Kieran and I both appear in this interesting piece by Spencer Kornhaber at The Atlantic, which inspects the discourse of decline in culture - mostly focused on music, but also taking into account contemporary visual art - via some well-known gloomsayers: Ted Gioia, Dean Kissick, and Jaime Brooks.
Kieran naturally is present to represent the Anti-Declinist position - what would you call that? Flourishism? - and I pop into view towards the end as a sort of semi-reformed / semi-retracted declinist. We also figure as "dad hands over the family business to son", i.e. chasing after new micro-genres and giving them names *.
Seems to me that with most eras - apart from exceptionally supercharged, forward-thrusting decades like the Sixties - there's usually sufficient evidence someone could draw on to argue either the Declining Times or It's A Golden Age case ( especially if the positive stance is modified with a "if you know where to look"). Stagnation and new shoots of growth are always going on simultaneously. Pop music and its unpop offshoots seem particularly amenable to these kinds of competing arguments - a schism of temperament as much as a generational divide - because from very early on (1968, I'd say) there has been a kind of internal battle between postmodern and modernist impulses within pop music. The archive of past achievement builds up and this stokes an ever-growing temptation to revisit and reenact the high points of recent history, whether you're a consumer or a creator. Also there's something about pop music that makes it particularly susceptible to nostalgia for its own earlier phases of surging excitement, those virgin moments of emergence. You don’t get quite the same plangent yearning to time travel in other art forms or areas of entertainment, the ache to go back.
Talking about decline and the political gloomscape... I also pop up in this nice piece by Meredith Blake about the protest song, which asks where are the anti-Trump anthems in the charts, eh? It's written for The Contrarian, which I recommend subscribing to if you need your doomscroll jitters counteracted by some reasoned and informed analysis. 33 Revolutions Per Minute author Dorian Lynskey also appears with some astute comments.
Update
W. David Marx chips into the declinism conversation. (He has a book out soon called Blank Space: A Cultural History of the 21st Century). And brings up poptimism as causing a "crisis of valuation" - there can't be agreement whether decline is happening if you can't agree on a shared metric. But how far back do you have to go to find anything like that prevailing? Warhol and Kael and Sontag were already complicating that in the 1960s, taking up the cause of "plastic" and "trash" and "camp" and "sensation". By the end of the decade, Nik Cohn was making that move within the domain of pop music, refolding the fissure between high and low back into pop itself and aggressively taking up the low as crusade. (Even as many high culture elitists still continued to regard all pop culture as lowly and beneath consideration). That Cohn-style move of championing the low within the low, the lowest of the low, has remained a fixture of criticism ever since - an option on the menu of stances available, a culture-critical space you could occupy. It was over 30-years-old when the poptimism debate "kicked off" in the early 2000s.
Marx mentions a glass half-full piece from last year, "No, Culture Is Not Stuck", by Katharine Dee at Wisdom of Crowds, that argues for new emergent cultural forms, TikToky stuff etc. Alternate title for the piece: "No, Your Brain Is Not Rotting".
Kornhaber has more to say on the subject at The Ringer's Derek Thompson's podcast Plain English
Tidbit:
"The really shocking statistic [from 2021] that I think made a lot of people wake up was that almost 75 percent of music consumed today is old music. New releases count for, really, a minority of what people are streaming at any given time. And those numbers keep getting “worse.” More and more every year, you see new releases getting a smaller, smaller piece of the pie for listenership. And that would seem to indicate that people are a lot less interested in the culture of now than the culture of yesterday. And you have very concrete examples of what this means.
"A couple of years back, Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” became a huge smash. It came nearly to the top of the Billboard [Hot 100] chart despite being released three decades earlier. That was due to being placed in a TV show, Stranger Things, which is totally nostalgia bait; it’s a pastiche of tropes from ’80s movies and TV. And it happened in large part because TikTok and platforms like it allow, well, they allow a couple of things, but one of them is the flattening of culture and the flattening of time.
"Things can pop up there and catch your eye and compete directly with what’s happening now. And in many cases, the things from the past have an advantage because they’ve been time-tested, and we’ve grown up in a culture where the ideas contained within them shaped our taste in the first place. So it felt like the past was eating the present."
And another Kornhaber interview at Studio 2
* some family busy-ness - recent columns by Kieran Press-Reynolds
on Drake shilling for online gambling sites and the get-rich-quick mysticism of luck that is so very Trumpian
on phonk (of all the genres K has introduced to my ears this is the one whose appeal I find most mystifying - reminds me a bit of nu-skool breaks)
on the afterlives of dariacore
on the brainrot royalty of internet rap
Oh and here is a No Bells at NTS mix Kieran made of "the sounds of the rap abyss and beyond"
