Representational and symbolic exchange is always subservient to material transformations, and some of our favorites offered quite devastating ways to mourn, from Carrie & Lowell to A Crow Looked At Me. In this decade, it was okay to cry, to embrace our E But other times, it was about having faith in selves.
So, yes, sometimes it was about having faith in the creative output. This decade’s most controversial musics were not marked by political upheaval or rupture, but by ambivalence and ambiguity, even uncertainty.
This restaging of aesthetics happened almost instantaneously (Lil B), sometimes accidentally (Farrah Abraham), and oftentimes originating from and rapidly reproduced by quick-witted, meme-savvy teens who had no reason or incentive to explain themselves. Music, here, was quickly dematerialized, reterritorialized, and re-coded for algorithmic consumption (18+), collapsing and folding into itself (E+E), stumbling into bizarre juxtapositions (DJ Rashad), calling attention to the medium itself (D/P/I), and vomiting brilliant recombinations (Klein). It was OK to not force yourself to choose between celebration or rejection, because our art’s value was in perpetual oscillation. This decade, it was OK to not know whether you “liked” something or understood what was “meant.” It was OK to not be able to envision a future because our depictions were always-already anachronistically displaced.
KIM PETRAS TURN OFF THE LIGHTS VOL 2 VINYL PC
We have plenty of ways to know when we’re getting fucked.) From vaporwave’s radical appropriations and Kanye’s destructive provocations to PC Music’s wild HD pop experimentation and Dean Blunt’s drifting, ephemeral gestures, this decade’s most controversial musics - at least the ones we cared most about here - were not marked by political upheaval or rupture, but by ambivalence and ambiguity, even uncertainty. The results were sensually provocative and perverse, sometimes even confoundingly rote, but it infected the entire decade, offering dynamic, multilayered ways to not only subvert our temporal orientation, but also explore how affect itself could challenge our assumptions about resistance under capitalism.Īnd indeed, most of our favorites this decade didn’t hinge on signaling their politics. Our past was not just aestheticized for apolitical nostalgia, ironic indulgence, or mindless repetition the past was restaged, reperceptualized as a disruption in our listening, calling into question our entrenched, vestigial expectations concerning “originality” and taste. No longer just a simple, comprehensible repository for things that happened, the past became part of the exclusive present, because distinguishing between the two increasingly felt like what time eventually does to the differences between 3rd and 4th grade, or what increased distance does to rocks and pebbles. Many of our early favorites this decade, from James Ferraro to Ariel Pink to Oneohtrix Point Never, would effectively swap traditional notions of musicality and engage directly with phenomena like nostalgia, cultural memory, and the corresponding junk left behind. Time, this decade, figured as much into our writing as words themselves - even when we didn’t realize it - and the same could be said of its music. It was everything time, and we could barely handle it.
It was a statement, but also a warning, heralding - perhaps even willing into existence - what was to come: a decade both explosive and incomprehensible. This quote, this foundational assumption, presaged this decade’s perceptual and material eruptions of sounds, of images, of ideas, of bodies reducing our grandiose theories into beautiful yet fairytale simulations of purity and vanity - into rain and glitter. Here we are, floundering at the tail end of the decade, grasping to make sense of the last 10 years, when that ancient quote (actually from Gang Gang Dance in 2011) had already provided this decade’s temporal framework for what feeling and existing might look like this decade. Join us as we explore the music that helped define the decade for us. We are celebrating the end of the decade through lists, essays, and mixes.
0 kommentar(er)
