Like many of you I'm sure, I have been dipping into the online Markhive - rereading favorite pieces and posts. Below are just a handful - well, a couple of handfuls - really an armful - of Fisher classics. Along with the fully-realised long-form work, there's a few more fragmentary things too - in some ways even more enjoyable and characteristic. Mark was in his element when pitching into the fray - arguing, agreeing (but always building on his interlocutor's point, pushing it further along). Some of his best insights and lines emerged out of the back-and-forth of these fractious spaces - Dissensus threads, the K-punk comments box. Jewels, exuberant with the sheer sport of thought, that are hard to disentangle from the discursive thicket of their moment. But in a way it was in these innumerable brief exchanges and interactions that Mark's mind flexed itself most fruitfully - and merrily.
From the CCRU era, an early classic tirade against postmodernism, co-written with Robin Mackay - "Pomophobia".
On darkside jungle, in the New Statesman, in 1994! And a later Wire Epiphany about the impact of Rufige Cru on his young mind.
Writing as Mark De’Rosario, for Hyperdub when it was a dance-theory-crit webzine not yet a label, on Oxide & Neutrino as punk garage.
A classic K-punk surprise - his paean to Dido's Life For Rent. (Earlier thoughts on her - and Girls Aloud here)
"There are dead times" - a swift salvo against poptimism's obligatory cheerfulness. See also the precursor post "Are We Living Through Another 1985?"
The klassic piece on Burial - "London After the Rave"
Another salvo anti-poptimism (but not, crucially, anti-pop), with an immensely long and fractious comments section.
The klassic piece on Burial - "London After the Rave"
And his interview with Burial for the The Wire
And the unedited transcript of the Burial dialogue.
On Fleetwood Mac
And the unedited transcript of the Burial dialogue.
On Fleetwood Mac
Hauntology, ahoy! #1
Hauntology, ahoy! #2 (Wire interview with The Caretaker / James Kirby)
Photo-illustrated posts on hauntology and landscape - Suffolk + Norfolk
Quick riff on the UK music press and their long-gone power to "dream alternatives". And one on the emerging blog network as its replacement / fruition in exile.
Photo-illustrated posts on hauntology and landscape - Suffolk + Norfolk
Quick riff on the UK music press and their long-gone power to "dream alternatives". And one on the emerging blog network as its replacement / fruition in exile.
"Is Pop Undead?" - the klassic K-punk assault on Arctic Monkeys, in which he introduces the concept of nihilation (the negative drive to aggressively outflank and outmode rival forms of music, discredit and discard them - an energy fatally lacking in the contemporary scene) . Plus Mark's response to my response and his final response.
"Nihil Rebound" - on Joy Division and the depressive truth of laddism.
Glampunk Artpop Discontinuum. And more glam thoughts in this Glampirism post.
Pomophobia, Pt 2 (via Robbie Williams)
On Picnic At Hanging Rock
Pomophobia, Pt 2 (via Robbie Williams)
On Picnic At Hanging Rock
Posts on the wounds of class
On Michael Jackson
"Ontological rot" - a piece on the artist Nigel Cooke
There are too many Dissensus moments - but Mark was in top form in this thread he started about how he just didn't get Dylan. Made potent contributions (as did several others) to these more philosophically out-there pop-theory threads on pleasure and either/or versus plus/and (nihilation pt 2 really). And this - on why the name Dissensus for the forum he co-founded with Matt Woebot - is of historical interest. As is his stormy exit from the forum a few years later.
A surprising piece from the briefly reactivated K-punk of several years ago - a revisionist celebration of The Jam as radical entryists
"Running on Empty" - a New Statesman essay about an energy crisis in pop culture resulting in declining rates of innovation. Most startling among many insights:"Technology has been decalibrated from cultural form. We can’t hear technology any more. There has been a gradual disappearance of the sound of technological rupture" (in favour of endless upgrades).
Another New Statesman essay, this one on the connection between music and militancy.
On boredom (via his archival blog Spectres of Mark - originally in Visual Arts News Sheet)
Secret Sadness, Pt 2 - on Drake.
A definitive take on Sleaford Mods for The Wire.
And a fantastic, ideas-packed, and wonderfully hopeful piece written immediately after the 2015 UK election and Labour's defeat - exploring the concept of "political retromania" and arguing for the role of pop culture in creating a sense that change is possible, not through explicit politicized agitation so much as through the "indirect action" of generating new narratives, new images, new structures, new modes of feeling.
"leaving some signs / now a legend"
And a fantastic, ideas-packed, and wonderfully hopeful piece written immediately after the 2015 UK election and Labour's defeat - exploring the concept of "political retromania" and arguing for the role of pop culture in creating a sense that change is possible, not through explicit politicized agitation so much as through the "indirect action" of generating new narratives, new images, new structures, new modes of feeling.
"leaving some signs / now a legend"