I actually read Songs In The Key of MP3 after picking it up at the brilliant piccadilly recs last week (finished it in a weekend) and I have to disagree - it’s fantastic. Easily the most excited I’ve been about a piece of music writing in a while. It isn’t really what you characterise it as. All of the material conditions and contradictions inherent in art under absolute neoliberalism are acknowledged within the first few pages. It doesn’t deny the circumstances Fisher described but explores how a new generation of artists responded to them. The section about city-based psychedelia and rap as working class music in the earl sweatshirt chapter is especially brilliant
Yes, I was mostly going off what Cartledge and Colquhoun wrote about Inscoe-Jones' book, and my impressions could only be just that: impressions. If I've mischaracterized then certainly mea culpa, but primarily I was trying to sort through and/or respond to Rekret's ideas, which seem to hold a broadly similar position, and with which I am more familiar.
Pulling back, I suppose what I'm most preoccupied with, and more directly relevant to what you say above, is how much artists' response to a structure of feeling is itself part of that selfsame structure. I don't have a clear answer, but it's both fascinating and frustrating to me precisely because late capitalism is more adept than ever at metabolizing any oppositional gesture or aesthetic.
The more I think about it, the more opposed capitalist realism's cancelled futures and the experiments of popular modernism become, but neither seem to be fully spent. There's still this push-and-pull between them. Obviously I'm rooting for something akin to a new popular modernism (and/or the kinds of experiments Rekret lauds) emerging (if that's possible) but it doesn't seem like we're there enough that we can dispense with the framework of cancelled futures yet. Shit's still just too bleak and for the most part static.
I actually read Songs In The Key of MP3 after picking it up at the brilliant piccadilly recs last week (finished it in a weekend) and I have to disagree - it’s fantastic. Easily the most excited I’ve been about a piece of music writing in a while. It isn’t really what you characterise it as. All of the material conditions and contradictions inherent in art under absolute neoliberalism are acknowledged within the first few pages. It doesn’t deny the circumstances Fisher described but explores how a new generation of artists responded to them. The section about city-based psychedelia and rap as working class music in the earl sweatshirt chapter is especially brilliant
Yes, I was mostly going off what Cartledge and Colquhoun wrote about Inscoe-Jones' book, and my impressions could only be just that: impressions. If I've mischaracterized then certainly mea culpa, but primarily I was trying to sort through and/or respond to Rekret's ideas, which seem to hold a broadly similar position, and with which I am more familiar.
Pulling back, I suppose what I'm most preoccupied with, and more directly relevant to what you say above, is how much artists' response to a structure of feeling is itself part of that selfsame structure. I don't have a clear answer, but it's both fascinating and frustrating to me precisely because late capitalism is more adept than ever at metabolizing any oppositional gesture or aesthetic.
The more I think about it, the more opposed capitalist realism's cancelled futures and the experiments of popular modernism become, but neither seem to be fully spent. There's still this push-and-pull between them. Obviously I'm rooting for something akin to a new popular modernism (and/or the kinds of experiments Rekret lauds) emerging (if that's possible) but it doesn't seem like we're there enough that we can dispense with the framework of cancelled futures yet. Shit's still just too bleak and for the most part static.