of certain (identitarian rather than material) conditions they experience, and at the expense of others — more syncretic — that muddy the picture somewhat.

By the same token, however, it is true that many of those who lean into a pluralistic perspective can often overlook materialism in favour of a competing ideological position that, by its very nature, attempts to produce solidarity across identity categories. But so can the essentialists. Class is itself often reduced to an identity category — reduced, that is, to vibes and cultural signifiers with no attention paid to material conditions.

To repeat: I am not simply saying that we can replace all mentions of blackness in Gilroy’s text with ‘working-classness’. Each is already comingled with its other. They are all social categories, even if measured in very different ways. These differences are important to attend to, of course, but they are dead-ends in and of themselves, and must therefore be overcome for a solidarity without similarity — this, after all, is the rallying cry of disidentity politics.

Intersections at Sea

This is not a politics of intersectionality. Intersectionality is an inapt name for a politics in/of motion.

David McNally:

Intersectionality emerged through efforts to comprehend the multiple oppressions that constitute the social experience of many people, particularly women of color. Yet, from its beginnings, intersectionality struggled with the spatial metaphor that defines it. An intersection, after all, is a space in which discrete roads or axes cross paths…

Dissatisfaction with the idea that all of these “axes” or “vectors” of power are independently constituted has propelled a number of analysts to amend the notion of intersecting relations with a vision of interlocking ones. Patricia Hill Collins, for instance, has proposed that we think in terms of interlocking systems of oppression that comprise a “matrix of domination,” one which constitutes a “single, historically created system.” […] More recently, Rita Kaur Dhamoon has suggested that the term interactions is preference to intersections. All of these theoretical moves rightly seek to overcome the conceptual image that has haunted intersectionality theory: that of reified, preconstituted identities or locations that come into some kind of external contact with each other. But at the same time, these modifications continue to be plagued by the ontological atomism inherent in the founding formulations of intersectionality theory: the idea that there are independently constituted relations of oppression that, in some circumstances, crisscross each other.

Here too we find, at the heart of a still-dominant current and attempt at pluralistic theory, a kind of strategic (and, in some senses, also ontological) essentialism.

What Gilroy instead attempts to produce, to the contrary, pulling something provocatively positive from the crisscrossing motion of slave ships across the Atlantic — further noting how these ‘ships’ in motion lurk behind notions of, for example, more static notions of citizenship — is a truly Marxian dialectic that considers the insights of both an essentialist and pluralistic perspective; that seeks to uncover subterranean or submarine currents that elude the failings of essentialism and pluralism both.

But how, then, are we to overcome these divisions to produce a solidarity that can overthrow the common enemy of a capitalist class? A rethinking of class itself is necessary, and it is a rethinking not be found among the essentialists.

As Tithi Bhattacharya has argued, we must overcome the “narrow vision of a ‘working class’ in which a worker is simply a person who has a specific kind of job.” Economic relations are social relations. Turning to Marx:

His contribution to social theory was not simply to point to the historical-materialist basis of social life, but to propose that, in order to get to this materialist basis, the historical materialist must first understand that reality is not as it appears.

The “economy”, as it appears to us, is the sphere where we do an honest day’s work and get paid for it. Some wages might be low, others high. But the principle that structures this “economy” is that the capitalist and the worker are equal beings who engage in an equal transaction: the work’s labor for a wage from the boss.

According to Marx, however, this sphere is “in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham.” In this one stroke, Marx shakes our faith in the fundamental props of modern society: our juridical rights. Marx is not suggesting that the juridical rights we bear as equal subjects are nonexistent or fictive, but that such rights are anchored in market relations. The transactions between workers and capitalists take the form — insofar as they are considered purely from the standpoint of market exchange — of exchange between legal equals. Marx is not arguing there are no juridical rights, but that they mask the reality of production.

If what we commonly understand as the “economy” is then merely surface, what is this secret that capital has managed to hide from us? That its animating force is human labor. As soon as we, following Marx, restore labor as the source of value under capitalism and as the expression of the very social life of humanity, we restore to the “economic” process its messy, sensuous, gendered, raced, and unruly component: living human beings capable of following orders — as well as of flouting them.

The issue, long taken with Tutt’s engagement with a “post-left marketplace of ideas”, is that he engages only superficially with the surface-level appearance of various economies — economic, attentional, et al. When he was criticised for his boosting of a collection of essays published by Theory Underground, for example — see previous link — the less explicit basis for this was TU’s essentialist fetishization of the particular jobs their spokespeople hold (the figure of the philosophe-Amazon-warehouse-worker), which are championed above the actual content of their theoretical work itself, which consists of platforming TERFs and a persistent engagement with Nick Land in spite of his racism. Indeed, Tutt views many of these figures as “juridical” equals, we might say, championing his paltry voice of dissent in an attention economy that is also not as it appears.

His (and Wildermuth’s) recent alignment with the owners of Repeater at Watkins puts a far sharper point on this. Workers who take the decision to flout their boss’s orders are seen as censors, rather than comrades attempting to bring to the fore the “messy, sensuous, gendered, raced, and unruly” background of workers’ agency in — in this specific instance — left-wing publishing. Indeed, the visibility of those who have managed the media channels at Repeater / Zer0 — who are ascribed some illusionary power through their visibility, despite being precarious workers at the beck and call of the invisible capitalists at its helm — leads to the obscuring of their material conditions under the ‘professional’ masks they are forced to adorn. (A mask Adam Jones used to embolden dissent at the imprint, which was then picked up and used cynically by the ownership themselves.)

Rather than join in this struggle, Tutt and co., feeling maligned by struggles that look beyond the egotism of any individual’s author(itative) status, revert back to an essentialist discourse that is so reductive it isn’t even about class anymore, and which asserts no challenge to the materially constituted financial power of Watkins Media, now looming over everything.

What the former workers at Repeater Books — authors, presenters, admin, etc. — are attempting to highlight right now, after 18 months of threatening suppression, the flexing of legalese, and its accompanying contracted silence, is “the ‘economic’ as a social relation: one that involves domination and coercion, even if juridical forms and political institutions seek to obscure that.” The horror of this moment — and here I am speaking personally as an author who has enjoyed the (perhaps questionable) sense of home provided by Repeater as an imprint — is that, far from being an independent voice on a blog who has branched out to publish books to reach a wider audience, the compromise of the (publishing) contract, the fear of breaking it, the desire not to throw those fully employed by these institutions under the bus, has clarified the processes of domination and coercion that I may have previously — and naively — assumed did not apply.

Tutt’s perception that I have held more power at these imprints than I have in actuality is, of course, a common one in this regard. This blog, the Acid Horizon crew, and Repeater in general are blurred together, with our differing material positions overlooked.

Speaking personally, I was only ever a freelancer without contract, checking the punctuation and grammar of forthcoming titles; I am friends with Acid Horizon but uninvolved in their operations; I receive paltry royalties every six months from Watkins, based on a contract that entitles me to a fraction of the overall profit accrued from two of the books published with them (I receive no royalties for Postcapitalist Desire). If my goal in life was to financially enrich myself, I’d have spent the last ten years very differently…

An obsessive commitment to posting for free on this blog, often stealing time back from employers by writing posts on the job, actually led to me being fired from two pre-pandemic jobs, as I always did the absolute bare minimum required of me in order to spend more time at my desk writing here. Financially speaking, I spent my twenties doing very little that was actually in my own interest — and it’s not like I have any familial wealth to fall back on, as an adoptee estranged from two families, never mind one.

I hope, now in my thirties, I can drag myself out of a persistent precarity, but not at the expense of my principles. My outspokenness has been pursued with little thought paid to the contracts I’ve signed, and with far less caution than others who have previously been closer to the daily operations of the imprint, who remain dominated by them even now. It is truly a sad situation when writers, whose voices are reduced to commodities, are left feeling like they cannot speak freely. What Tutt has described as my “censoriousness” has in fact been fuelled by a wanton disregard for self-censorship. I loved Repeater because I too am alive and I too do not agree, and Watkins’ recent statement is an affront to my loyalty to the imprint on that basis, showing how even a tagline — just seven words, never mind the tens of thousands that make up their individual titles — can be bastardised by those who claim legal ownership of it.

Where is the Worker?

Bhattacharya:

What is the ideal situation for the worker? That she pulls all the way in the opposite direction and annihilates surplus value altogether — that is, she only works the hours necessary to reproduce her own subsistence, and the rest of the time is her own to do as she pleases. This is an impossible solution, in that capital will then cease to be capital. The struggle for higher wages, benefits, and so on in the workplace, against a boss, or even in a series of workplaces and against specific bosses, then is only part of the pivotal struggle of capital in general versus wage labour in general. The worker can even “leave” an individual boss, but she cannot opt out of the system as a whole (while the system as it stands exists)…

Marx:

The worker leaves the capitalist, to whom he has sold himself, as often as he chooses, and the capitalist discharges him as often as he sees fit, as soon as he no longer gets any use, or not the required use, out of him.

But the worker, whose only source of income is the sale of his labor-power, cannot leave the whole class of buyers, i.e., the capitalist class, unless he gives up his own existence. He does not belong to this or that capitalist, but to the capitalist class; and it is for him to find his man — i.e., to find a buyer in this capitalist class.

Bhattacharya:

If we take our lead from Marx himself, then it is utterly unclear why only the economic struggle for wages and benefits at the workplace must be designated as class struggle. Every social and political movement “tending” in the direction of gains for the working class as a whole, or of challenging the power of capital as a whole, must be considered an aspect of class struggle…

We should then reconsider our conceptual vision of the working class…

The question of “difference” within the working class is significant in this respect… Marx gestures toward differently “produced” sections of the working class in his discussion of the Irish worker, where the English worker is “produced” with access to a better basket of goods … while the Irish worker remains as a brutal level of existence with only “the most animal minimum of needs.” Obviously Marx did not believe that the value of the labor power of the Irish worker was a constant that remained below that of her English counterpart due to ethnicity. Instead it was a result of class struggle, or lack thereof, and it was English workers who needed to understand the commonality of their class interest with the Irish against capital as a whole.

Marx:

[Workers] must now learn to act deliberately as organizing centers of the working class in the broad interest of its complete emancipation. They must aid every social and political movement tending in that direction. Considering themselves and acting as the champions and representatives of the whole working class, they cannot fail to enlist the non-society men into their ranks. They must look carefully after the interests of the worst paid trades, such as the agricultural laborers, rendered powerless by exceptional circumstances. They must convince the world at large that their efforts, far from being narrow and selfish, aim at the emancipation of the downtrodden millions.

When the core team at Repeater Books sought to express solidarity with the Palestinian cause, this gesture towards the emancipation of the downtrodden was subdued. It has been further subdued by Watkins’ insistence on Repeater’s economic failure to meet its capitalistic standards. It seeks to separate the economic from the non-economic in a manner wholly predictable of the capitalist class.

What is left for the authors to do? This is not simply a dissenting movement that seeks to distance our books from those distributing them — a selfish, ignoble and impossible task. We must take mallets to the machinery. We must blow up the production line. The boycotting of Watkins is not, in economic terms, in the interest of any author – although the gains are so miniscule given the amount of work that goes into writing books; unless you crack a bestseller (10,000+ copies), you work accrues far, far less than what would constitute minimum wage – and those of us being particularly outspoken about this obviously run the risk of alienating our peers. But solidarity with Palestine is more important to us. At this point, I would much rather all this work produced be cleaved from its capitalist apparatus and disseminated freely online.

This is my personal opinion. What happens next is unknown. But far from this being a selfish and myopic concern, it is one that is fuelled by a desire to free up the information, the tactics, the ideas accrued for purchase and divest from an infrastructure that now only serves Watkins. The complete emancipation of this body of knowledge is concomitant, even if only in a small way, with the emancipation of our principles, of workers, of thinkers. It necessitates the sacrifice of a collective identity under the heading of Repeater / Zer0, and that act feels far more liberatory right now than any alternative. If Watkins refuse to acknowledge our desire to align ourselves with the dispossessed, then we must dispossess them of the value they accrue from us.

A Reckoning

This moment has felt like a reckoning. I have known about Repeater’s removal from the Publisher 4 Palestine petition for over a year. I have been through the grief that this betrayal occasioned. I have come to terms with the foreclosure of an imprint I loved. Many others are only just starting this process. But I am enlivened and excited about what might come next. I am determined to give further life to the last eight years of work — again, speaking personally – in a way that allows for a realignment with the facelessness of the online and the submarine currents of disidentity that lurk there…

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Detour over. In Part 4, a return to intended programming, which will nonetheless be attuned to all of the above…

Early copies of Egress on display
in The Word Bookshop, New Cross, London, 2020.

Part of me was excited for this moment, but the last few days have changed things…

My first book, Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher, turns 5 years old today. But then as now, the whole thing feels complicated and bittersweet.

It was always a completed and bittersweet book, of course, about building solidarity around failures, with grief, with others, whilst resisting the gravitational pull of ressentiment… I’m feeling that same energy today.

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Today, I’m catching the train home to Newcastle, after two weeks of “rest” in London. On this day 5 years ago, I was wandering around central London doing interviews, and waiting for the evening book launch event at the ICA with Kodwo Eshun.

Already things were tense, but not because of anything to do with the book itself. We were one week out from Boris Johnson finally implementing lockdown conditions that would keep us all mostly inside for an unknown length of time, feeling anxious about whether going ahead with the event was even a good idea anymore. But we did go ahead with it, and it was a very special evening.

Now it is 2025, and rather than lockdown looming over this first foray into print, the book is basically out-of-print, in need of further corrections to address its litany of typos (oops), and I’d really like to give it an afterword that addresses the peculiar context the book emerged into and out of, which is far clearer to me now than it was before this day 5 years ago. But that all seems unlikely, with the rights being held by a publisher that is a shadow of what it was once.

Repeater Books — and its subsidiary, Zer0 Books, bought back from scabs in 2021 — is currently controlled by Watkins Media, who have decimated the imprint’s core team of staff over a decision made 18 months ago to sign a Publishers for Palestine letter of solidarity. (Please read Sereptie’s report on all this if you haven’t already.) Repeater, then, has gone the same way as the first iteration of Zer0 Books, when control was also lost over disagreements with ownership, but today the stakes are so much higher.

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The fifth anniversary of a book’s publication should be a moment of celebration, but things are worse than they’ve ever been. Just as Zer0 Books was at that time run by reactionaries profiting off the legacy and reputation of the late Mark Fisher, so too now are the rights to Mark’s work held by an ownership investing in Israeli AI start-ups and who have smothered all dissent at the imprint against Israel’s ongoing genocide and apartheid of the Palestinian people. There is nothing to celebrate.

The fifth anniversary of a book’s publication should also be an excuse to remind people of its existence, in the hope that those who haven’t bought it will do so, in order to support independent publishing and independent writers like myself, who — contrary to any online clout — are often at the sharp, precarious end of the culture industries. (In fact, financially speaking, I’m a lot worse off now than I was five years ago, lol.)

But I will not be asking you to buy my books today. Instead, I want to implore you to do the opposite. Boycott Watkins Media. For over a year, they have battled against internal pressure and instead flexed their financial and administrative power to rid the imprint of workers trying to express solidarity with the dispossessed. Those who have applied this pressure have my full respect and adulation, but internal pressure is no longer enough. With the cat out the bag, external pressure is now what is needed.

If you care about the freedom of left-wing publishing, about Palestine, about dissenting ideas that hope to inspire those to take action against power, it has long been the time to act on it. “We are alive and we don’t agree” is Repeater’s tagline; its time to reiterate that mantra to those who currently own it.

Boycott Watkins.

Back in February, Daniel Tutt sent an email to staff at Repeater Books threatening to embarrass anyone associated with myself or Acid Horizon by publishing a letter from various Repeater authors who experienced censorship. This embarrassing letter would not appear, Tutt implied — with no sense of irony — if I (and everyone else) deleted then-recent tweets about him being an idiot online. I was further implicated in this because of my apparently censorious practices as an editor at Repeater Books — a role I have never held.

Reader, I doubled down. Consequently, Tutt only embarrassed himself and his letter never appeared. I imagine this is, in part, because of what I posted on Twitter not long afterwards.

I would have posted the Twitter statement here on the blog at the time, but it was under (re)construction then. I have a feeling, however, that all of this is going to become relevant again — not only thanks to Sereptie’s recent SubStack about Daniel’s colluding with the Zionist management of Watkins Media — so here’s what I said for posterity:

I am hearing that Daniel Tutt has sent an angry letter to Repeater asking that I delete all recent tweets about him.

It is a strange request, as I have only ever worked as a proofreader for Repeater on a freelance basis, and the imprint has no authority over what I say or write, just as I don’t have (nor have I ever had) any say over what it publishes.

Disagreements I take with the work of other authors are personal to me, and I was dissuaded of a positive opinion of Tutt’s work long before he published with them. This is surely encouraged since the imprint’s editorial team has long hoped to platform a wide range of voices.

Yes, sometimes I think that’s gone too far. I think the publication of Rhyd Wildermuth’s cloaked work of transphobia was a mistake; the contracting of a book (later rescinded?) by Angie Speaks even more so.

Writers for Compact / Sp!ked have infrequently had a place in Repeater/Zer0’s roster, and most of the imprint’s controversies can be traced back to these individuals. When Repeater bought Zer0 back from Doug Lain, it was with the intention of ousting their stain once and for all.

When Tutt threatens to publicise private tensions with other authors, he is largely referring to people associated with their reactionary cliques. Many of them have behaved in unhinged ways (as he has been doing to Acid Horizon) and I doubt many would feel sympathy towards them.

It is Tutt’s solidarity with these people that I’ve never liked. Again, this comes down to my personal principles, and I have long been vocal about them, with Tariq previously expressing gratitude with regards to having an author willing to doggedly fight the imprint’s corner in a personal capacity.

That being said, I’m aware others at Repeater have been less enthused by my gobshite tendencies. To each their own. But as their tagline goes, “I’m alive and I don’t agree.” I stand by everything I’ve said and will simply respond that Tutt can go do one.

An addendum (or two):

I should add that, since the future of the imprint has been uncertain for at least a year now, I’ve long made peace with the fact that any professional relationship I have with it (as author or proofreader) is over. So Tutt’s deferred request is all the more bizarre. I remain friends with many involved, but I will not be choosing to publish with Repeater again. All this only further demonstrates that Tutt has no idea how it is run, or who by. I simply dislike him personally.

One more thing: Tutt claims I’ve been censorious in my capacity as a proofreader. There are books I’ve been very critical of — not on the basis of politics, but quality of writing, which I’ve always addressed constructively (where possible). I take great pride in that side of my work. I think it’s a job I’m very good at, and have been told as much. I’ve never received any complaints, and my work has always aimed to improve the final project. Franky, Tutt has lost it if he thinks my removal of a comma here or there amounts to “censorship on the left”, and I look forward to what response he produces, which will be embarrassing for him but not for me.

For transparency, here’s a full list of Repeater titles that have seen my red pen. I thoroughly enjoyed reading all of them.

As for the claim [made in Tutt’s email to Repeater] that pushback against Tutt’s initial tantrum has led to him being harassed and called a fascist: in my opinion, he is not one. He’s a useful idiot who helps spread reactionary sentiments by the basis of (useless and ineffective) “critical engagement” in a debate-bro sphere that thrives on dissensus for clicks. He claims a lack of understanding about “neo-fascism”, not seeing how he contributes to its own attention economy. Deplatforming works and is a valid form of resistance under platform capitalism. The end.

It was exactly one month after this statement was posted that Tutt finally published his report on left-wing censorship at Repeater Books. As predicted, it was embarrassing for him. All of his barbs and accusations were blunted, and he no longer sought to call me out by name; he fumbled others’ grievances, not being privy to other reasons why individuals were not to be published by Repeater or Zer0 (it’s easy to make something sound political when editorial staff simply don’t want to give oxygen to the personal); and in which he parroted a line from Watkins’ Zionist management, pouring cold water on the Publishers for Palestine controversy to instead cite financial statements that are dubious and very questionable, not least because the sharing of this information may break confidentiality agreements… Oh dear.

But I imagine that is will (unfortunately) not be the last time we hear from Tutt. He’s been a glutton for embarrassment for few years now, and he keeps coming back for more.

So I’ll leave all of this here, just in case…

Part One

Black-ground

The next day, having stewed with my thoughts of the faceless for 24 hours, I took myself to another retrospective in the capital: the exhibition of Noah Davis’s paintings currently showing at the Barbican.

Davis paints Black anonymity. “The paintings aren’t political at all”, he claims – at least not in ways that audiences might expect. “You rarely see Black people represented independent of the civil rights issues or social problems that go on in the States. I’m looking to move on from all that…” But Davis’s paintings are political, of course – inevitably so. No matter what he might be trying to do away with, the problem, the social issue, he cannot extricate himself from (as a painter) is the problem — the ruin, even — of Black representation.

Davis wants to show something else, something other – but how to excavate this otherness from forms of life already Othered so violently? The Barbican’s exhibition, posthumously produced, charts his grappling with this question over two decades, chronicling a life and art practice all too brief, and in a way that is inevitably chronological. But we would be best served bucking its linear narrative and starting in the middle.

Noah Davis, Nobody (2008)

The major culture shift that marks Davis’s work throughout the 2000s and 2010s is that of the first Obama presidency, occasioning a pivotal breakdown (and breakthrough) in his image-making practice. But not everyone may think so. Discussing the section of the Barbican exhibition that features Davis’s painting Nobody, here’s Adrian Searle in the Guardian:

During the campaign leading up to Barack Obama’s first presidential win in 2008, Davis adopted a mandarin modernist pose, painting flat, quasi-geometric shapes on bare linen backgrounds, the forms all taken from the shapes of battleground states (Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico) during the previous presidential race in 2004, the peachy purple colour of the forms a mix of Democratic blue and Republican red. Only one of these paintings survive (he painted over the canvases of two of them), and it hangs in the Barbican’s upper gallery. Bright rectangles of light projected on the adjacent walls signal the missing paintings. This, I think, is a curatorial misstep in an exhibition that is already complicated by its desire to show the breath of Davis’s work, including his curatorial projects and source material [my emphasis].

Far from the misstep being the decision to include this momentary break in Davis’s otherwise consistent (albeit always developing) figurative approach to painting, for me the whole exhibition hinges on the tension that Nobody introduces; this brief move into abstraction away from the figurative mode that precedes it, and which fundamentally shifts all that comes after it. Indeed, this “desire to show” is the exhibition’s central paradox, just as it is Davis’s own. How does one ‘show’ the Black anonymity of the everyday? How does one unveil the “black-ground” of American life?

Noah Davis, Single Mother with Father out of the Picture (2007–08)

In Single Mother with Father out of the Picture (2007–08), Davis alludes to that most cliché of Black social issues – the absent father. Marlene Dumas, in the exhibition’s catalogue, writes:

The title makes us think of all the absent fathers who left as soon as there was a child to be taken care of, about double meanings and paintings in paintings. Sometimes children, when asked to draw their families, leave out a member they dislike, saying there is no space left on the paper to include them.

When, then, is included? A child, naked save for a diaper and a bulging plaster cast on their left arm. A mother, slouched in an brightly coloured armchair, repose yet imposing. An ashtray, its pus-yellow glob of filters and tar shedding a plume of grey smoke that stains the inside of a lamp shade. A gaze – two, in fact, sharing a focus on the same absent presence, eyes searching for a figure who has exited stage left.

Noah Davis, 40 Acres and a Unicorn (2007)

In 40 Acres and a Unicorn (2007), what is absent is now painted; a Black man straddles a horned mule on a field of blackness. “Out of the blackness of creation appears a mythological animal.” The title is a play on ’40 acres and a mule’, “the promise of Special Field Orders, No. 15 – a military decree issued in the final months of the American Civil War, an attempt to reinscribe order as it became clear that America had a problem: what to do with/about/for the formerly enslaved?” An order never passed; a paltry promise; a feeble gesture of restitution and/or reparation. But how does a nation possibly begin to make up for the crime of slavery? Helen Molesworth, commenting on Davis’s outrider for a Black apocalypse, quotes Langston Hughes:

In the first line of his poem ‘Harlem’, Langston Hughes asks, ‘What happens to a dream deferred?’ In the poem’s last line he answers the question with another, one he felt the need to set in italics: ‘Or does it explode?’ … If Americans finally metabolise the figure-ground relations of our country’s origin (wealth and power, both accumulated and extracted, each utterly contingent on centuries of enslaved labour), will there be a Big Bang in the socio-political order?

40 Acres and a Unicorn is one of the few paintings David produced wherein a figure of Black renewal emerges ex nihilo. Other paintings, in which Black figures are presented in full view, are equally mythological or otherwise stereotypical. But everything changes after Obama’s election.

Noah Davis, The Architect (2009)

T. J. Clark considers The Architect (2009) – a painting Davis claimed was his personal favourite – as an early foray into new forms of Black (re)abstraction, based on “a photo of the Black architect Paul Revere Williams, who perfected the art of drawing upside down…because he realised that most of his white clients couldn’t cope sitting next to him as he sketched their dream houses.” But Williams’ face is smeared with a splash of white paint, ultimately obscuring his identity, just as the painting’s title anonymises him as well. “It could be an empty gesture, that splash. It could be a cover-up”, Clark suggests. “Or it could make Paul Revere Williams – ‘Black bourgeois’, Black success story, Black architect to the stars – come free of the categories and sit on the other side of the table.”

Davis’s work teeters on the verge of an afropessimism in this regard, as his assaults on Black identity (or at least the ‘acceptable’ and ‘positive’ confines it is restricted to by white supremacy) encapsulate the fraught potentialities of creative destruction. But Davis only gazes over the edge of the critical abyss, rather than launching himself into it, as in 2011’s Painting for My Dad.

It is as if he sees two possible trajectories laid out in front of him: on the one hand, the assimilationist tendencies of a Black excellence that makes itself recognisable to the over-bearing whiteness of the art world, its white faces and its white cubes; on the other, the defiant Black negativity of ‘hood’ art. Davis is dissatisfied with both aspects of a Black modernism, however. “Do I have to make it new, and about hip hop and all this shit to get people interested?” He instead eludes a white tautology, seeking to abstain from the double consciousness of Black modernity, whilst falling further into it; rejecting the hip-hop paradox of the respectable hoodlum, whilst nonetheless aligning himself with its popular-modernist strategies. But the undercurrent that runs beneath this questionable, even impossible, desire to break free of all categories – questioning which of them is and isn’t lauded – is a fascinating one. The doubled (and doubly modernist) desire to both extend a Black radical continuum and reckon with the discontinuum that predominates in the present is precisely where the power of Davis’s work lies – that is, the newness that exudes from his attempts not to make the new at all.

Noah Davis, Painting for my Dad (2011)

Let’s return to Nobody (2008), Davis’s abstract rendering of American battleground states in the purple garb of two-party mediocrity. Far from expressing an apoliticism or a ‘both sides’ critique, the painting might well be seen as a visual pun, aping the Supremacist style of an early-twentieth-century Russian avant-garde. But this is an abstraction for a Black Marxism, with Suprematism’s interest in “the supremacy of pure artistic feeling” confounded by the muddied impurities of an imagined post-racial American politics. This is the background of Obama’s presidency, with Davis’s demonstrating a complete disinterest in Obama as representation/representative of a new age of Black excellence. Something else was obviously happening in the background, exacerbated in hindsight by the last decade of stark polarisation that has followed the hazy (and ultimately deleterious) false optimism of ‘post-racial’ liberalism. It is into this background that Davis dissolves.

“‘Hood’ Rothkos”

From Suprematism to abstract expressionism, the quality I love most about Davis’s later paintings — particularly the series The Missing Link (2013) and Pueblo del Rio (2014), the latter featuring many buildings designed by Paul Revere Williams, as well as individual works like The Conductor (2014) and Untitled (2015) — is their referencing of Mark Rothko. 

Wells Fray-Smith writes how “Davis would walk around the streets of Los Angeles and take photos of what he called ‘hood Rothkos’, patches of exterior walls where graffiti was painted over so that it looked — to Davis’s eye — like Rothko’s hazy edges” — a feature of the UK’s urban landscapes that I’ve been documenting obsessively for over a decade as well. “I am fascinated with instances where Black aesthetics and modernist aesthetics collide”, Davis explains, and the further incorporation of ‘hood Rothkos’ into his painting practice makes this collision all the more enthralling.

Noah Davis, The Missing Link 4 (2013)

Mark Rothko, Entrance to Subway (1938)

Compare Davis’s The Missing Link 4 (2013) to Rothko’s Entrance to Subway (1938) — the latter being a work in which we see the breadth of Rothko’s oeuvre in microcosm. The concrete pillars are miniature colour fields that would later be exploded and become the central focus on his work, behind which here linger ghostly white figures that populate the scene’s stairway and turnstiles — a fleeting sign of life that would disappear from his more abstract work soon afterwards.

But in Davis’s work, this similar approach to fields of colour includes Black figures far more starkly, with the denizens of Black neighbourhoods becoming miniature colour fields in their own right – blackness not as void but the presence of all colour – or otherwise pockets of Black expanse, like the “black-ground” to 40 Acres and a Unicorn poking through the quotidian; like Black holes through which the whole of creation ushers forth. But there is also no cosmic grandeur here; only glimmers of what the various housing estates depicted were meant to make exuberantly possible:

In Davis’s vision, the housing development is pregnant with possibility, holding and gestating the aliveness of Black people — their creativity, their noise, their movement, their quietude, their contemplation, their rest.

Jazz Harmony

Whereas New York architecture is seductively rendered in the foreground of Rothko’s city scenes — with a cold concrete stillness offsetting the noise of white urban life, which is pushed hauntingly into the background — architecture once again becomes the background against which Black people come to life in Davis’s works.

The built environments painted are no less serene and calming, but also whereas Rothko privileges their stillness, Davis gathers up all the motifs of Rothko’s early and late styles to reverse the polarity. “In these works, the architecture is cold and restrained, the mauve sky is bruised with yellows and greens, but the canvases are charged with the magic of creativity; with music, with song, with dance.” But everything is also blurred here, such that the distinction between activity and tranquillity is energetically and peacefully eroded.

Yes, this charge is there, no doubt, and no less than as it is in Rothko’s colour fields, which hum for the viewer before them. But Davis’s anonymised figures hum alongside his architectural studies, and it is only through the harmonic resonance of each painting’s colourful figurations that the full chord of Davis’s work is heard.

Noah Davis, Pueblo del Rio: Prelude (2014)

Take Pueblo del Rio: Prelude (2014) — a painting of a young Black boy in marching-band uniform playing what looks like a clarinet. He is dwarfed by his surroundings, and perhaps only becomes significant through his activity — like so many of the figures in Davis’s painting, particularly those from the 1975 series, which feature many Black bodies swimming: the tranquil energy of leisure time.

But at the same time, the boy doesn’t exactly ‘stand out’; he might just as readily fade into the painting’s background, lost under the canopy of nearby trees. Indeed, to remain fixated on the boy is hard, as the building next to him — glaring white, with loud yellow door and bright lime-green trim — pulls the eye forcibly to the right. Still, the boy does not completely disappear. As I try to imagine the sound he is making, I am led synaesthetically to the building once more, as the note I hear is loud white, bright yellow with a lime-green trill.

I hear a young Roscoe Mitchell, another clarinet player, blurting out bright discordant stabs into the ether. But just as there are no ‘wrong’ notes in jazz, only an ever-shifting context in which all sounds are allowed to find their place or moment of resolution, the imagined call of the young boy finds its response in his surroundings. Noah Davis, the architect, gives Black life its place to dwell — an anonymity that is not silent but in which Black life finds harmony with itself.

In Davis, then, we see the harmonic soundscapes of class struggle and proletarian leisure combined.

Thinking back to where this meander began in Part 1, the chords struck within each painting remind me of Burial’s brighter, more recent work, in which the rave has not so much faded in darkness, but is rather made more ethereal as it finds itself in the light again. The stalking of South London Boroughs, as soundtracked on Burial’s debut EP, is an activity no less beguiling on a record like ANTIDAWN, but his sonic palette is nonetheless reconfigured and recontextualised to amplify the serenity of the music-making and walking undertaken during Black leisure time.

There is still a xenomania here, but it is also oddly domesticated; the outside has been let in. The tension is still never settled, however. Its provocation as ‘headmusic’, as a soundtrack most befitting of urban dérives or bedroom-lounging – both background activities for headphone listening – is that, as comforting as the music may become, it remains essentially unheimlich, accompanying us in familiar environs that it might also help us see anew.  

The more recent output of Burial, then, is a fitting accompaniment for what Davis’s painting practice turned towards the end of his life. No less anonymous, no less faceless, but rather than wandering hooded and balaclava’d on night walks, a new anonymity is treasured that takes place during the day. This is not so much “joy as resistance”, but leisure time as free time. (And remember: “communism is free time and nothing else.”)

Obsessed with the Internet

I would be remiss here, as I try to drag part two of this tripartite ramble to a close, not to mention Noah Davis’s self-confessed “obsession” with the internet. Unfortunately, his website, bestpainteralive.com, appears to be down at present, but a slideshow of the images formerly featured on Davis’s site were thankfully given their own quadrant of the Barbican exhibition.

Here we find Davis’s more personal treasure trove of anonymised Black life; a carousel of everyday photography, whether taken by his own family members or rescued from flea markets, sourced for paintings but also delightful in their own right. Here too we have another iteration of the often-invisible being given an uneasy presence, as the unheimlich, the homeless, the abandoned visuality of Blackness — literally, its material ephemera — is recontextualised and reclaimed.

It is a great shame that the website is not currently accessible. In my head, traipsing back through the London Underground, camera in hand as I am beckoned home by thoughts of bed, eyes peeled for new “‘hood’ Rothkos” to add to my own online archive, I had imagined a visit to Davis’s old website would make the perfect coda to this gathering of thoughts.

But such is the fragility of the online. What to do with it? Simply printing off the internet is not enough, but as our access to Internet cultures becomes more straitjacketed, less open, more gatekept and curated, less wantonly expansive, there is a lingering desire to allow so much of this work to materialise itself in print as possible, so that it is not forever lost. As I apply the finishing touches to these posts — the 1,986th, 1,987th and 1,989th entries on this site — I wonder if and when and how and who might take on the unenviable task of curating what I’ve left behind for those more time-poor (it certainly won’t be me).

Although it is said that nothing can ever truly be deleted from the Internet, things go missing all the time. They may remain somewhere, archived, no doubt, but no one is ever likely to find this web ephemera without already knowing where to look for it. (In the case of Davis’s website, I’m sure someone still has access, but it’s not any of us, since not even the WayBack Machine has retained it.) But maybe the challenge is simply letting it go, and holding out hope that someone – like Davis – sees potential in recontextualising all this ephemera for times new, in ways as yet unthought of. Such a process will surely be daunting. The solution isn’t always to give materiality to the immaterial; to provide a face for the faceless.

But what’s more, it is likely the whole predilection for dichotomies that fails us here. Contemporary subjectivities laugh heartily at absolutes…

Part Three

This is the first of three posts on two weeks I spent in London having a “rest”. It’s about exhibitions I saw, books I read, and an attempt to wrestle with faceless culture in the twenty-first century. Part 1 is the longest of the three, and where I talk about the retrospective for The Face magazine at the National Portrait Gallery, bedroom culture, Simon Reynolds’ Futuromania, Burial, and more. Part 2 reflects on Part 1 in the context of the Noah Davis exhibition at the Barbican. Part 3 is about vibe shifts and a Porter Robinson gig attended at Brixton Academy. Enjoy.

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Getting Out of The Face (Again [and Again])

After waking up with the sun one Monday morning in south-west London, I left for the city’s centre with hopes of returning back to base inspired. First stop: the National Portrait Gallery for The Face Magazine: Culture Shift, a retrospective on forty years of the magazine’s groundbreaking art direction and photographic imagery. But on leaving the gallery a few hours later, I found myself feeling cold.

Don’t get me wrong – a large part of the reason I wanted to visit the exhibition was a long-standing interest I have had in fashion photography; there’s no undue cynicism with regards to glamour here. But I realised that, for all the exhibition’s open celebration of youth culture, I didn’t see a semblance of youth that I recognised, or that I could at least align with my own. This is not necessarily a flaw within the exhibition itself, but for a show talking about The Face’s contribution to (even instigation of) a ‘culture shift’, I left more interested in how culture later began to shift in another direction – that is, not towards faces, but towards the faceless.

The name The Face “originated from 60s mod-culture and meant someone with the right clothes, the right haircut, and the right taste in music”, explained the exhibition’s wall text. True to form, the fantastic array of imagery on display gathered together four decades’ worth of style icons, musicians, and club kids; of those most visible across various distinct, yet also intersecting, cultural movements and moments.

But at a certain point, as the various displays moved from the 1980s toward the present day, the faces themselves became less important, or at least less singular. Ian Curtis, David Bowie, Grace Jones, Leigh Bowery, Björk, and Kate Moss – so much Kate Moss – were soon replaced (although not entirely) by models whose names I did not know and which were not listed. Whereas many of the initial images in the exhibition were accompanied by numeric indicators that led the eye to names corresponding to those pictured, before long those actually featured in the images were left anonymised, with credits given only to the faceless figures behind the scenes – those responsible for pressing the shutter or for the extensive post-production work.

Nothing is made of the facelessness that stalks the later eras of The Face, except when the conspicuous absence is set in relief by the heading of the exhibition’s final section. ‘Culture IRL’ turns to a new generation of now-ever-present faces, like Charli XCX (obviously), which is intriguing given this new era of pop’s intractability from the ‘hyper-’ – that recent mutation of pop that is impossible to talk about without reference to the online.

Next to this section, there was a magazine spread that announced the arrival of the Internet explicitly and the cultural cornucopia this new technology granted the general public speedy access to — notably by making reference to early web nomenclature and acronyms, highlighting how Internet culture was far more textual than visual or (more specifically) photographic — but little more was said about it in the exhibition itself. It was almost as if the threat posed by the Internet to the print culture being celebrated was intentionally snubbed. Instead, all emphasis was placed on those who broke free from the virtual, or what I might call ‘legacy icons’; the figures already visible, or young debutantes who materialised miraculously after a period of gestation within a disembodied matrix. Their number, however – compared to the wealth of imagery documenting decades past – was few.

The culture, it seems, had shifted again — and magazine culture struggled to adapt. Whereas the early issues of the magazine romanticise club culture, investigating clubs as spaces “with bigger meanings that went beyond just drinking and dancing … that clubs are places in which the young and creative try on new ways of expressing and enjoying themselves that felt right for the times … the best places in which to hunt out the new music and ideas that may eventually infiltrate everyone’s everyday lives”, it was clear that by the turn of the millennium, these spaces had been joined by others far less visual and ripe for documentation.

I felt this oblique tension between print and web most pointedly when reading one of the wall-adorning quotations from behind-the-scenes editorial staff, which described the paradoxical allure of magazine culture in general; paraphrasing, the allure procured by the sense that the magazine’s readers are privy to a curated cultural cool, gaining insight into a secretive world, which is nonetheless available to anyone who chooses to buy the magazine, like you’ve been placed on the VIP list for a club that everyone is invited to. This is the function of magazine culture that I’ve always been intrigued by too, particularly the magazine’s status as art(ful) object: you buy a magazine from the high-street newsagents and take it back home with you, where it becomes a kind of ephemeral coffee-table book, more lightweight (although not always…) but often no less imposing; a kind of glossy, polished scrapbook containing this month’s cool before we are implored to seek out the cool-to-come.

But when I later walked to a newsagents in Soho, famous for its wide array of magazines to purchase, I spent some time browsing, hoping to have my feelings contradicted, but found very little that made me want to fork out £15-£20 for an afternoon read in the park.

Still, the allure of magazine culture in general is familiar — I had subscriptions to a few magazines in the mid-to-late 00s, but let them expire when this allure was felt more expansively online. Today, print and online feel like very different worlds, with both having blurred together somewhat, but back then, it felt like the “one-man magazine” — as Mark Fisher’s k-punk was once described — felt like a real competitor. Now both have been eclipsed by the rise of social media, but whereas magazine archives make exhibitions like that at the National Portrait Gallery possible, it is hard to think of an equivalent overview that could do the blog era justice. A tome like Fisher’s K-Punk collection, for instance, obviously loses its hypertextuality, its sense of community and conversation, replacing the lightness of the web with a very physical weight, even though such a project is limited to the stand-alone texts that make sense in the context of print, with the rest — arguably the very lifeblood of the thing — discarded.

If retrospective exhibitions for blogs sounds ridiculous — and it is — it is nonetheless interesting how Internet culture is still capable of its own nostalgia returns. Indeed, a decade on from the heady heights of blog culture – not simply the theoretical, autodidactic cult-studs blogosphere I remain tangential to, but also fashion blogs (some of which made fleetingly moves into more traditional forms of print, like Rookie Mag) and the long-since copyright-struck independent music blogs (which once felt as integral as something like Pitchfork whilst running on little more than a drop of its resources) – I am repeatedly humbled by the frequent return, by way of web nostalgia, of niche bands and artists seemingly lost to the ether, who are occasionally summoned back to momentary prominence thanks to the drifting of a collective memory – a drifting that was, anachronistically, already a staple of early Internet culture, and which now seems to exist strangely alongside the mainstreaming of many figures most active at that time. [1] Such returns are humbling because they are often devoid of any prior air of exclusivity – an exclusivity that was, of course, always illusory; the isolation of bedroom web-surfing provided decontextualised cover for the seldom-acknowledged fact that the post-Y2K Internet was open and accessible to everyone.

This was the intriguing disparity of online culture at the time, felt more sharply since. I’d wager I spent far more time perusing the web than many of my IRL peers, for instance, with every night after school given over to scrubbing Mediafire links from Blogspots, like a kind of digital crate-digging through which the teenager (with little concept of money, never mind the sustainability of the music ‘industry’) could download gigabytes of sonic history and, given the errant lack of adolescent responsibilities, actually have time to listen to a lot of it. [2] Making oneself the obsessive digger of a friendship group led to a misleading sense of erudition, it must be said, and it is evermore clear to me now that the things that piqued by interest in the late 00s and early 10s were just as accessible to a more global audience than any more local and physically situated scene could ever be. What felt personal and secretive was, in fact, the common experience of a generation. As Simon Reynolds – more on whom later – noted at the time: “Infinite choice + infinitesimal cost = nomadic eclecticism as the default mode for today’s music fan.”

The Internet wasn’t all about downloads though. It also made it possible to feel connected to IRL scenes in other cities that you were otherwise completely removed from. The priviness of UK magazine culture, so London-centric, was no longer at such a remove from a Northern, suburban existence (to speak of my own situatedness). I could (and did) follow a cultural percolation in, for example, the USA’s Pacific North West and feel like some sort of distant participant – a feeling somewhat vindicated when I emailed Phil Elverum back in 2019, and he commented that he remembered writing my name on many AirMail packages.

Thus, when first jobs brought a paltry income, which wasn’t needed to pay bills or rent, mail-order record labels were a more considered step-up from hogging the family bandwidth. K Records, P. W. Elverum & Sun, but also distributors closer to home, like the much-missed Volcanic Tongue, felt like record shops, magazines, blogs, and labels all rolled into one. And this stuff was all the more attractive precisely because the magazines weren’t writing about it. The gatekeepers of cool weren’t often plugged into the Internet in the same way as the average music fan, as if unable to fully understand the facelessness of the online underground, which was anathema to their ways of operating. Then, as IRL scenes disappeared into anonymity as well, in line with the online spaces many also frequented, there wasn’t the same interest in faces as previously. In fact, it felt necessary for popular media to concoct scenes of its own to keep up with the times.

Simulacra and the Ephemeral Skin

I was thinking about this the other day after coming across Ewen Spencer’s photographs of the cast of Skins, commissioned by Channel 4, on some random Instagram page. As Lucy Bourton writes, reflecting on the Skins shoot for It’s Nice That a few years ago:

Ewen’s commission came via two in-house creatives then at Channel 4, who contacted the photographer after seeing his personal work photographing teenagers, shot during the early 2000s for [– where else? –] The Face. Ewen would visit clubs, bars and youth centres around the UK, taking candid photographs of teens in a style truthfully portraying those early years of over-excited hedonism after school. Around the time of Skins in 2007, Ewen had also recently published his first photo book Open Mic, centred on the burgeoning Grime scene. Ewen’s agent at the time would often leave it as a gift for prospective clients. “In general,” he reflects, “they were something of a calling card, those pictures.”

Channel 4’s team then began to build a brief for Ewen referencing these works as well as Late Night Party, another photography book “which had a similar approach to making pictures with direct flash of kids partying but less candid, and more direct reactions to camera,” he explains. At the time, “I wasn’t really watching TV,” adds the photographer – a possibly helpful factor when creating the promotional material of a show unlike any of its predecessors. Rather than diving into similar campaigns for television Ewen built his own references, like the works of Irish street photographer Tom Wood and Larry Fink’s early work of parties in New York and Studio 54.

Although Bourton’s article lauds the photoshoot for becoming truly iconic and instantly recognizable to a whole generation, I can’t help but feel turned off by it in retrospect. The pictures themselves are great, of course, and my feelings in no way reflect on Spencer as a photographer, whose book of photos from the UKG era is a prized possession. But for my age bracket at least, aged 16–19 during the first few seasons of Skins, the TV show came first, as a kind of simulacra youth culture. We imitated its debauchery, rather than feeling like it was an honest reflection of our lives, for no other reason than we had little else to draw on. [3]

This is further notable given Spencer’s success within the pages of many London magazines, documenting actually existing subcultures, like the grime scene, then in their heyday. But in a down-trodden city in East Yorkshire, which seemingly had no authentic culture of its own (at least not any longer), most were less attuned to the grime revolution happening down south, and the local parties we could attend locally were either ‘indie’ club nights or otherwise retromanic affairs that, further unbeknownst to us, had little in common with what they were imitating.

Above all else, what we had was the Arctic Monkeys, and it was partly a deep dissatisfaction regarding their spawning of a thousand imitations in my hometown that led me to attune my ears elsewhere, hearing in Burial, most significantly, the distant whisper of a club scene that was all the more spectral when listened to in the indie-boy heartlands. (Cue my first engagements with the k-punk blog.)

Xenomania

On leaving the National Portrait Gallery, I walked through Soho, stopping briefly to look in the bookshop at the Photographers Gallery, before then heading back to new haunts in Bloomsbury. In the Gower Street Waterstones, I picked up Simon Reynolds’ Futuromania long past due.

Reynolds provides characteristic clarity when discussing the impact of the Internet on scene-making, just as the first decade of this century had come to a close. In a chapter notably drawn from an article that first appeared on MTV Iggy in 2011, he reflects back on his earlier book, Retromania – which was “partly an investigation of the ways in which the internet has transformed twenty-first-century listening habits and music-making … primarily concerned with digital technology’s effect on our sense of time” – describing how “[a] new generation of listeners and musicians is emerging whose consciousness is post-geographical as well as post-historical”, as “a thirst for fresh musical stimuli … slips easily past geographic borders and cultural boundaries.”

Reynolds terms this “appetite for the alien” as xenomania, plotting various points of convergence wherein “one contingent of Western hipsters are feverishly tracking contemporary sounds from far-slung corners of the globe,” whilst “another bunch are investigating the musical pasts of these non-Western countries” as well. (I like this term, obviously, as the name of this blog is already a nod to that era of blog culture, which was so formative for me.) Many of the blogs, labels and mutant genres listed in the article leave a bitter taste in the mouth, however, which Reynolds acknowledges. There is a tendency on display that is quintessentially capitalist-imperialist, extracting commodities from forgotten archives or freely traded bits of contemporary music from around the globe, before repackaging them for Western audiences as new forms of exotica. Many of these sites have since come in for reprisals; Awesome Tapes from Africa is one such example I remember coming in for some (perhaps undue) criticism at some point over the last decade. What is at issue here is the (potentially) exploitative practices of certain labels themselves — that is, the (often inadvertent) implications of exposing non-Western subcultures to the global dynamics of capitalist exploitation, even just the brashness of Western re-presentation — rather than the new audiences procured for the music in question; it is hard to deny that so much of it is fuckin’ brilliant.

Furthermore, the emergence of such a strategy at the fringes of the music-industrial core had huge effects on music-making itself as a practice. Musical styles newly reaching the West’s global ear led to rapid-fire mutations and developments in its own sound palettes. But what Reynolds also notes is that none of this was new, even then. Western musicians have long taken inspiration from ‘alien’ sources for hugely generative ends (culturally speaking at least); the Internet has simply made this process far easier than ever before.

Reynolds quotes an article from New York magazine by Justin Davidson:

‘A century ago, Bartók had to haul his gramophone through the mud of Moravia to learn about folk music. Now a curious kid in Brooklyn can track down an Azerbaijani song in seconds. Today’s styles need not be born of deep experience; they form out of collisions that bypass history and geography.’

Here again, a tension lingers. Expropriation and appropriation are practices more easily enacted than ever before (at least by those who seek to exploit these sounds for profit); meanwhile, whilst there is nonetheless something preferable about this cultural exploration being shorn of the romanticism of colonial adventure, artists are seldom renumerated for their work when it is shared freely online – the shadow of colonialism is long and can always be felt within the digital. But perhaps the cultural gains, by and large, exceed the tenuous (im)moral code of the market overall. Still, we must acknowledge that our well-meaning xenomania is subsumed within capitalism’s own, which is so fundamental to its functioning. With the other side of the world is at your fingertips, then, there is a fine balance to be maintained between decontextualization and decolonisation, as ease of access completely disorientates any precocious sense of what constitutes the (Western) canon at the same time as this ease also results in further exploitation.

Despite all this, Reynolds ends on a “more generous” note, highlighting how “xenophilia (fervour for the foreign)” can quickly shade into “neophilia (ardour for the new).” He continues: “The impulse to seek out the alien sounds that already exist on the planet (that may indeed have existed for decades) but are effectively new to you could be a displacement of the future-hunger, the quest for the unknown, that used to be the motor driving the vanguard sectors of Western pop.” Although warning against a blog-mining tendency that extracts various kinds of music (often borne of class discontent) from their political context, there is also a potential here for the nurturing of a nascent class solidarity.

On this point, I was somewhat surprised, in Reynolds’ overview of cultural exchanges during the ascent of globalisation, not to see Northern Soul mentioned. This throughline from Mod culture to blog culture is far from neat or without its problems, but as Northern Soul nights were still a staple of my own adolescence, experienced as part of the retromanic Payback parties hosted at Hull’s Adelphi Club, the political resonances of a dancefloor continuum constructed between the United States’ industrial Midwest and England’s industrial North were not lost even on an adolescent who’d then had barely any experience of the labour market. This potential remained latent online and was still there during the blog days, even if the acquisition of political contextualisation required more click-holing than was required to access the music in general. Indeed, the potential for contextualisation and recontextualization was just as potent as the more prevalent result of context collapse, and this dichotomy was even indicative of the UK decentralisation within dance culture (and markets) as a whole.

Decentred Club

Steve Goodman in 2014:

[O]ften when people are talking about the history of rock music, they say that punk killed rock. Punk was the end of rock and everything after then was just, like, undead zombie rock. I think you can do a parallel in the UK – I don’t know how far you could run with it – by saying it was grime that stuck the knife into rave. It was grime that killed this kind of peace, love, unity, respect, the hippy side of rave … [But] I’m ambivalent. Depending on the day of the week, I’m either melancholy or upbeat about this. But I think you can see this as a process of creative destruction … The UK has still got a bit of a hangover. It’s still clinging onto this idea that it is the centre of the underground electronic musical universe. And I just don’t think it is just now.

Last year was the first year since I started DJing where most of the music I was playing was actually American and not British. So I think that’s quite interesting and quite telling.

Not Dead, But Buried

Earlier in Futuromania, Reynolds considers Burial as an example of solidarity-producing xenophilic music production in the twenty-first century, epitomising — as he did for Mark Fisher — the hauntological currents of the late 2000s. [4] Not only does “the way Burial talks about his music [align] closely with Ghost Box, the UK label that’s home to spectral audio exponents like the Focus Group and Belbury Poly … with references to uncanny presences, subliminal hums, moments when you glance at the face of a friend or family member and catch something alien in their expression”, he has also expressed “childhood love of the ghost stories of M. R. James”, Reynolds writes. But this pervasive structure of feeling is also more expansive than that of Ghost Box in general, with

Fisher pegg[ing] Burial’s self-titled 2006 debut as ‘an elegy for the hardcore continuum’: a misty-eyed memorial to the British subculture of pirate radio and warehouse raves that coalesced at the end of the eighties, evolved through mutant nineties styles like jungle and 2-step garage, then splintered into twenty-first century offshoots like grime and dubstep. Listening to Burial, Fisher wrote, felt ‘like walking into the abandoned spaces once carnivalised by raves and finding them returned to depopulated dereliction. Muted air horns flare like the ghosts of raves past.’

Although Fisher’s interpretation is “enduringly compelling”, there remains the question of what comes next, or in what ways the affective qualities of his music might be most effectively expanded and contextualised politically. [5] Indeed, what I find most affirming about Reynolds’ ode to Burial is his focus on “music’s power to dissolve divisions”, which is often lost under the music’s general melancholia and post-grime complications. But it is integral to examine where exactly this melancholia comes from. As Reynolds notes, Burial once “told FACT magazine, ‘It sounds stupid, but it’s like they [the ‘classic’ rave producers] were trying to unite the whole UK, but they failed. So when I listen back to them I get kind of sad.’” Behind the aesthetically hauntological exorcisms of Burial’s output, then, “lurks another spectre: socialism”, bringing ‘hauntology’ (as genre) back into contact with its Derridean namesake. The “ideological battles” that defined the late-twentieth century thus remain “the background of Burial’s music and shaped his bleak vision of modern urban life.” Reynolds continues:

Where dance music is generally about abandon, Burial’s music is about abandonment … When his songs aren’t about feeling bereft and forsaken, the titles point to emotional damage, or its corollary, the capacity of damaged people to lash out and perpetuate the cycle…

It is Burial’s adept attuning to this pervasive structure of feeling that has allowed his music to spread much further than that of many of his contemporaries, Reynolds argues. Indeed, although the chronology here is far from neatly linear, Burial’s music can be thought of as a kind of post-grime (following Goodman’s 2014 observation) that is as indebted to grime itself as post-punk was to its predecessor. Reynolds makes this connection explicit when he suggests it is precisely the “postpunk connection [that] helps explain why Burial is the one dubstep artist that people who don’t follow dubstep, or even electronic music, have latched onto”, such that it “makes sense to slot Burial in that pale lineage of ‘young men, the weight on their shoulders,’ to quote an Ian Curtis lyric — to see him as another of those sad-eyed ‘missing boys’ who left ‘some signs’ and is ‘now a legend’, to quote the Durutti Column’s tribute to the dead Curtis, ‘The Missing Boy’.”

But whereas some of the signs left by Curtis include the iconic photographs of his sharp jaw and thousand-yard stare, as featured in the National Portrait Gallery’s retrospective for The Face, Burial is far more notable as one of the faceless who, although not entirely invisible, lacks the same visual presence in contemporary culture (even though his music remains everywhere). Indeed, the trailing-off of The Face exhibition’s visual maximalism to leave large parts of contemporary culture in shadows is felt most acutely in the absence of someone like Burial especially.

Bedroom Culture

If the youth culture I am most familiar with was not represented amongst the scenesters at the National Portrait Gallery, it is undoubtedly because the culture I grew up with was a bedroom culture.

I went to clubs, even if this was overall a depressing experience. (As I’ve said before, my first experiences of jungle were not in clubs — I was born in 1991 — but at the travelling fairs of the late nineties, with jungle and gabba blaringly out of waltzers and other thrill rides.) Drum and bass could still be heard throughout my adolescence, but this scene was oddly adjacent to Hull’s indie scene, thanks to cross-cultural acts like Chase & Status, who, as veritable pop stars, were able to straddle multiple scenes at once. But this indie scene was also a disaster, and was utterly devoid of any of the affective qualities that many now look back on fondly with regards to the race scene.

Hull’s queer scene fared much better – even if I’d stay firmly in the closet for almost fifteen years after first frequenting the cavernous and relatively invisible homesteads of that particular community. All my memories of this time are bittersweet. The soundtrack – leaning heavily on Lady Gaga et al. – didn’t feel that different from the pop playlists of the nearby shopping centre. The advances of predatory men left me anxious and afraid. Above all, I remember the awkwardness of having first attended Hull’s premiere queer bar Fuel with a friend, very much out of the closet, who I was nonetheless in love with, and feeling sidelined by a painful disregard as I was left outside the women’s bathrooms, where she spent half an hour having sex, as I cursed my own shyness and the body I inhabited. I remember being taken under the wing of three towering queens, welcoming me into a lovingly open community, but I was not ready to step fully under their wi(n)gs, as they asked me all sorts of questions I didn’t yet have the answers to. I numbed the alienation with alcohol and wanted to disappear. I wanted to be back in my bedroom. I did not have a good time.

Perhaps it is unsurprising, in light of all this, that I continue to feel most seen by Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant than the Sun. “The bedroom, the party, the dancefloor, the rave: these are the labs where the 21^st C nervous systems assemble themselves”, he writes, “the matrices of the Futurhythmachinic Discontinuum.” I never needed drugs to feel out of myself; I had gender dysphoria and an Internet connection. The listening stations listed by Eshun are multiple, intersecting, even as they appear disparate and disjointed, but the point gleamed from Eshun’s fragmentary exploration of twenty-first-century culture, wonderfully scrambled by an online expressionism, is that preference for one over the others hardly made for a less intensive experience.

My teenage bedroom was a potent site of affective concentration and cultural channelling, where I could don the mannerisms of the “kinaesthete [who] overrides that pre-modern binary that insists the dancefloor is all mindless bodies and the bedroom nothing but bodiless minds.” The bedroom was where the body went to war with itself, or otherwise fumbled through loving gestures with that of another, not a virgin, but no less caged in an uncomfortable skin. My bedroom is where I felt both at home and off-world. Indeed, Juan Atkins’ famous quote, repeated by Eshun, that the “synthesiser allowed me to create, in my bedroom, the sound of what it would be like if a UFO landed in my front yard”, was still relatable, even for the non-musician. The escapes of club culture were not drastic enough for the jailbreak I sought in my daydreams. I didn’t need a night out on the town; I needed to be abducted at night from a tent erected in the garden.

This isn’t the ‘cool’ response for anyone interested in contemporary culture, and I can only laugh at the resolution I made last year to engage more actively in whatever club scene Newcastle has to offer; I haven’t successfully gone out dancing in over a year… Partly because the battery of various medications I’m taking for gender transition has led me toward a cautious sobriety, but also because I have come to accept that my guilt rests on a false dichotomy between the bedroom and the dancefloor that I’ve never really believed in anyway, even if I struggle to ignore the distinctions placed on Eshun’s adjoining listening stations by the faciality and presenteeism of so much contemporary scene culture. Re-engagement with the club abandoned, what is, on further reflection, far more interesting to me – and here I have my essay for Urbanomic’s Sonic Faction firmly in mind – is the systemic nervous conditions produced by a protracted commitment to bedroom culture over the course of a lifetime, in spite of all else I am told I should enjoy.

Eshun – whose brother Ekow was notably quoted on the exhibition walls at The Face, conjuring an interesting (if imagined) distinction between them; Ekow for The Face, Kodwo for the faceless – covers a litany of headmusics on his meander through the various nervous-systemic assembly lines discussed in More Brilliant Than the Sun, with ‘bedroom music’ being that which continues to resonate with me the most. Massive Attack’s 1991 album Blue Lines, for example,is referred to as “bedroom music” explicitly, and there is surely no more representative anthem for this than the track ‘Daydreaming’, featuring Shara Nelson singing the wistful refrain “I quietly observe standing in my space / Daydreaming”.

But it is on Tricky’s Maxinquaye that this sound tumbles into deeper complexities, becoming “a post-HipHop headmusic” that is “unheimliche, at home nowhere” – not at the party or the rave, on the dancefloor, or even in the bedroom. It is a disorienting and affective headmusic that wouldn’t be heard again with the same intensity, I’d argue, for another twenty years – that is, until Earl Sweatshirt’s unsubtly titled I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside.

But as various odes to hikikomori culture linger in the back of my mind — particularly Lisa Blanning’s essay “Ghost in the Machine”, for the Audint essay collection Unsound:Undead — I am reminded that, at a certain point, the introverted intensity of unheimlich anhedonia can feel as dangerous and risky a place to dwell as the extroversion of club hedonism. Finding ways to build outwards whilst falling further inwards can be a harder, but also richer, form of cultural involution – a move I’ve tried to chronicle elsewhere – than the many of the more obvious and facialising broadcast stations available.

The real difficulty here is not letting the bedroom line of flight become ingrown and necrotic…

Cybergothic

When lurking amongst the faceless, we remain at risk of forgetting the necessity of extending our internationalist solidarity outwards. The web is one such vector for doing this, but the Internet today feels anathema to so many of its initial promises.

Nick Land once felt like the philosopher of a contemporary xenomania – with his favourable view of capitalism reflecting and refracting the various challenges faced by anyone who seeks to engage with their own desires to be rid of a system that has nonetheless produced the subjectivity they try to embody – and following my recent reflection on his dwindling influence in contemporary online spaces, I’m reminded of that post’s opening quotation, taken from his essay ‘CyberGothic’: “It all starts for you with a casual channel-hopper question: what’s happening on the other side?”

Where this cybergothic ‘other side’ is located was, at that time, less than clear – and that was undoubtedly the point. The challenge undertaken by the future-hungry few who stumbled across his writings was precisely that of orienting oneself in his otherwise disorientating prose. It was a challenge reflected within the early Internet in general, which disassembled the channel-hopping imperatives of television, whereon distinct streams of information are generally experienced one at a time (if nonetheless flitting between them with an erratic despondency), to instead subsume you in a semioblitz where hopping channels wasn’t really a requirement any longer. Everything everywhere all at once. That is to say, everything, at least at that time, seemed to come at you across an infinite plateau, endlessly clicking through channels that were hyperlinked across an unfathomable web – cells interlinked, interlinked – producing digital natives who were aliens at home as far as their parents were concerned.

Then came the drastically advanced regression. The technofeudal equivalent of channel-hopping today is the platform-hopping of social-media doomscrolling. Had too much of Twitter’s infinite misery? Hop over to Instagram for infinite pictures and reels of cats and more friendly faces. Too cloyingly sentimental? Have you tried the artificial dementia of your parents’ Facebook feeds? Not for you? Back to the geopolitical nightmares and live-streamed genocides of the present, I guess…

Land’s channel-hopping was, in retrospect, more political in nature. Tired of Marxism, he became more interested in the thought of the online right, and then got stuck there. It is not for nothing that most people seem to equate him to a Boomer who has channel-hopped their way to Fox News and Facebook disinformation and given in to the brainrot. But for all of Land’s (and, admittedly, the Ccru’s general) penchant for Heart of Darkness analogising, it is arguably all the more significant that doomscrolling isn’t the journey to the end of the river it once was. Although Land has long seen himself as Kurtz, we have (for better or worse) lost the inevitability of any Kurtz-gradient leading you to the terminal destination of his online cargo cult. Yes, for better or worse, the doomscroll never ends. Mark Fisher’s description of the present as a “frenzied stasis” is vindicated.

On Difficulty

But the further development of this particular culture shift can be seen moving not only against Land but also to the contrary of Mark Fisher’s assessment of despondent youth in the late 2000s as well. As he wrote in Capitalist Realism, a Millennial youth’s

malaise, the feeling that there is nothing new, is itself nothing new of course. We find ourselves at the notorious ‘end of history’ trumpeted by Francis Fukuyama after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a ‘terminal beach’ was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche’s most prescient pages are those in which he describes the ‘oversaturation of an age with history’. ‘It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself’, he wrote in Untimely Meditations, ‘and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism’, in which ‘cosmopolitan fingering’, a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche’s Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness.

The figure of the young Millennial as Nietzsche’s Last Man is made all the more ironic, however, given that the prophetic Nietzsche was also supposedly the limit of an adolescent thought, as Fisher believed many were unwilling (or thought themselves unable) to cross the threshold and engage in difficult, bloody-minded critique; disinterested in philosophising with a hammer – something occasioned by an initial dwindling of attention spans, Fisher thought, which clearly has nothing on the hypo-attentions of the TikTok age:

Ask students to read for more than a couple of sentences and many – and these are A-level students mind you – will protest that they can’t do it. The most frequent complaint teachers hear is that it’s boring. It is not so much the content of the written material that is at issue here; it is the act of reading itself that is deemed to be ‘boring’. What we are facing here is not just time-honored teenage torpor, but the mismatch between a post-literate ‘New Flesh’ that is ‘too wired to concentrate’ and the confining, concentrational logics of decaying disciplinary systems. To be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, YouTube and fast food; to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand. Some students want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp – and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension – that the indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche

This is, infamously, Fisher at his most grumpy. But his longing for a youthful re-engagement with the weird and wonderful undoubtedly jumped the gun. Speaking personally at least, as someone who was an A-level student when Fisher’s debut was published, deeply immersed in an online xenomania, I was most certainly reading Nietzsche then, relishing the challenge, and being all the more insufferable for it. I also do not think I was that exceptional in doing so. Millennials like myself existed then, and many other Nietzsche-lovers no doubt exist today.

In light of this, it is worth dwelling a moment further on the xenomania that Reynolds identifies just two years after Capitalist Realism was published, as it provides a further counterpoint to Fisher’s doomier outlook. Indeed, that xenomania is an alternate path taken by the otherwise despondent youth Fisher had the misfortune of teaching then is clarified further by the more recent work of Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, who finds that “the most vigorous campaigns of intensity sometimes flourish exclusively under the shadow of certain extinction” – a shadow that chills the New Flesh of 2025 inherently. This is what Robin Mackay finds in Omnicide II, writing in the book’s foreword, adding that “fully opening the ‘exceptional window of consciousness’ afforded by the prospect of inevitable demise exposes us to an anticipative form of mania that reaps analeptic quickening from certain doom.” Xenomania, then, might well be one more affective (and effective) vector through which “one who, in losing all hope, gains acuity in perception, perhaps even developing new sensitivities and preternatural capacities for action”. [6]

This is something Fisher channelled for himself, of course, as someone so intensely active online for twelve years of his cut-short adult life. He may have even, at times, expected too much from his A-level students, yet to be fully exposed to the true abundance that surrounds them, as he had already been, instead confined to platform-hopping and yet to uproot themselves from family homes where they hang impotently on the meat rack of postmodernity as so much ‘New Flesh’. Fisher at his most grumpy could often be found projecting in this way, and it is hard to blame him. What a difficulty it must have been for him to have to teach Nietzsche to 16-to-18-year-olds students after the highs of his PhD years at the University of Warwick… But it’s hardly a problem so difficult as to warrant the lambasting of an entire generation.

And anyway, even with all that being said, Fisher should have also, perhaps, been more careful in what he was wishing for…

Post-Brodernism

The mention of hipsters in Reynolds’ 2011 account leads me to the recent discourse around a contemporary ‘brodernism’ in literary culture – one of the more awkward coinages of recent times. As described by Federico Perelmuter in an article for the Los Angeles Review of Books, it feels less like a new tendency than a continuation of Reynolds’ xenomania in more literary spheres online:

Brodernism is not a writerly movement but a critical tendency, not a tradition in the strict sense but a kind of post facto absorption, a critical construction with no real basis in textual history or novelistic corpus that is slowly trickling into the fictional unconscious. An aesthetic product, often, of critical ignorance or disregard: glorious local and regional traditions of experimentality or ambition vanish under the haze of a homogenizing (and loudly proclaimed) American reception as “difficult.” If careerism is the dominant literary style in the United States, brodernism esteems itself the resistance. Provincial or hermetic American texts balloon outwards and swallow up the world, unaware that the world was already in them. The complex interplays of local and transnational that define most literary production disappear into a diffuse but ever-expanding vacuousness into which all are incorporated: some broad notion of “challenging” or “maximalist” literature. Formalism devoid of form. Brodernism, nostalgic for the would-be uncharted waters of modernism (but whose?), revives the early 20th century’s fetish for textual originality devoid of its acute historical self-consciousness and critical cosmopolitanism.

This ‘brodernism’ hardly feels that different from the pallidness of what has often passed for online music criticism in the twenty-first century. In this sense, ‘brodernism’ is one more diminishing return of postmodernism itself – not as literary style, but as cultural logic of late capitalism; it is nothing more than a new term for the hipsterism that has supposedly vanished over the last decade.

As one user recently wrote on Twitter:

WTF happened to hipsters? One day they were everywhere, dressed like they worked a blue-collar job and never shutting the fuck up about vinyl records. Then, the next day, they all vanished.

The most notable quote-tweet that followed soon clarified that the hipster had simply lost all subcultural status. This strangely amorphous, poorly actualised (and still poorly understood) figure, once hyper-visible, feigning connection between pop cultures and subcultures, has lost all claim to non-conformity (a claim already tenuous to begin with, since, again, it was based on an atomised sense of an individual’s cultural engagement online, which nonetheless defined that generation of digital natives as a whole):

Everything hipsters were into 15 years ago went mainstream. You can buy raw denim at Uniqlo. Target has vinyl records. Your corner store has craft beer. Right wing chuds dress like urban lesbians and graphic designers did in 2010. Everyone drinks fancy coffee now. They won.

It’s true, we are in fact already living through a post-brodernism; the pretentions that surround a book like Infinite Jest, for instance, were already staples of hipster culture way back when. But 2025 is not 2010, and what was then is not as it is now. Still, we have this strange awareness of being privy to a return; of witnessing the maturity, the coming-of-age, of a once quintessentially Millennial culture, or put another way, the mainstreaming and ‘adultification’ of what was once seen as ‘youth’ culture.

Yes, the most easily parodied aspects of a hipster culture have been reduced to pop-cultural trash – which, in truth, is how they were already perceived by many at the time – whilst those figures who were the true darlings of the early twenty-first century surprise us with a two-way recognition.

I am here thinking of the recent Oscar-winning achievement of Daniel Blumberg, for his original score to The Brutalist. Many were enamoured by the concluding acknowledgement of Café OTO in his acceptance speech, evoking a now-familiar amazement with regards to the name of a relatively underground music venue being name-checked on such an enormous global stage, highlighting the ways in which something considered minoritarian probably isn’t (and that’s no shade, but rather an echo of the illusory privacy of an individual’s xenomania that has defined the twenty-first century thus far).

Then came the sense of a return. Following the online gratitude expressed towards this nod to OTO, various social-media accounts reporting on contemporary culture noted Blumberg’s prior involvement with the band Yuck – a band I had almost entirely forgotten about, despite having loved their self-titled debut album, released in 2011, which was, on reflection, indicative of sonic modes that were widely celebrated on the MP3 blogs of the late 00s and early 10s. (I think I may have even seen them live…)

Everything about this moment is familiar, even if some, perhaps many, aspects of this recognition are surprising to us. The faceless turn to face us; the Orphic myth reversed; reterritorialization achieved. The indie darlings of yesteryear, seemingly forgotten, have not vanished but are now writing many of the globe’s biggest pop hits. (Dan Nigro is another example.) We come to realise that our private dwellings are not so private any longer, or that the minor heroes of old are now facelessly dominating popular culture behind the scenes; that our clutched pearls are stained with the fingerprints of millions of others.

Postmodernism? Yes, but despite itself, still strangely modernist in nature. Although Perelmuter pours cold water on brodernist aspirations for a new modernism, this kind of return, even if unsavoury, is modernist nonetheless. As Lyotard wrote about the relationship between Homer’s Odyssey and Joyce’s Ulysses, and the return of the former under the auspices of the later: “this is no great transformation: no one is fooled by it. But there is something shifty about it.” Yes, here too, we witness a culture shift.

A Metamodern Mission

Irrespective of all this talk about hipsters, I again want to assert no hipsterish incredulity here, no pious deflation of cultural significance. What is most of interest in relation to a burgeoning ‘hipster discourse’ on Twitter – buoyed by Gen Z / Gen Alpha confusion has to how this apparent ‘subculture’ constituted itself – is how unsatisfactory most attempts to define that moment are, in part because the most visible cliches of that era are anathema to its broadly invisible circulating online. Indeed, every notable current from the early twenty-first century has been bastardised in favour of what was most visible about it, or about what was (quite literally) loudest about it, with the influence of blogs, message boards, etc., being ignored precisely because they remain somewhat unrepresentable.

This was predictable, even at the time. We need only consider the distinction between US and UK dubstep – the former epitomised at the time by the brash, in-your-face maximalism of Skrillex (which has its place, as Reynolds notes in the chapter of Futuromania dedicated to Rustie and ‘digital maximalism’, but which is certainly not dubby enough for UK standards); the latter epitomised by early Hyperdub releases, perhaps, especially Burial (at least in the popular imagination, since Burial’s music is already a mutation of a sound that others would more close align with Skream, Digital Mystikz, Plasticman, et al.).

In between these, in the UK at least, we might position a track like Katy on a Mission, which I remember went off as bombastically in indie clubs (as strange as that seems now) as it did in the underground. On a Mission was already a popular grime instrumental at the time, but the addition of a vocal – of a voice to raise what was underground to something more suitable (for lack of a better word) for radio play; of a vocalist with a face to carry the underground into the light – elevated the track and turned it into a cross-cultural go-between. Here again, we have a (post)modernist return; the post- that modernism always-already carries within itself; the culture shifts that are so constant today as to be barely felt by the majority; what others have instead called metamodernism.

The authority of a voice added to an instrumental feels analogous to the process of giving a face to the faceless, or more strategically putting a mask on a more shrouded cultural entity. Where does this leave us? Having recently written a whole book about the false dichotomy between the face and the faceless, in which I explore the ways that selfies have often been used to dissolve a sense of self as much as they have been used to define one, I’m left further enthralled by the shadows of our hyper-visible age. In fact, I wonder if the persistent lauding of Faces – the right people with the right style and the right taste in music – doesn’t help further clarify where the underground is located today. As Burial continues to demonstrate, there is much that remains strange about our quotidian, anonymised malaise, which needn’t be an affective dead-end, but rather a rallying point for reconnecting with the politics of the present / of presence. That is, the tension that remains between our material conditions and all else that feels immaterial – not only ‘all that is solid melting into air’, but how the atomic particulars of everyday life are so prone to recombining themselves in unforeseen ways, such that atomised existences do not always split further but are occasionally accumulated through our era’s ‘Clump Spirit’ – to quote Maya B. Kronic — something that I think is befitting of more serious contemplation and excavation.

Let us continue further, then, “without contempt, without judgment, and with monotonous regularity, processing the readyconsumed to find within it a residual energy of transmutation”…

Part Two

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[1] How strange it still is to think that, when we commissioned Danial Lopatin to resurrect his Chuck Person project for the lockdown For K-Punk hosted by the ICA, he was simultaneously working on The Weeknd’s Super Bowl half-time show.

[2] This is something that seems hyperbolic now, as an older generation at the time saw such wanton consumption as an impossibility, but neuroplasticity and a lack of broader responsibility meant you never really had to unplug, and I often mourn the bursting encyclopaedia of musical history that used to live in my head, but that now, as I approach my mid-thirties, more often than not fails me.

[3] I often wonder if those who claim otherwise are not stuck in the online feedback loop of life-imitating-art-imitating-life-imitating-art

[4] See my introduction to the reissue of Ghosts of My Life for more on this.

[5] As last year’s discourse around a DJ Seinfeld edit of a Burial track proves, there’s some hipsterish animosity looming around his work that is inexplicably puritan, given its already mutant nature.

[6] Something further demonstrated by Mackay’s trans-figuration through cute/acc vectors into Maya B. Kronic, as the Urbanomic imprint continues to disintegrate, and yet leave remainders, of a name not so much dead but anagrammatically recuperated.

It’s been a very sad time behind the scenes at Repeater Books for well over a year now. The future of the imprint has been hanging by a thread and myself and many other authors have made peace with what has, for the last few months especially, seemed like an inevitability. I certainly have no intention of publishing there again after all that has transpired, and have spent most of the last year mourning this loss of an intellectual home. But some things are more important than our own platforms. Sometimes, you just have to move on, and many at Repeater already have done.

This situation has been alluded to on this blog occasionally — here and midway through my first post back too — but for the most part, many of us have been forced into silence for fear of reprisals, whether for ourselves or for others still employed at the imprints. This has been deeply ironic, given the accusations of censorious practices thrown around by some of the reactionaries published by Repeater recently, particularly Daniel Tutt and Rhyd Wildermuth.

But the silence has been broken. Sereptie of Acid Horizon has written an excoriating breakdown of what has actually been going on and has demonstrated just how embarrassing the public actions of Tutt and Wildermuth have been. I expect many people will find it astounding. We certainly have, behind closed doors.

If you have been at all curious about Repeater / Zer0’s removal from a Publishers for Palestine solidarity letter in late 2023, or you’re after more general insight into how expressions of solidarity with Palestine have shown some people’s true colours, as well as what a mess some parts of left-wing publishing are in right now, beyond all the culture-war bollocks, I cannot recommend enough that you read this. It is essential.

“Crossing the Line: The Repeater Books Controversy and the Fight for Solidarity” is available to read here via the Split Infinities SubStack.

Photos taken between 22nd January and 9th February.