Do you ever wake up with the knowledge that something terrible has happened? Something irreversible, something dire? I wake up with it most mornings. I go to sleep with it too, the feeling that some rubicon has been crossed and, not only is there is no going back, there is no changing of things for the better. It’s a feeling of being out of place and out of time, powerless and inept in the face of something much, much bigger than you. You’ll keep doing what you’re doing because you don’t know what else to do and you’ll be ground down slowly. It’s a feeling like being in a swimming pool when you were young, before you knew how to swim, finding yourself in a part of the pool that was just a little too deep for you, where your feet couldn’t touch the ground and you were trying hard to keep your head above the water. Just on the verge of panic.
It’s probably a pretty regular feeling for a lot of people my age or thereabouts, in their early 20s, finished college and wondering what the hell to do with themselves. The world you imagined is not there anymore, if it ever was. The things you believed in are not real and no one else cares about the things you care about. Do you even care about anything anymore? Can you afford to? The bildungsroman is an old story and worthless to this fatalist, predestined age. It feels like every position is sown up, like there is no winning because someone else has already won. The race is over. Fight back? We just want to be left alone.
The creative industries are dying on their feet, some were murdered, some were sick a long time and others finished themselves off. You could say they were bubble industries from the start but that’s a bit pessimistic. The visual arts are totally reliant on state-funding or serious private investment, i.e. the tasteless, uncouth market. Music is being eaten up by a cultural devaluation as love turns to consumption, a skin to mere accessory. Print, in all forms, is dying out. The physical is being taken away and if we mourn it we’re backward, retrograde fools. We’re stuck between a future we don’t want – politically, culturally, personally – and a past it would be stupid to want again. A path diverged in a yellow wood, down one way is a synth-pop duo, down the other Mumford and Sons. Which would you choose?
In a way, post-modernism is the ultimate capitalist tool. It is an aesthetic and theoretical system that can reproduce itself infinitely at increasing cost only to the consumer. It allows things to stay the same while making it seem like they are changing too fast for anyone to follow. The same old thing is always new and always marketable. Nothing is authentic, so why feel anything for it? All that’s real is the work you do for someone else and perseverance as you have less money, less time, less peace, less hope, less of you. Success is something that happens to someone else. It leaves us with a loss of identity, a loss of roots and a confused future. The irony is this is an old train of thought, trundling around on looped tracks for forty years or more. When your aged, deeply conservative, former Fianna Fáil-supporting, mass-going grandmother is wondering what life would be like with no government, you know things are bad. The first flowering buds of anarchism in a 75-year old woman and not a bloody thing her children or grandchildren can do about it.
Culture stagnates and rots in its own sweat. So many busy bees trying to make something happen, for themselves mostly, and its all a lot of buzzing. We’re indulgent, feeding off our own culture, cannibalising it like it’s there only to please and not to educate, challenge and develop. It’s all sugar. We all want to believe we’re right and so we tell ourselves we’re honest and what we love is honest and real, until we give up and cash in if we have a good enough idea. Manipulation, of people, of stocks, of markets, of position, of culture. Whatever it takes to get up and out because it isn’t worth drudging through this shit any longer. It’s fun and all but it’s too fucking difficult. No soul. A few cans.
What has this got to do with music? Everything really, and nothing. Because music is the creation we’ve taken as our badge, the emblem we hold up to tell others what we are and how we live. And the way we’re told we consume it – I’ve never felt like I consume music, have you? What a fucked up way of looking at it – is disgusting. Everything is free and that wouldn’t really matter much but for the fact that we don’t even pay in time any more. (Big giant “WE”, I’m sorry to generalise. My generation. Your generation. Their generation. Blame. Doesn’t mean a thing, we’re all screwed and screwing.) Music as an accessory to life, a place to be seen. The music press sold out a long time ago, it’s now totally dependent on fuck-buddy friendships with PR companies, managers, promoters; how else can it stay alive? International showcases, festival bookings, hip young columnists, hungry bloggers, haircuts, record deals, cover-shoots. When did it become ok for “artists” to seek out success, to make that their goal? When did it become ok for your art to be part of advertising campaigns? When did we go blind? It’s like politics, a game that just happens and we could all do without it but it carries on under the illusion of its own importance. Some people even believe in it, but their numbers are decreasing. I’m a part of it and I’m ashamed, compromised, self-aware. But I’ve got to eat. Ha! The excuses.
Sometimes none of this matters and you find moments of joy amid it all, a sound or a song that will clear the clouds and rain sunlight down upon your very essence. More often though, you read something (like this) and think it’s never getting better. I should have become a carpenter. I might yet. I do not want to be a dynamic employee, I do not want to be suitable for a role, I do not want to interview well, I do not want to be a valuable part of this company. I do not want my art, the art I love enough to call my own, to fit. I want it awkward and messy and real. I want it to be complex. I want to have to think about it. Sometimes I’ll want to be able to dance to it or fly into a pack of heaving bodies to it or sit in a chair and read to it. Whatever I physically do along to it, I want to have to think about it after. I want it to impact on me, to leave me changed. To leave me better for having experienced it.
I want other people to think about it. I want to read their thoughts, to hear their ideas. I want to learn in a group, not locked away by myself, tethered to a screen I hate more with every passing day. I want to take advantage of what is available, not feel enslaved by it. I want this ever smaller world to feel cosy, not crowded. The language of criticism, the way real criticism uses language, is disappearing, either vapourised in the general press or retreating into the locked-down academy. We are getting worse at analysing and learning, getting more used to doubt, fear, shame and stasis. We cannot imagine a future any more.
I have no answers, of course I don’t. I’ll go looking for my roots but I can’t help you. I ask people questions all the time and I’m sick of the answers. The questions are nothing and the answers are nothing. They serve their purpose but we don’t gain anything from them but time, a little more sustenance for this charade. I’ll ask you now though, same as I’ve been asking myself so often lately, what are we going to do about it?
