It’s become fashionable, over the last decade or two, for cultural observers to bemoan the lack of innovation in contemporary music. Heavily influenced by the writings of the late Mark Fisher, arguably the most influential cultural theorist of the 21st century, the notion that popular music’s innovative qualities are in a terminal slow down courtesy of neoliberalism’s culture-quashing hand has become a bit of a modern intellectual trope. One glance at major recent releases such as Playboi Carti’s post-language noise rap or FKA Twigs’ avant-pop artistry is enough to refute the notion that popular music has lost its ability to sound like today and/or tomorrow.
However, Fisher’s ‘slow cancellation of the future’ thesis holds more water when you assess the state of contemporary rock music.
Already I knew this article was gonna wind me up… Because Mark Fisher was also talking about contemporary rock music! But this leap is so common, it’s not even the first time this month I’ve written about this tendency to take Fisher’s critique of the Arctic Monkeys and blow it up wholesale, thereby conflating his hatred of the present with a sort of Adornoian hatred of all pop music, which is simply baffling.
But it’s Fisher’s misery that still grabs people’s attentions even now, perhaps because it resonates with a unreflexively pessimistic outlook that is already deep-rooted in us. The thing that most people who cite Fisher thus fail to separate is their pessimism from his negativity.
In a post from 2010 — oft-quoted here over the years — Fisher addresses this disparity as follows:
There has been some discussion of whether Capitalist Realism is a pessimistic book. For me, it isn’t pessimistic, but it is negative. The pessimism is already embedded in everyday life — it is what Zizek would call the “spontaneous unreflective ideology” of our times. Identifying the embedded, unreflective pessimism is an act of negativity which, I hope, can make some contribution to denaturalizing that pessimism (which, by its very nature, does not identify itself as such, and is covered over by a compulsory positivity which forbids negativity). Far from nothing ever changing, something already has changed, massively — the bank crisis was an event without a subject, whose implications are yet to be played out. The terrain — the crashed present, littered with the ideological rubble of failed projects — is there to be fought over. And I believe that it can be seized by those who have been most deeply cooked in neo-liberalism and post-Fordism, not the French immobilisers, the nostaglic 68ers, the hay bale agragrians, or anyone else resigned to playing Canute to the rising tide of Capital. We can only win if we reclaim modernization.
Whether he was successful at this is another matter, but it’s ironic that the uncritical trotting out of Fisher-the-scapegoat has itself become indicative of an unreflective pessimism, demonstrating how susceptible today’s music journos are to getting stuck in the past, and so blatantly in the articles that insist on the contrary. (“I’m gonna show you the future; here’s some bands that sound like remastered mid-20th century prog rock to stick it to a man who was talking about a very specific moment ten-to-twenty years ago…”) In fact, I reckon if more of them actually had a read and a think about all of this, and didn’t just regurgitate second-hand summaries of people’s arguments, they might start writing about “the new” without the perfunctory flogging of a twenty-year-dead horse.
But this is only the beginning. It’s not even the main issue I have with this article. What is most irritating about it, in light of its attempt to counter the claim that contemporary rock is rubbish, is to argue that more attention should be paid to “maximalist indie rock” — just “don’t call it ‘prog'”.
I don’t think prog is a dirty word, personally, although it was once amusingly overused. Back in 2003, it was even a running joke in the blogosphere that just about any band could be “progged”. And I reckon most other bands could be “maximalised” today in the same way — at least when “maximalism”, as seems to be the case here, is reduced to “anything that’s not just guitar, bass, drums, vocals”. Or what’s less, “maximalism” is not when my senses are overloaded, as would be more appropriate — and there’s plenty of interesting examples of that right now — but a pleasant sort of fullness, a “Wall of Sound” vibe, which is again just a throwback to Phil Specter in the 1960s.
There’s nothing wrong with throwing it back, of course. Nor do we live in times when prog is hated quite so vehemently as it once was. I’m partial to Yes, personally, and have been since my teens, when Close to the Edge first entered my rotation and never really left. But the existence of King Crimson in particular — becoming a darling institution in later life, thanks to their persistent adventurousness and their ability to buck the trend of petulant in-fighting that characterised the downfalls of most of their peers — seems to have made up for prog’s various crimes against music for many people (so long as no one mentions Genesis).
People like prog then, whatever that word means. But that only highlights how what’s at issue isn’t necessarily the music itself (although it can be awful). In the UK especially, an animosity towards prog is only a deflected conversation about class. To this day, prog is weighed down by its association with private-school kids. Indeed, what is “boundary-breaking” is often just posh kids flexing their classical training with non-classical instruments. It’s what led Radiohead, who met at the Abingdon private school in Oxford, to rightly get tarred with the “prog” brush on OK Computer, I’d argue, and it’s what continues to haunt all kinds of bands today who are from all the same places (and this really is a new influx of Oxbridge natives).
It is class that keeps many other bands, who were a kind of prog, from getting lumped with the label. Throbbing Gristle’s “industrial music” was a conscious attempt at prole art in the 1970s. To call them prog is surely ridiculous — but they did get their start opening for Hawkwind. This is the faint line that has run through British music culture for 75 years. Prog is posh. That’s often the only thing that separates one experimentalism or maximalism from another.
Morgan misses this. Class doesn’t get a single look-in in his article, although it oozes out of the subtext like water under foot in a bog. Take the essay’s discussion of Black Country, New Road. They are a band that I have personally never found at all interesting; only painfully derivative. Early single “Sunglasses”, for instance, has the sparseness of Slint with the emotive brass overtones of American Football, and a spoken-word bark that is such a cliched post-punk staple at this point, I can’t listen to anyone who tries to make a go of it.
It’s a postmodern amalgamation of well-trodden tropes that don’t actually have any grit to them, nor any sense of contemporaneity beyond their streamlining of bands that have become darlings for Internet natives. In fact, their early sound is simply an adherence to the accepted standards of your average forum-dwelling hipster (and I say that as someone who was one). But what’s worse is that BCNR have only regressed further in 2025. Due to some lineup changes, they’ve moved on from aping 90s/00s post-hardcore to a new album that lets rip what every keen listener had always heard lurking underneath: a defrosted Canterbury-scene posho whimsy, which first accosted the British isles in the mid-60s.
It is abysmal, and to select this band as a pillar of modernity could not be more inapposite. Truly, no one should be abusing a semi-colon like this to write about a band this bland:
The Cambridge-based sextet’s compositional palette; ornate, orchestral instrumentation, a prog-minded approach to grand, unorthodox and maximalist arrangements as well as lyrics that oscillate between deeply sincere and archly playful, has struck a chord with not just online music fans … but also an emerging crop of ambitious and diverse young musicians.
What stands out to me is the vague tone of a glowing school report here. BCNR play well with others. It’s how people write about that other “star pupil” of the contemporary pop landscape, Jacob Collier, who is just as at home in this “maximalist indie rock” lineage, what with him being an incredibly talented musician whose studio recordings are often technical marvels without any soul in them whatsoever.
And this was always the main problem with prog: for all its jazz-infused sensibilities, it could be utterly soulless. Classic prog has nothing really to do with modernization or a postmodern bricolage in this sense, but is rather a kind of neoreactionary music that infuses classical music with rock music. It’s not all bad, but it’s never really been a vanguard, especially not in the US or the UK. It tries to align itself with jazz fusion, which can be just as proggy, but by travelling in the wrong direction. Prog always encapsulated the dizziness of looking over your shoulder from the present — confusion as an epitaph, to paraphrase King Crimson — whereas jazz encapsulates the dizziness of being whipped around toward the future. Jazz is often sexy too for this reason — because it desires. Prog rarely does, however, even if we can more generously acknowledge its other virtues.
Mark Fisher would have never, of course. When he poured scorn on hippies, it was similarly for their aversion to sensuality, and prog was embarrassing for the same reason.
Punk followed prog for good reason then — and one of my favourite anecdotes, never verified, is that it was a televised performance by Queen that lit the fuse on that moment (a story that made me feel vindicated about a long-term hatred for that band).
Post-punk emerges later as a kind of disjunctive synthesis of punk’s passionate but unsustainable fury with prog’s open ear and studiousness. But this is kids from polytechnics opening themselves up to all that culture has to offer, producing a “pop modernism” that Fisher adored. Prog and post-punk becomes synonymous only when the class distinctions are erased, and this makes it all the more telling that the two genres are continually blurred together today.
Fisher, as usual, gets to the heart of the distinction on his blog when he writes:
The Fall’s pulp modernism has become an entire political-aesthetic program. At one level, Grotesque can be positioned as the barbed Prole Art retort to the lyric antique Englishness of public school Prog. Compare, for instance, the cover of ‘City Hobgoblins’ (one of the singles that came out around the time of Grotesque) with something like Genesis’ Nursery Cryme. Nursery Cryme presents a gently corrupted English surrealist idyll. On the ‘City Hobgoblins’ cover, an urban scene has been invaded by ’emigres from old green glades’: a leering, malevolent cobold looms over a dilapidated tenement. But rather than being smoothly integrated into the photographed scene, the crudely rendered hobgoblin has been etched, Nigel Cooke-style, onto the background. This is a war of worlds, an ontological struggle, a struggle over the means of representation.
Grotesque‘s ‘English Scheme’ was a thumbnail sketch of the territory over which the war was being fought. Smith would observe later that it was ‘English Scheme’ which ‘prompted me to look further into England’s “class” system. INDEED, one of the few advantages of being in an impoverished sub-art group in England is that you get to see (If eyes are peeled) all the different strata of society – for free.’ The enemies are the old Right, the custodians of a National Heritage image of England (‘poky quaint streets in Cambridge’) but also, crucially, the middle class Left, the Chabertistas of the time, who ‘condescend to black men’ and ‘talk of Chile while driving through Haslingdon’. In fact, enemies were everywhere. Lumpen punk was in many ways more of a problem than prog, since its reductive literalism and perfunctory politics (‘circles with A in the middle’) colluded with Social Realism in censuring/ censoring the visionary and the ambitious.
What are we to make of a post-punk palette that shades into prog today, then? It’s unfortunately true that a saccharine music press won’t help us. Indeed, not for the first time recently, the sexlessness of public-school prog sensibilities have come to afflict the writing about it too.
For starters, I am always bored by the vague equivalence drawn between some things all bands do and a sense of contemporaneity: bands having happy and sad songs, addressing more than one social issue on an album, maybe even using musical techniques like counterpoint and dissonance, and isn’t that just like how you see lots of different things on social media… Hail! the sound of now!… I mean, fucking hell, the Arctic Monkeys actually start to look like revolutionaries compare to this lot, and half their lyrics are about pouring public-school-levels of cynicism on the wayward proles of left-behind Yorkshire towns.
But it is how this music is described that always tells you which “now” is being represented. Recall, for example, how the paragraph from Morgan’s article above, following a jab at Mark Fisher’s critiques of “neoliberalism’s culture-quashing hand”, later makes use of mealy-mouthed Starmer-worthy epithets like “ambitious” and “diverse” to show how far we’ve supposedly come from the era of “indie sleaze”. But these are the sorts of cultural descriptor that hook MPs into the zeitgeist. This is Keir Starmer clocking in to watch Adolescence for the “proggy” gimmick of being filmed all in one take, whilst displaying no understanding of the substance of the show. Technical marvel always trumps emotional register for people like this. It’s what makes them fawn over Big Tech whilst never really figuring out how to get themselves comfortably elected.
This wishy-washy liberal tone continues later in Morgan’s article when the discussion of complex orchestral arrangements slides into a discussion of gender representation in the music press more generally. But this is identity politics at its absolute worst, and “progressive” in just the same backwards way as prog music itself. Indeed, more diversity of representation along gendered lines overlooks the more glaring fact about contemporary British culture, which is that access to the arts is predominantly (even increasingly) the preserve of the upper classes.
This has long been apparent to anyone paying attention. It has arguably made Starmer’s New New Labour rerun all the more predictable as well. How many indie bands with cringe names and no politics have we had paraded in front of us over the last ten years or so? (This nightmarish profile of the band Sports Team from the Guardian in 2019 always comes to mind for me.) Never forget how Corbyn — no matter how opportunistically — sought to align himself with grime. He was interested in UK culture that wasn’t the preserve of pomo public school kids learning sonic rebellion by rote. It probably didn’t help him.
Mark Fisher, of course, has a storming critique of this tendency — even if he goes so far that I can’t fully get on board with it myself. In fact, Fisher hated prog so much that he hated anything that even tried to lampoon it.
A controversy that never really broke through to the rest of the music press, unlike Fisher’s hauntological writings, was his distain for Sonic Youth — and particularly Daydream Nation, the structure of which is clearly inspired by the sprawling prog overtures of Emerson Lake Palmer, et al. — who he saw as little more than representatives of “avant-conservatism.”
I love Daydream Nation, for what it’s worth. I think it is rightly lauded as their best record. But for Fisher, it’s precisely the contradiction of being universally admired renegades that he finds so stupid. When he is psychologised by a fellow blogger, hoping to explain his “oddly intense emnity” [sic] towards the band, Fisher comes back guns blazing:
If a group were genuinely challenging and experimental, “oddly intense emnity” would surely be expected from some quarters. But the point is that no-one, even their own supporters, really expects SY to provoke any sort of strong affect at all, just elicit a bland admiration. They’re on our side, they’re good sorts. And the fact is, it is indeed difficult to summon up any affect for them. The emnity is a second-order response to my first order action, which is one of boredom. (A boredom that I strongly suspect is shared by even their most ardent fan — could such a fan sincerely claim that the thought do we really need another Sonic Youth record? has never come to mind?) This renormalisation of boredom, this re-establishment of consensus around ‘accepted standards’, is precisely what is so pernicious about Sonic Youth now. They represent the embourgeoisiement of the rock avant-garde, its disconnection from overreaching, intemperance, intolerance and antagonism.
No matter how much I like Sonic Youth, I can’t disagree with this final line from Fisher. It’s something that jangles the nerves, an embourgeoisiement that stalks even the most shocking of former sonic styles (like Goldie performing his albums live with an orchestra for the BBC), but it is all the more glaring when the claim is made that our contemporary vanguard are made up of a musical bourgeoisie of Oxbridge prog rockers who’ve simply updated their palettes to Y2K sonics and thus tamed the intemperance of decades past.
Fisher continues:
Kim Gordon in New Statesman last week: “Are Sonic Youth political? Well, they are, in that they offer an alternative to mainstream music.” Well, they may not have hit singles (but neither did the prog dinosaurs of the 70s); but here they are on Later With Jools Holland; here they are doing compilations for Starbucks; here they are, the darlings of the broadsheet press, their pastiche-of-themselves records not exactly guaranteed a good review, but always automatically accorded event status. In what way is the so called mainstream perturbed by any of this? In what way, in the decentred era of web 2.0, is this not the mainstream? Their avant credentials rest on a few hoary old formal innovations – just as the prog rockers’ did in the early 70s. SY have disconnected experimentalism from social and existential maladjustment, just as prog rock did. But while punk annihilated prog after a mere half a decade of flatulent complacency, Sonic Youth are still lauded as countercultural heroes even though they have been making variations on the same record for over twenty years now.
SY’s precise function for Restoration culture is to be a hypervisible simulation of an alternative within the mainstream. That is why [2007 film] Juno provides such a depressingly accurate picture of certain impasses in US alt.rock culture: a supposedly smart alt.teen (not so smart that she avoids getting pregnant, though) as poster girl for reproductive futurism, giving up her child to baby-crazed professional, whose husband – a failed rocker now miserably writing advertising jingles — turns her onto Sonic Youth. The fact that Juno — who is into Patti Smith and The Stooges — has mysteriously not heard of Sonic Youth is the key to their fantasy positioning. When she falls out with the husband, Juno says that she “bought another Sonic Youth CD and it’s just noise” — at this point, everyone’s happy: SY are namechecked in an indie-mainstream commodity, but posited as something that is ultimately too extreme. There is no more stultifying mode of cultural conservatism than this avant-conservatism.
[…]
What’s at stake here is the very difference between pulp modernism and postmodernism. The Birthday Party, The Pop Group, The Fall up to 1983, were all impelled by the conviction that the only way in which rock could continue to justify its existence was by perpetually reinventing itself; they were death-driven forward by a nihilative motor which wouldn’t allow them to resemble anything pre-existing, even themselves: never settle, never repeat yourself, never give the audience what they want, were the unwritten maxims inducing them into further convulsions. It’s easy to forget now, after Smith and Cave’s Sunday supplement canonisation, how divisive this music was, how it engendered revulsion and denunciation as much as adoration, how it shattered any sensus communis. And then there is the Vision thing: listening to The Fall, The Birthday Party and The Pop Group, you tuned into a unique way of seeing the world — whereas SY offer only a bleary, weary confection of familiar alt.rock postures and signifiers. Importantly, also: The Fall, The Pop Group and The Birthday Party kept the Sixties behind them. … Punk and postpunk’s significance was to have overcome the Sixties, to have fingered the Sixties as the problem, whereas SY, with their even handedness and informed good taste, re-established a continuum between punk and the Sixties, mending the bridges that punk had incinerated.
Though we might argue to this day about the veracity of Fisher’s reading of Sonic Youth’s influence and status as a counter-cultural entity, so much of this is far more applicable to the “indie-prog” posh rock of now.
Mark Fisher may have not always done a great job of shining a light on what excited him about the future, but he did not mince words when it came to what terrified him about it. It wasn’t “the new” he was afraid of, nor did he fail to sense it when it arrived in front of him, but a pallid sense of “newness” that was little more than appropriation of dissent from a particular class of people. What’s telling about his example from Juno too is the structural positioning of dissenting culture that is otherwise palatable. It’s the classic hipster dad animosity of asking people whether they can even name three Ramones songs when seeing someone in a t-shirt, having not yet come to terms with that fact that they have been so reduced to a kind of commodified and palatable protest that the music doesn’t even matter.
It’s a good job he’s not around to see it; the embourgeoisiement of British rock has accelerated far ahead of anywhere he would have expected…