Music Criticism’s Lost Futures

There was a new article in Tribune the other day rejecting pop-pessimism and championing a new argument in favour of music’s futures — an article written in terms that, somewhat ironically, felt familiar and even dated to me.

Luke Cartledge reviews Liam Inscoe-Jones’ new book, Songs in the Key of MP3, in which Inscoe-Jones argues that the future isn’t lost to us in 2025; it’s everywhere, riding the ripples outwards from the paradigmatic innovations of five “new icons of the Internet age”: SOPHIE, Dev Hynes, Oneohtrix Point Never, Earl Sweatshirt and FKA twigs.

The review begins as follows:

There isn’t often consensus on the British left. But for at least the last fifteen years there has been widespread concurrence on one thing: a highly melancholic view of contemporary music. The accompanying argument will be familiar to many readers. Here are its greatest hits: following a relatively progressive, dynamic period of pop-cultural production between the immediate postwar years and the triumph of neoliberalism in the 1990s and 2000s (the era Mark Fisher defined with his concept of ‘popular modernism’), the aesthetic development of popular music has dramatically slowed. 

The experimentation and popular creativity enabled by the relative equality and working-class empowerment of the social-democratic era has been subordinated along with everything else — so the argument goes — to the whims of the market. This has left us with little but a nostalgic fascination with pop music’s own past, and sets of disconnected, hyper-local, hyper-individualised subcultures, which do little to contribute to any kind of mass cultural project. At this point in human history, it would seem, popular culture, like politics, offers us no opportunity to imagine a more just future beyond capitalism.

Personally, I’m not sure if this left is in the room with us right now. But it is nonetheless a very nice review, with many productive offshoots, which has led me to order Inscoe-Jones’ book prior to its release. Having spent the day reading it, however, I can’t help but feel cynical about the terms in which the conversation is framed here.

Without wanting to pour too much cold water on a book that celebrates a bunch of artists I also love, I don’t feel like the book itself really measures up to the music it is considering. Particularly when setting itself against caricatures of a discourse that Mark Fisher, Simon Reynolds and others are associated with, I think it betrays a misunderstanding of the stakes of their arguments, ultimately glossing over the substance of what they have had to say about contemporary currents in culture, as well as the friction they produced in rubbing up against the “new normals” of our increasingly digital reality.

What’s most jarring to me, in being presented with an argument that is supposedly new and a breath of fresh air, is that I’ve written about this a lot before over the last five years, when arguments like Inscoe-Jones’s have become very familiar. With apologies to loyal readers who might find some of what follows to be a repeat of older writings, it is precisely because I’ve written about this at length over the last five years that I am left feeling self-consciously like a dog with a bone. But at the risk of being a belligerent grump, please allow me the exercise of sharping my teeth on it some more all the same…

Which Lost Futures?

Inscoe-Jones’ book is about how the Internet has led to the emergence of some wonderfully new currents and sensibilities in contemporary music. Somewhat inexplicably, however, he comes for Mark Fisher with regards to this argument early on.

“Even in the early days of the twenty-first century, there was already a fair bit of anxiety about what the newfound access granted by the Internet was doing to creativity”, he writes in the introduction. “Figures like cultural theorist Mark Fisher posited that … the new technological breakthroughs like Napster, Limewire and MP3 stores were not about musical creation, but simply musical preservation, and he found great swathes of new artists beginning to simply remix or rehash the great leaps of decades past.” But, Inscoe-Jones adds: “Forecasts like these were premature to say the least.”

I don’t see how, personally. When Simon Reynolds gave the name “hauntology” to a then-emergent sensibility, it wasn’t to disparage it. Fisher loved a lot of this stuff too. Burial, The Caretaker, Ghost Box all deal with manhandle the sounds of (someone’s) youth and reflect back on them with age, through memory, making it new. It was a truly post-modernist. By the same token, however, this brief assessment, attributed to Fisher, of the function of music-streaming platforms is surely correct also. (See Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist.) To conflate that with the work of artists themselves in a misnomer, however. A disparity is blurred together here, ignoring how both observations — the explosion of sonic experimentalism, and the conservatism of the platforms we listen to this music on — can be true at once.

Fisher held no animosity toward the recombinatory practices of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries — at least not in the broad strokes that Inscoe-Jones paints them. Nevertheless, he selectively quotes Fisher as asking: “‘How long can a culture persist without the new? … What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises?'” But the exaggeration of this comment to be a wholesale dismissal of twenty-first-century cultural advances is ignorant, if not dishonest, as that is not what Fisher was talking about in the slightest.

Fisher had very particular targets for his ire in the mid-2000s, most of which were the stunted offerings of zombified indie rock, epitomised by the Arctic Monkeys. But the specificity of Fisher’s considerations is ignored here, painting him as someone wholly out of touch with the moment he was living through. This, above all else, could not be further from the truth. Fisher already came in for critique, via Alex Williams in 2008, with regards to the viability of “good postmodernism” (self-aware postmodernism; hauntology), and how it wasn’t really all that different to the “bad postmodernism”, and he took this critique firmly on board. This is the discussion that accelerationism emerged from, after al,, and Fisher took up the mantle and wrote about it regularly for the rest of his short life.

People constantly ignore this, and so you get arguments like Inscoe-Jones’s. He notes, for example, how, “[i]n 2016, hip hop, a style of songwriting invented by children of Caribbean migrants in New York City, overtook rock and pop as the most-listened-to genre in the world, shattering a paradigm which had lasted half a century.” The implicit suggestion is that Fisher paid no attention to this — a bizarre claim for someone who belonged to a generation so influenced by Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic and the vibrant hybridity and pluralism of black music, no longer really separable into any essentialising racial categories — and here again, the pros and cons of (re)appropriation are unavoidable.

But still this suggestion clings to Fisher’s legacy. It is something echoed further in Cartledge’s review, when he notes another recent book that has singled out Fisher for critique:

Paul Rekret’s Take This Hammer: Work, Song, Crisis … takes specific issue with Fisher’s conception of popular modernism — ‘an inventive and counter-hegemonic culture running roughly from the 1960s to the 1990s, now discernible only in its withdrawal’ — arguing that such an idea is tied to a specific, linear narrative of progress enabled by Fordist capitalism, inextricable from a particular experience of time, labour and leisure, and exclusionary of social groups and sets of relations which do not fit with the typologies of this framework. 

But again, no theorist so attendant to Gilroy’s work would think this. Fisher’s frequent tributes to jungle are a prime example. What interested him was precisely a scrambling of temporalities and modes of subjectivity accelerated so drastically in the 1990s and beyond. Fisher came up with the Ccru, of course, which is all about time spirals and the dissolution of identity through the digital. The last thing you will ever find in Fisher’s work, in this regard, is a “linear narrative”.

Case in point: Fisher saw hiphop’s ascendancy coming, as his writings on the now-defunct Hyperdub blog attest to, but it is unfortunate he wasn’t able to write about this moment specifically. Fisher passed away in 2017, lest we forget, but at that time he spoke to friends about his love of Kanye West’s then-recent album The Life of Pablo. Relatedly, one of the unrealised projects he hoped to pursue with Kodwo Eshun was a book called Kanye Theory, which intended to look at the significance of Kanye West — for better and for worse — within this moment of hiphop’s pop-cultural triumph in particular (just as his first book project on an equally popular and founding figure, The Resistable Demise of Michael Jackson, had done before it).

It is jarring, then, to have hiphop in 2016 be compared to Fisher’s writings a decade earlier — a very different cultural moment, to say the least. I’ve surveyed this mid-2000s moment for myself, of course, in the introduction to the reissue of Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life (now on the blog here). In fact, given the moment Fisher was critiquing, now viewed with almost two-decades’ hindsight, it seems inevitable that hiphop was to reach such heights when it did.

2005, the year before “hauntology” discourse came into its own in the blogosphere, was the year in which the Arctic Monkeys were rising to prominence; the year of Nickelback’s “Photograph”; the year in which the best-selling albums in the UK were by James Blunt and Coldplay. In short, it was a year when rock and pop had never felt more tired and inoffensive. But it was also the year of Kanye West’s second album, Late Registration, and iconic singles like Amerie’s “1 Thing”; the year in which grime was making itself increasingly known to the mainstream, and proving that it was here to stay.

Hiphop was already, ten years prior to 2016, primed to overtake rock as a sort of musical lingua franca. But it was notably in-between these two moments that something else also came to the fore — the very beginnings of what Inscoe-Jones goes onto celebrate. The suggestion, then, that Fisher was somehow an old man yelling at crowds, left looking silly by the greatness soon to come, is question-begging. In spite of the fact that this is the dominant narrative now attached to his legacy, it is wrong. Fisher saw many fascinating things on the horizon. As much as he hated the present in general, there was so much about it he loved also.

If there is room to doubt here, it is due to Fisher’s careful avoidance of any premature poptimistic triumphalism. Indeed, he was by no means a “poptimist” in any sense, because his writings did not consider pop culture in some kind of hermetic isolation. Whilst it is true, as Inscoe-Jones argues (and Fisher himself acknowledges on numerous occasions), that technological innovations were vastly accelerating pop-modernist processes of appropriation, producing all kinds of sonic mutations for the average listener to feel excited about, these innovations could not, in Fisher’s view, be separated from the enshittification of industry platforms themselves.

This is the tightrope that Fisher attempted (not always successfully) to walk along. Yes, Spotify has hugely increased our access to the unfathomable depths of human culture — and isn’t that wonderful for us — but as a platform, it’s still a piece of shit, driven by homogenising algorithms and pioneering a techno-feudal deference to the monthly subscription model that leaves artists themselves poorer. I think we are all capable of dealing with this dissonance, and it was a dissonance at the heart of Fisher’s work overall, which was always in service of a more general critique of contemporary capitalism.

Far from Fisher believing that there was no future as such left to speak of, this was the very sentiment he named as “capitalist realism” and spent two decades critiquing. But if the popular perception of his argument is muddied, it’s because what Fisher takes issue with is the curtailing of certain futures but not others, echoing that line often attributed to William Gibson that the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. With that comment in mind, it is integral we consider the futures imagined by music itself and the deeply flaw distribution models it is disseminated through. And this is worthy of consideration not only in terms of music, but all the mod-cons we uncomfortably enjoy.

Put simply, the friction of the postmodern that Fisher was interested in — and postmodernism is all about erasing frictions — is as follows: how is it possible to enjoy the unquantifiable wealth of contemporary culture at the same time as we live in an era of persistent austerity policies and an ever-rising cost of living? What good is this cultural abundance, the life-affirming proliferation of our artistic endeavours, when it is coupled with reactionary powers that slowly diminish our quality of life overall?

It is at this point that we should consider the plurality of the lost futures Fisher talks about. Because they are plural. Capitalism cancels the future for many of us on an individual level, as the “good life” promised starts to feel increasingly inaccessible, whilst this reality is hidden behind the simulacra abundance of culture itself. Thus, a political reality diminishes the possible futures attainable at a material level, whilst encouraging us to be satisfied by the hype machines of the cultural industries. It is in this way that Fisher is able to write about the “slow cancellation of the future” and remain attuned to music newly proliferating on the Internet. Indeed, if Fisher is so closely associated with an artist like Burial, it is because his music conjoins these two sensibilities adeptly. Burial’s music, then and now, feels exceedingly contemporary, progressive and visionary, whilst at the same time his first two albums are imbued with a melancholy with respect to everyday life. But for many music critics, these two poles — political futurity; aesthetic futurity — are blurred together, erasing the contradictions that interested someone like Fisher so consistently. And speaking more personally, this is precisely what makes so much poptimism deeply annoying in its uncriticality…

How, then, does contemporary culture, in 2025, address this discrepancy? How does it produce modes of resistance and raise our consciousness as to how different things could be or how stagnant they still are in spite of cultural proliferation? There are many examples; I think underscores is a particularly good one. Inscoe-Jones, somewhat regrettably, highlights Charli xcx instead.

Postmodernism and its Discontents

I don’t know when his book was finished, but the celebration of Brat, in the book’s chapter about SOPHIE — where Inscoe-Jones points out (correctly) that Charli’s Brat “couldn’t have existed without” the pioneering sound of SOPHIE — rings hollow since the “Kamala is brat” debacle of late 2024.

Even before that moment, I personally felt like Brat was a very sad, “party-hauntological” album (to borrow from Fisher) that exacerbated the lost-futurism of hyperpop’s ascendence to the mainstream after SOPHIE’s untimely death. In short, whilst there’s no denying SOPHIE’s radicality and influence, I don’t think any of her successors have managed to make good on the “whole new world” she promised. Quite the opposite. Brat especially went from being the sound of the summer to achieving such a ubiquitous pop-cultural saturation that the sharpness of its production style was very quickly blunted, even made irritating.

At its worst, it was an album that heralded a new moment of “reflexive impotence” not unlike that of the Kaiser Chiefs and the Arctic Monkeys in 2005-06. It predicted a riot, but ultimately basked in the malaise of neoliberal anhedonia, all ketamine numbness to the complete lack of political futurity epitomised by the election of Keir Starmer last July and the return of Trump not long afterwards. Brat — not entirely through faults of its own, but certainly not helped by the album’s never-ending marketing campaign — felt completely anathema to the period of time when SOPHIE first came to dominate my listening habits, during that far more optimistic summer when ‘Lemonade’ was a new earworm that followed me to and from Jeremy Corbyn rallies. “Kamala is brat” was the putrid opposite of that.

How, then, does the music of the artists Inscoe-Jones considers help us to break free of the more egregious repetitions of the world around us? How is it possible that only (some parts of) pop culture make advances, whilst our political reality is a series of humiliating returns, via new forms of reaction and austerity?

This is the Fisherian gulf that Inscoe-Jones doesn’t seem to know about, or at least never addresses, but this was the bread-and-butter of Fisher’s conflicting analyses of the present in which he lived. One result of this lack, despite Inscoe-Jones’ gesturing towards new futures on the horizon, is that his contextualising of the artists discussed begins to erase all of the nuance of a previous generation of writers who did far more to open out the potentials latent in contemporary culture, in order to show how they might revolutionise other areas of culture in turn.

By way of an example, Inscoe-Jones champions the general code-scrambling of postmodernism — SOPHIE, for instance, is explicitly referred to as a “postmodernist” — despite the ways that a prior generation of critics were thinking more considerately about the nuts and bolts of PoMo and trying to describe how contemporary musicians working under postmodernism (as “the cultural logic of late capitalism”) were also able to position themselves against it, in order to express a kind of resistance or problematisation of its inescapable affects.

Fisher is enlightening on this point, writing about one of Inscoe-Jones’ new Internet icons, Oneohtrix Point Never, in a 2010 edition of The Wire. Here Fisher borrows the term “salvagepunk” from Evan Calder Williams and China Miéville to try to highlight the ways in which OPN is not so simply a “postmodernist”, but rather a twenty-first-century “pop-modernist” (again challenging Rekret’s presumption that Fisher think pop-mod was a thing of the past):

American theorist Evan Calder Williams’s concept of ‘salvagepunk’ provides a broader context for thinking about how these methodologies deviate from their banal twin, postmodernity. For Williams, salvagepunk — at once a sensibility; a kind of non-genre embracing film, fiction and other cultural spheres; and a theoretical framework — is to be opposed to the “inherent flatness and equivalency of postmodern cultural production.” It draws together (and from) the 20th century’s chief arts of reappropriation: montage (Eisenstein, Vertov, Chris Marker), collage (Heartfield and Gilliam), detournement (Duchamp, Debord and the Situationist International, hiphop), and farce (Monty Python and Richard Lester).

Inscoe-Jones appears to have little time for any of this, resulting in the strange contradictions whereby someone like SOPHIE, for all her jagged approach to audio synthesis, can be described using a term that some — I guess not all — still associate with the flat, frictionless banality of late-capitalist homogenisation. Although I might be quibbling with semantics here, to me the book slips regularly into ahistoricity as a result, further proliferating numerous misreadings of a generation of critics he otherwise hopes to set himself against, thus betraying a poptimistic anti-intellectualism that is superficially journalistic. Because of this, for me at least, the book starts to feel like a celebration of futurity that is actually far less futuristic and ambitious than the writers he repeatedly (but always briefly) chastises.

A Brief Moment of Reflection…

I want to address this quality of the text itself, but let me first introduce a (not so brief) self-reflexive caveat. In light of the discussion around Cartledge’s review that took place on Twitter the other day, I should acknowledge my own pedantic sensibilities going forward — if they weren’t already blatantly apparent.

On Twitter, Toby Manning made the point of whether my particular bugbears are at all able to connect with the ways in which certain texts, concepts or thinkers are actually used in everyday conversation and discourse. He commented:

I often think a flaw in my own work is knowing the history too well, whereas what the history is understood [as] is what’s out there and has to be engaged with.

What I take from this is that it is not always so helpful to fight for a purist reading of certain concepts, when these concepts have clearly taken on lives of their own and may well mean something different to what was originally intended — and that is not inherently a bad thing. It’s just what happens when these things are dispersed through culture as a whole, and separated from the more isolated discourses of bloggers (in this case). Overall, an escape from those more cloistered online spaces is desirable — even hermetic bloggers critical of the mainstream want to be read — and so the degradation of their critical armature is to be expected. That is something that cannot be forgotten and should be reckoned with. And anyway, the world would feel a lot like Twitter does in general if everyone was as much of a pedant as me, and that’s not a world I want to live in either. The question, then, is always how best to do that, and long grumbling screeds like mine are probably one of the worst vehicles for doing so. (I’d probably be better off making 3-hour video essays instead?)

All this is to say that, when it comes to falling into the puritanical, I am absolutely guilty as charged. But the point of knowing our history — even if “too well” — is so that we do not mindlessly repeat it. Indeed, what frustrates me, in reading a poptimistic book about futurity in 2025, is that it can be so ignorant of the recent past — that is, not only of how the discussions it critiques in passing developed two decades ago, but also of all the intellectual developments that have occurred since. The irony felt, then, in reading Inscoe-Jones’ refutations of a lost-futurism — and, relatedly but more obliquely, of hauntology — in 2025, is that these critiques end up only repeating the laziest engagements advanced two decades previously. The discussion thus feels like its stuck in 2008, rather than feeling shiny and new in 2025.

I can think of nothing more unfortunate for a book about the recent past and the proximate futures it has produced. It is thus a book that is nowhere near as contemporary as it thinks it is. It betrays an ignorance not only of Fisher’s 2010s work, but also the work of many others. As such, I struggle to find much merit in a critique that betrays a lack of engagement with the futures explored in music criticism itself — that is, the book’s own domain, apart from the music itself.

I think knowing this history is important, then, because, for my tastes at least, it can lead us to a better form of music criticism. In fact, it is the complacent role of the contemporary critic that I take issue with here above all else. Concerning Inscoe-Jones’ book, I again make no quibble with the artists under consideration. They’re some of my favourites too. But in terms of how they’re written about, how they are contextualised on an art-historical timeline, which is currently in the process of being written and canonised, I find it ultimately superficial and lacking, even if its positivity is a welcome reprieve from the drudgery of the present more generally.

As a result, I find the book speckled with little contradictions, or at least lots of confusion and disparity between terms. I don’t think that’s some kind of fatal flaw, however. Plenty of readers won’t be miserable cunts like me. But this confusion is also precisely what I find most interesting, as did the likes of Fisher, and it is this that I think needs to be engaged with if we’re to break out of a critical deadlock that seems to want to avoid any lengthy critique of its priors in general anyway. The point is that things aren’t so simple, and I only wish more music critics had a self-awareness in that regard, as well as a bravery to get stuck into the nitty-gritty of contemporary culture and the futures it promises.

Truthfully, as someone who loves music — listening to it, writing about it — I must confess I find most books about music to be as dull as dishwater. And maybe that too is nothing more than a matter of taste. Maybe it is even uncharitable to critique a book for not being something it doesn’t even want to be. It’s a pop work of poptimism, and not a weighty tome of philosophical critique. But it also doesn’t feel like a book that “breaks the mould” and “defines categorisation” as one of its jacket endorsements claims. It feels like dozens of other books that think poptimism is enough, and at a certain point, they all turn me off.

I think, then, that if we’re going to discuss the valences of something like hauntology or “lost futures” discourse in the context of a present-future, we cannot elide the paltry lack of affectivity common to the texts themselves, which try to convince us of the abundant affects produced by the music in question, but seem incapable of conjoining themselves to that affectivity within the confines of an achingly journalistic prose. That’s not to say that “academic” writing is the way forward. A lot of that is bunk too. But I find myself longing for a lost future within popular music criticism itself, when the various delineations between categories and modes of thought were completely disregarded, and music critics dared to channel not only their interest in music, but all the currents of contemporary culture that they came into contact with, be that music, film, literature, poetry, philosophy, etc. I miss a music criticism that used to really grapple with the strangeness of the present, and not just cherry-pick the “nice” bits.

If that makes me the arsehole, so be it. It may also make me a hypocrite, as I encase all of this in a long-winded rant about it for no-one to read. But that’s my cross to bear.

The Lost Futures of Music Criticism

Cartledge’s review, appearing as it does in Tribune, goes some way to emphasise the political undercurrents of Inscoe-Jones’ book’s content, and so the focus on Fisher in the review itself isn’t that surprising. But when Inscoe-Jones uses him as a scapegoat for a kind of cultural pessimism, I can’t help but think (again) about how so much contemporary music writing still demonstrates a lag in how we actually talk about music in the present, despite all of its pronouncements to the contrary. It’s the sort of argument that betrays its own lack of futurity, I’d argue, because it still cannot fully exorcise the ghosts of critical modes past that continue to torment it, nor does it see this haunting as a defining aspect of the very thing it critiques in passing.

The in-grown nature of these discussions doesn’t seem to occur to Inscoe-Jones, but Cartledge himself recognises them:

The [book’s] broader arguments against a wholesale lost-futures denialism of aesthetic progress are convincingly made. The SOPHIE chapter is by far the strongest. In one key passage, Inscoe-Jones directly challenges Fisher’s contention that a great deal of contemporary music would not shock a listener from previous decades by listing a whole host of sounds which would not only have that effect, but would simply not have been possible to make before.

Yet the more specific and complex ideas he rails against are rebutted less effectively: for example, his response to Reynolds’ concern that what is often presented as uniquely synthetic, genre-splicing work is merely ‘diversely derivative’, ‘avoid[ing] having one influence by having lots of influences’, never quite meets the challenge directly, instead reaffirming that the results of such processes are aesthetically pleasing, without pinpointing how exactly they disprove Reynolds’ charge.

This is my feeling reading the book too, and as far as its arguments against “a wholesale lost-futures denialism” go, I happen to think that these arguments are all too easily made as well. Because of course things happen, of course things change. And of course, this isn’t something that Fisher ever really denied. Despite being associated with a “left melancholia”, Fisher explicitly and repeatedly takes issue with this himself (in Ghosts of My Life, in his first Postcapitalist Desire lecture, and in his intro to Acid Communism).

The strangeness of the twenty-first century, for Fisher, was how much had materially changed — with the rise of the Internet most obviously — whilst so much still remained affectively drudgerous and mundane. Rather than insert themselves into this bizarre disparity and open up the space between these two poles, critics of Fisher instead tend to talk about stasis and acceleration in the same breath, just as Inscoe-Jones does — what Fisher called our “frenzied stasis” — but an awareness of this complementarity and its centrality for a prior generation of critics is something that feels particularly lacking in Inscoe-Jones’ book. This is particularly apparent in the chapter on Oneohtrix Point Never — a figurehead for a hauntological and memoradelic current in contemporary music, who is nonetheless (rightly) praised by Inscoe-Jones, in Cartledge’s words, for his “semi-accelerationist attempts to mainstream fringe aesthetics”.

This is important because, for all the nods to Fisher as someone who has observed a cancellation of the future, OPN — a keen reader of Fisher himself — is surely the most “Fisherian” of the artists considered. In fact, this attempt “to mainstream fringe aesthetics” was the same motor behind so much of the music criticism of Fisher’s generation. It’s why their work cares so little about compartmentalising music criticism, philosophy, politics, etc. They jumped on these sorts of attempts to mainstream fringe aesthetics in order to simultaneously mainstream fringe ideas. But it appears we’ve since fallen back into an anti-intellectualism that these writers first started pushing back against, as far back as the 1990s.

Here’s the rub… Fisher’s mournful nostalgia for the future-shock of jungle might be one thing, clearly remedied by the arrival of footwork and countless other mutants who’ve sprang from the hardcore continuum — which, again, he wrote about — but the critics who love to remind us (and him, even posthumously) of that fact today also fail to notice how this lack of future-shock is just as (if not far more) applicable to music criticism itself.

I’m reminded here of a book by another of Reynolds’ peers: David Stubbs’ Fear of Music, with its provocative subtitle “Why People Get Rothko But Don’t Get Stockhausen”. We might well extend this to a lot of music criticism today and ask, by way of some other (more awkward) couplings: why do people get Autechre but don’t get Wittgenstein? Or, why do people get black metal but don’t get Bataille? Or, why do people get Oneohtrix Point Never but don’t get Fisher?

Of course, many people do get Fisher, but in the case of Songs in the Key of MP3, it still seems strange to me that someone like Inscoe-Jones wouldn’t see the obvious parallels here. The now-familiar misreading of Fisher and Reynolds’ work is repeated in the book’s chapter on Oneohtrix Point Never: “In 2011, while writers like Simon Reynolds feared that immediate access to old music was leading to a stagnating culture” — did they though? — “no artist was delving in as excitedly as Daniel Lopatin.” Again, as already highlighted above, Fisher championed this too in The Wire. He didn’t write about OPN all that often — I can’t think of another instance off the top of my head — but the process of making an album like Replica is exactly the sort of thing Fisher refers to passionately as “digital psychedelia” and “capitalist counter-sorcery”.

Compare, for example, how Inscoe-Jones writes about Replica to how Fisher talks about the the Otolith Group’s Anathema.

First, Inscoe-Jones:

In 2011, Daniel released … Replica … On it, he made a sharp turn away from his first four albums — defined by heavily synthesised, completely original soundscapes — and brought the vapourwave method into the world of Oneohtrix Point Never. On Replica, the sources which influenced him were not pop songs but television adverts from the ’80s and ’90s which had been crammed en masse into endless YouTube playlists. The results were a fascinating experiment: taking the sonic palette of that turbo-charged moment of all-American consumerism and turning them into something mournful, and just a little out-of-time.

But to what end? What is it that’s really evocative about this album, the sources it draws upon, and what it turns them into? So much more could be said here, but the chapter as a whole feels superficial compared to other writing on this stuff that I’m more used to, including that by Fisher himself.

Here’s Fisher in 2012, then, in an article that’s notably contemporary with Replica, discussing a film that, also like Replica, is made out of warped samples of YouTube videos, drawing on its strange archive of television advertisements:

The advertisements were all gathered from one of the major nodes of communicative capitalism, YouTube, a site primarily generated, just as Baudrillard predicted, from the “active responses” of participants. YouTube illustrates very well the communicative capitalist apparatus of capture: the participants who make all those time-consuming analogue-to-digital conversions, all those uploads, and who are not paid for their labour. It is the parasitic predator, capital, which accrues the value generated from the site.

[…] Anathema‘s first step is to de-anchor the phantasmatic scenes that the advertisements construct from the products they are ostensibly selling. The de-anchorage is responsible for producing much of the overwhelming affect of eeriness that pervades the film. Anathema composes a place of consistency from these orphaned semiotic-libidinal fragments. As we watch, it is as if we are inside a machine dream. But who or what is dreaming here?

One way of seeing Anathema is as a glimpse of capital’s own dreaming. This world of smoothly yielding orifice-interfaces, of instantaneous contact, of hard surfaces dissolving into liquid when touched, may be how the communicational matrix looks (and feels) to capital. But the experience of its human users is somewhat different…

Swap out Anathema for Replica and Fisher’s essay could well serve as the liner notes to OPN’s album (not that it needs any). What’s more, it’s an essay that feels achingly futuristic for the moment it was written in, considering how these investigations into “capital’s own dreaming” seem to prefigure the AI aesthetics inaugurated by Google DeepDream a few years later. (Here we might compare Replica to Lee Gamble’s Models, which feels like an update on that kind of investigation to an AI present, but this post is already long enough…) And we’re supposed to take Inscoe-Jones at his word that Fisher and co. are somehow conservative writers making premature forecasts?!

This comparison nonetheless makes Fisher’s writing feel all the more heady and academic, and that mode of cultural writing is distinctly out of vogue right now. Inscoe-Jones even writes how, “[w]hen I first encountered Oneohtrix Point Never, he seemed like the kind of artist whose album reviews tended to come with references to critical theory, and a diagram.” God forbid music writing thinks with an abundance of material, never mind get critical… But the point Inscoe-Jones makes is taken on board; this style of writing might go some way towards explaining why it’s not that well understood. Regardless, I think we’re poorer without it, and Inscoe-Jones’ book is too.

What I think is clear from Fisher’s writings is that he was interested in music at the forefront of expressing a certain a ‘structure of feeling’ (whether present or to-come) — a phrase borrowed from Raymond Williams, whom Cartledge likewise brings into play in his review. In fact, the paradox Fisher contends with, when considering the work of OPN and others in the late-00s and early-10s, is that their psychedelic exploration of past forms of materiality was itself new, was itself pop-modernist — and in that regard, Inscoe-Jones and Fisher have something in common, but it speaks volumes that the former is trailing the latter’s arguments by ~15 years…

Readers might well take or leave music writing that contains critical theory, but in its bold engagement with all that is contemporary — not just the music — these sorts of books stand up just as well today as the albums Inscoe-Jones writes about. Will his book do the same?

To offer up some other books for contrast, I’ve been reading Simon Reynolds’ first book, Blissed Out, recently. It remains a fiery piece of writing about music, despite first being published in 1990, that also continues to feel futuristic today. This feeling is sharpened by the fact that the book is built out of articles that appeared in the music press, at a time when it is almost impossible to imagine anything like them appearing in the music press today. Songs in the Key of MP3, by contrast, gives me the distinct impression of reading the Guardian… But I don’t want this to come across as cynical ad hominem, so let’s think about this some more.

The critique often made implicitly by Fisher (and less implicitly by Reynolds), once upon a time, was not only that pop-rock music had lost its experimental edge, but that most writing about it had too — something that contemporary critiques like that of Inscoe-Jones fail to appreciate, which is a shame, as it batters the tonality of their own writing, despite being relatively ancient. But this is precisely why books like Reynolds’ debut hold up and still feel exciting: because a lot of music writing has fallen back into a journalistic complacency that they fiercely wanted to shake up.

To bring in another example, Kodwo Eshun’s 1998 book More Brilliant Than The Sun begins with an excoriating dismissal of everything else around it:

All today’s journalism is nothing more than a giant inertia engine to put the brakes on breaks, a moronizer placing all thought on permanent pause, a futureshock absorber, forever shielding its readers from the future’s cuts, tracks, scratches. Behind the assumed virtue of keeping rhythm mute, there is a none-too-veiled hostility towards analyzing rhythm at all. Too many ideas spoil the party. Too much speculation kills ‘dance music’, by ‘intellectualizing’ it to death.

What Eshun, writing in 1998, deplored most in so much popular music criticism — not just criticism of pop, but music criticism that was itself popular — was its staunch anti-intellectualism: “Respect due. Good music speaks for itself. No Sleevenotes required. Just enjoy it. Cut the crap. Back to basics. What else is there to add?”

Eshun had arguably taken his leave from Reynolds here, whose first book — published eight years earlier — begins with a furious disregard for this same tendency. He cares not whether his writing is too philosophical. Indeed, rather than dismissing out-of-hand the persistent failure of music writing to truly grasp its object — writing about music is like dancing about architecture, or however that stupid idiom goes — he sees this as the very motor driving rock criticism’s more poetic sensibilities.

“A fissure between experience and explication has been intrinsic to rock writing since its inception”, he argues, but rather than leave the gap between them unmolested, he drops whatever he wills into this cavernous hole and waits to see what makes a splash, what produces a klang that might resonate with the klang of the sonic avant-garde itself. He even identifies this as the enduring preoccupation of a post-punk generation of writers (think Greil Marcus, Lester Bangs, et al.) and those like himself who basked in their influence:

And just as rock recovered for itself certain lost powers, so ‘we’ writers discovered, for ourselves, certain ancient truths. In particular, the truth discovered, separately, by Wittgenstein and Bataille, among others: that thought is a ladder you ascend only to pull up behind you and abandon; that it is only through language that you can reach that which lies beyond language’s reckoning. In other words, the only way for rock to live again was if the rock discourse could somehow manage to end itself — again and again. Enter gladly into an endless end. And so we directed our enmity towards ‘meaning’, and in particular, against punk. Or rather what punk had turned into, had bequeathed to British rock culture: a stifling fixation on the text, an overbearing neurosis for meaning and relevance, an urge to totalize, and a gamut of taboos and inhibitions about what was sonically permissible. Rather than respond to rock for its ‘spirit’, it felt more fun to rub against its ‘skin’. Rather than respond to rock as a series of ‘statements’, it seemed more exciting to be swept up in its incoherence.

What is so jarring about reading Reynolds from 1990 in 2025 is the wholesale forgetting of this reverence for any and all sources that might help us reach for what remains uncommunicable in the age of communicative capitalism, and the tandem irreverence (with regards to journalistic taste) for how they might be utilised. I mean, please show me a recent article that is as full of life as Reynolds’ essay on Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation and the Situationist International. Instead, so much contemporary music criticism today reads like little more than client journalism, no matter whether it’s writing about releases on major or minor labels.

Perhaps this goes some way to explaining the rise of Substacks and the like, blurring together the subscription models of platform capitalism and the old freedom of blog culture. It’s still in places like this that you’ll find the most exciting cultural writing. It’s why I remain so stubborn in keeping up this blog, but that’s not for lack of trying to spread my wings. From experience, when I’ve tried to pitch articles to various outlets over the years, every idea offered up has been rejected on the basis that it might alienate a magazine or newspaper’s general readership — yes, even when the music under consideration is itself an alienating stab into the heart of the contemporary. You can’t get deep with it; you can’t express yourself as the cultural conduit you’re otherwise asked to be. Music criticism cancels itself out, shining a light on what is current whilst doing little to mirror the shocks experienced, as any enthusiastic writer might be compelled to. In that way, the cynical position Cartledge describes, in which “[t]he experimentation and popular creativity enabled by the relative equality and working-class empowerment of the social-democratic era has been subordinated along with everything else … to the whims of the market”, retains considerable validity.

It’s a tendency I’ve felt frustrated with for years, not only in terms of music writing itself, but also how it is represented visually. The harsh flash that long characterised the photography in The Wire magazine, for example, apes the 90s fashion photography of someone like Juergen Teller, but gets stuck there. For all the column inches that might be dedicated to lightly critiquing the work of someone like Reynolds, in light of his analysis of our retromania, here is a magazine that, more often than not, transforms the ‘energy flash’ of 90s photography into an acutely photographic kind of stasis. This is something that frustrated me when trying to find work as a music photographer in the early 2010s, and it’s something that continues to frustrate me as I see this affectlessness carried over into contemporary music writing as well.

Why is this so? Why does so much writing about the present refuse to be contemporary on its own terms? Why is so much writing, which insists on a superficial understanding of “the new”, seem so incapable of being new itself? Why does so little music writing feel attuned to the contemporary concerns of other forms of writing (poetry, literature, etc.)? This isn’t a wholesale critique; if things were completely like this, I’d probably give up and clock out. And this also isn’t simply a question of writing style, but also of whatever else might be thrown into the mix. Too much — if not all — music writing, to its detriment, retreats into compartmentalising itself, and too often feels closed off from all other modes of thought around it (never mind within it, as the caricatures of Fisher show).

Personally, I listen to music — shocker — but I do not solely feel like a pair of ears. As I attempt, as a writer, to navigate the confounding nature of our present, I tend to draw on many sources. I like to write about music and poetry and philosophy and film and literature, picking up examples of each as I march along a path to some unknown destination — that is, into the future. I think that is neither pretentious nor uncommon. But as far as the flailing of “traditional” media goes, when trying to move from the total freedom of a blog to somewhere more “official”, you’re not allowed to think with culture in the same terms… “Save all your references and preferences for the books no-one wants to publish” is the message received. Is it really possible to write about contemporary culture too much, when our semioblitz is already too much to begin with?

The irony of critiques made against Fisher and Reynolds looms back into view here. “Write about the new”, a hundred critics implore their peers — well, they are (or were, in Fisher’s case), and in a vibrant and dastardly way that gets itself involved in the very aesthetic sensibilities it was writing about — most boldly in Eshun’s case — but most don’t care enough to really read it, or put in the work to understand all that they have to say…

Is the reason for this simply that thinking is hard? That rubbing up against the new New Flesh of our post-Videodrome present might not be as soothing as we want it to be when we seek the escapism of reading about our favourite artists? Whatever cynical answers to these questions might be given, it seems clear to me that something, some era, has ended. Not in terms of the music itself, but certainly in terms of how it is written about. As Fisher wrote about his first book, Capitalist Realism, the intention here isn’t to be overtly pessimistic; the intention is to be negative. Yes, so much has changed, and continues to, but not enough. We still live alongside the spectre of a world [in which music] could be free.

To the contrary, it’s almost as if, in our increasingly dominant forms of poptimism, critics try to ignore the stuckness of music criticism itself by hiding behind the shield of music’s continuing development itself. Music is disconnected from life, from politics, and this is supposed to be a virtue. No attempt is made to consider the influence of our temporally skewed world on the music we listen to, or when an attempt is made, with a eye to criticality and contemporary thought as a whole, they fail to see how they are circling around a problem that Fisher (the convenitent scapegoat) was far better attuned to than they are.

“Well, if we can get the Flatline, we’re home free.
You know he died braindeath three times?”

The coda to Inscoe-Jones’ book ends with a brief discussion of one of the most pressing technological issues in music today: the role of AI.

First, he notes Drake’s “Taylor Made Freestyle” as the single that kicked off last year’s defining beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar. Here again, as the book comes to a close, I feel the spectre of Fisher’s absence lurking.

The AI verses on ‘Taylor Made Freestyle’ are immaculate impersonations. The software Drake used didn’t simply recreate the voices of Snoop and [Tupac]; it recreated their cadences and flows too. This had once been the stuff of pure fantasy, the kind written by Mary Shelley. Once-living people, revived, Lazarus-style, from the dead. It was theft, of a kind, a dystopian fiction let loose upon the real world. And what was the reaction to this song? One giant, colossal shrug.

The track “elicited a sigh from hip hop fandom”, Inscoe-Jones continues, and was met with threats of a lawsuit from Tupac’s estate. This seems to come as a surprise. “Something which the likes of Blade Runner had portrayed as revolutionary — magical even — was, when deployed amid a conflict between two real artists, completely and utterly boring.”

Here again, more strange disparities. Are you supposed to think that Blade Runner‘s vision of AI enslavement and persecution is at all positive? Blade Runner is an apt reference here only given the fact that Tupac’s estate shut the whole thing down, “retiring” the replicant Tupac who’d wandered outside of their control.

An alternative reference might be made to William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and the flatline construct that Henry steals from a corporate mainframe — the digital revenant of one of his old accomplices, nicknamed Dixie.

A construct, in Gibson’s novel, is a digital simulacra of “a person’s stored memory/personality,” which is capable of “replicating [their] memories, skills, obsessions, even kneejerk responses” but which “doesn’t gain new memories”. It’s a feature of the novel that Mark Fisher ran a marathon with, way back in 1999. His PhD thesis, Flatlines Constructs, recently reissued by Zer0 Books — you can read the original here, since there’s a boycott on — centres on the way in which the flatline isn’t just some artificial entity we interact with, but finds its way inside the novel’s characters themselves:

In Neuromancer, “Flatline” functions as both a verb — characters flatline (surf what, for the organism, is the border between life and death) — and a noun — some characters are Flatlines (Read Only Memory data-constructs of dead people).

What Fisher alludes to, throughout his thesis, is the way in which we are Flatlines too. Long before the rise of social media, Fisher prophesises a future in which our own Flatlines could be constructed from the wealth of information recorded about us in newly digital media. But far from seeing this as totally dystopian, it’s a quality he likens to Deleuze and Guattari’s writings on capitalism and schizophrenia:

[I]t is Baudrillard who has been most explicit about linking the new cybernetic communication systems with schizophrenia. Another name for schizophrenia as Deleuze-Guattari understand it is radical immanence.

The era of immanence, as Baudrillard repeatedly tells us, is also the era of code … Deleuze-Guattari and Baudrillard have made a point of using this more loaded term in place of the ostensibly neutral cybernetic buzzword ‘information’. Code entails stratification (and vice versa). Baudrillard’s remarks that fiction and theory are collapsing into one another are impelled in part by the postwar emergence of code as a crossdisciplinary hyperconcept. Code is both the means by which the bio-social is controlled and manipulated and a kind of fiction (but fiction without an author, fiction beyond the text). Fiction, in Baudrillard and Deleuze-Guattari’s theorizations, moves beyond the textual and the specifically “literary”; in Deleuze-Guattari’s terms, it becomes a “machine.”

Fisher sought a machinic form of music writing in this regard. He wanted to move beyond the text and instead offer up delirious writings that were completely immersed in — immanent with — the affects of everyday life. These affects were numerous. His writings can be as joyful, positive and humorous, as they can be depressed, miserable and cantankerous. And he wrote at length on how these affects were preyed upon by — were even the product of — capitalism’s capacity for libidinal engineering.

Fisher’s PhD thesis is all the more enlightening in the context of Inscoe-Jones’s celebration of postmodern code-scrambling. On the one hand, Inscoe-Jones highlights “the resounding flop of ‘Taylor Made Freestyle'” to suggest that AI music “is very unlikely to take the place of artists themselves.” He even imagines the poverty of a future that is not that far from what Fisher and Reynolds already saw coming themselves:

[T]he software at the forefront of this ‘revolution’ cannot generate any new ideas of its own; it can only reiterate, remix and rehash ones conceived of by living, breathing humans. It does seem inevitable though, that by the end of the decade, streaming services will be rife with pretty good AI riffs on songs the likes of which we’ve already heard endless times before.

But here comes that poptimism again.

The consequences of this may not be as dire as they sound [because] originality will become an increasingly treasured characteristic, and there are few better things for a culture to hold dear. Basically: don’t count the artists out too soon. They haven’t failed us yet.

A lovely sentiment, but one that again fails to consider the ways in which this future is already here. The sorts of music that Fisher and Reynolds poured scour on where precisely those produced by this same iterative process of music production with living, breathing humans already. The music criticism they find so lacking also starts to look like a kind of “artificial intelligence” in its own right. Indeed, the humanism of Inscoe-Jones’ conclusion rankles all the more when we consider the successive generations of artists who have leaned into the feeling that they are already robots for the culture industries, such as Kraftwerk and even SOPHIE, in her own way.

I wrote about this too in 2021, shortly after SOPHIE’s death:

Simply put, she had become the face of the future of music — something that felt most apparent in clips shared again and again after her death, specifically those taken from the endlessly endearing conversation she had with Sophia the Robot.

There’s this wonderfully uncanny energy to the conversation, but not from Sophia herself. Sophia is very much of the present — certainly new, but janky and a little bit dysfunctional, like a self-service checkout. It is SOPHIE who speaks like a being from the future, telling Sophia of all the things she might have to look forward to if she ever manages to join her on the pop plane.

This is something else I find jarring about Inscoe-Jones’ book: the aching humanism of its presentation, the focus on the individual artist, their artistic choices, influences, experiences, despite the fact that many of them problematise their own humanity, sense of identity, or even their memories. SOPHIE and OPN both, in this regard, engage with themselves as a kind of flatline construct; as flawed machines fed on sugar-coated trash, glitching and stuttering through a cyberpunk sensitivity to technology’s breakdown of the self itself.

This is something that a prior mode of music criticism engaged in as well. One of the earliest posts on Fisher’s blog, for example, ends with the haunting provocation:

All recordings are ghosts.

But are we really more substantial than they?

It’s not so simple to champion the ghost in the machine today, when the two have become totally (or at least increasingly) inseparable. And why is Fisher, writing 25 years ago, more engaging on this than a book published now? Why does Zer0’s reissue of a 25-year-old piece of almost-lost media feel more like a manifesto for a post-SOPHIE generation than a book that only really talks about how spiffing she is? How is a music criticism, which itself feels like an unthinking exercise in the reiteration of received notions and ideals, shorn of all criticality, supposed to help us understand the present and the concerns of the culture it produces? It’s not the future that is populated with flatline constructs, but the present. You are a construct.

I defer to the intro from the new clipping. album, which makes the point most succinctly:

Innovate or get passed by dumb luck
Either way you a flatline construct
And created by everything that went amiss
Appetite for detritus is just what it is

Acknowledging this isn’t lost-futures pessimism; it’s a virile negativity against the lag of the now.

Look in the mirror. See yourself as a construct. SOPHIE did, and OPN has continued to. Both demonstrate just how fucking fun a Fisherian inhumanism is to play around in. They only help further prove the fact that Fisher himself, now eight years on the bad side of the Flatline, is still more future than you.