The phoney face-off between Blur and Oasis which preoccupied the media was a distraction from the real fault lines in British music culture at the time. The conflict that really mattered was between a music which acknowledged and accelerated what was new in the 90s - technology, cultural pluralism, genre innovations - and a music which took refuge in a monocultural version of Britishness: a swaggering white boy rock built almost entirely out of forms that were established in the 1960s and 1970s. this was a music designed to reassure anxious white males at a moment when all of the certainties they had previously counted on - in work, sexual relations, ethnic identity were coming under pressure.
- Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My LIfe
Adorno and Mark Fisher aren’t antithetical thinkers as many may think, me previously included. There may be many differences between the two on issues of culture, but they are ultimately aligned on the culture industry. Mark Fisher is far more invested in the state of culture than Adorno, but he still critiques it from the standpoint of the culture industry. The 21st century has lost any sense of cultural vitality and fails to produce its own cultural identity. This is because of the culture industry, the biggest films are constantly making references to the past. Iron Man is sound tracked by AC/DC, The Mario Film uses ‘I need a hero’, ‘Thunderstruck’ and more. One Direction had their songs based on already popular songs. When not referencing previously established forms, the culture industry produces works with nothing new or old about them, just immanently benign.
For Mark Fisher, the politics of culture was incredibly important. Neoliberalism for Fisher helped to bring about the very state of culture today.1 The ‘slow cancellation of the future’ he called it, was brought about by the complete annihilation of all culture, part of this included the gutting of arts funding.2 The marketisation of culture will always be poison for innovation because innovation requires risk and there is very little reason why any record company would take the risk when they know what sells. Take the Mario film [2022], there is absolutely nothing interesting about the film, it is a more explicit example than most products these days as it does absolutely nothing to pretend to be an artistic expression. It is just Shrek if Shrek wasn’t a parody. Ai films may not exist yet but as most films are already designed to be cash cows they are already written by markets. The horrific state of culture then is reflected in political consciousness according to both Fisher and Adorno. Capitalist Realism is regenerated through the poor state of culture as subjects continue to be enumerated by empty products and lame art that fails to capture any real consciousness. Even criticisms of capitalist society become objects of consumption and then reduced to another commodity like Squid Game. All politics is expressed through culture and thereby all political thought becomes images in media. Star Wars makes empty references to fascism because those are the bad guys. The culture industry is so alien from human expression that it finds the representation of historical tragedy impossible.
Against counter culture
In an Old K-punk blog post Mark Fisher takes aim at hippies. He says of the hippy movement that:
For all its “androgynous” imagery, hippie was fundamentally a middle class male phenomenon. It was about males being allowed to regress to the state of His Majesty the Ego hedonic infantilism, with women on hand to service all their needs.
- Mark FIsher, K-punk, or the glampunk art pop discontinuum
Adorno also famously disliked the student movements of the 1960s, writing of their use of music in protest:
I believe, in fact, that attempts to bring political protest together with “popular music” – that is, entertainment music—are for the following reason doomed from the start. The entire sphere of popular music, even there where it dresses itself up in modernist guise is to such a degree inseparable from past temperament, from consumption from the cross-eyed transfixation with amusement, that attempts to out fit it with a new function remain entirely superficial… And I have to say that when somebody sets himself up, and for whatever reason sings mauldin music about Vietnam being unbearable I find that really it is the song that is in fact unbearable, in that by taking the horrendous and making it somehow consumable, it ends up wringing something like consumption-qualities out of it.
Any objections to Adorno’s point may be countered by the reception to ‘fortunate son.’
The problem with notions like ‘counter culture’ is that ultimately it remains within the culture industry, it is permitted culture. It may have greater ‘cultural value’ and retain a greater sense of aura around it, but any counter culture does become a marketable object. This is where Fisher and Adorno break. In the same article by Fisher, he mentions Glam that dominated the early 70s and uses this as an example of an actually interesting cultural movement. Comparing it to the aristocratic virtues that Nietzsche preaches in the latter half of Beyond Good and Evil.3 For Fisher, Glam represents this because it has no time for democracy, it includes highly cultivated aesthetics in the imagery of artists like David Bowie. And unlike the ‘androgyny’ of hippy movements Glam actually embraces a mixing of gendered styles. It remains a fundamentally life-affirming art style that raises the individual artists beyond others by the manner in which they present themselves, standing out from the herd by embracing inauthenticity. They are both authentic and inauthentic at the same time, they dress and perform their subjectivity in artificial clothing but by standing out they end up being their own self. It is contradictory, like all cultural movements. Rage against the machine can sing about shooting landlords and sell millions of albums at the same time because it's always expressed through the culture industry. The culture industry is not just the capitalist structures of cultural production but also the very essence of culture under capitalist society itself. “What has become alien to men is the human component of culture” Adorno writes in Minima Moralia.4 The culture industry is the very form in which culture is produced, it must all be created in an immanent relation to commodification. Glam vs Hippy is an aesthetic distinction in the cultural forms rather than a political one as Glam was decidedly an apolitical movement and this does reflect Fisher’s position as a music journalist rather than a philosopher in this period. What Glam is at least, is a distinct cultural movement that can be categorised. Fisher’s Hauntological critique of contemporary 21st century culture is a response to something like this, where there are few and far between contemporary cultural movements. None of which are really as mainstream as Glam was. Hyperpop to me is the one big cultural movement of the 21st century. But in many ways it is a rerun of Glam, the embracement of superficiality and the artificial nature of their music, the wild aesthetics and the mixing of gendered styles. SOPHIE’s machine music is in many ways Glam 2.0 with tracks like ‘Immaterial’, ‘Faceshopping’, and Hey QT. Although this may not be a bad thing, in many ways Glam was designed for 21st century cyberculture, with the domination of the internet in all forms of life it is much easier to be ‘inauthentic.’ SOPHIE’s music perfectly represents the subject formed through social relations. The black hole of faciality under fire in ‘Faceshopping’ The immaterial nature of subjectivity in ‘Immaterial.’ Glam 2.0 is not just a rerun but rather a perfection. But it always contained its own negation, counter culture is very dialectical. In Hyperpop we see this with someone like Charli XCX, despite working with SOPHIE she is the negation of all that hyperpop stands for. Crash is simply the actualisation of this negation. Charli regained her popularity through hyperpop but at the same time never goes beyond basic pop structures, beyond some minor exceptions in pop2. Crash is the return to form, like Johnny Rotten being pro-trump. All concepts come with their own negation and cultural movements are ultimately no different. Punk rock created Green Day, and Hyperpop made Charli XCX.
All that is Bowie melts into Styles
ABANDON ALL CULTURAL VITALITY ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE
Harry Styles is easily the best representative of the culture industry today. Coming out of the X-factory machine as a member of One Direction before becoming his ‘own’ artist. Yet, there is nothing in his career that marks out a unique style. Watermelon Sugar is the easiest example of cultural hauntology not because it borrows from a particular style from the past, but rather that it could be from any period. His music is part of ‘the 21st century not arriving.’ One Direction was often explicitly hauntological. ‘Best song ever’ samples ‘Baba 'O'Riley’ from The Who and ‘What Makes You Beautiful’ samples ‘Summer Lovin’ from Grease. 1D was the ultimate form of the culture industry in that period. They’re the 2010s pop charts personified. Non-subjects created through market interests to sell the most records possible, they have no personality, they have no identity, they just are.
In recent years, Harry Styles has sought to carve out an identity for himself as an artist through the revolutionary act of mixing gendered styles. This is all he has, his actual musical output is mediocre at best, nothing offensively bad, just normal chart pop. Not much different from his time in One Direction. This may be because of his record company, or it's just the music he wants to make, either way his artistic output lacks any vitality. There has been lots of speculation over his sexuality and to me that’s very gross but also pointless because even if he came out as Bi or Gay nothing would fundamentally change. He would simply be the same mediocre artist, but now he likes sucking cock. Even at his most transgressive, he barely scratches taboo; he simply becomes fodder for conservative culture war about men losing their masculinity. Before he is quickly defended by the queer communards of the culture industry. If we are to even call it transgression, he is the most permitted transgressive artist to ever exist; his entire identity is built by corporate bottom lines and whatever isn’t too offensive or daring. Nothing sells better than transgression. Pop music will always be pop music. SOPHIE at her most daring is not pop nor what passes as Hyperpop today. Artists like Harry Styles and Sam Smith exist within the boundaries of chart pop, which never stray too far from the basic forms of pop music. Early Lady Gaga, meat dress etc, is in the same boat as them. Poker face is hardly sister ray. The actual demarcations of the styles in which Smith and Styles exist in is so limiting that they would have to fundamentally change their music in order to begin the slightest of transgressions. But even within popular music, they are comically tame. ‘Unholy’ keeps everything within innuendo, whilst WAP by Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B make explicit reference to oral sex. Like most popular music, WAP and Unholy still exist within the shadow of the Velvet Underground. ‘Venus in Furs’ is if ‘Unholy’ was actually challenging in any manner. It's important to note that Venus in Furs was released in 1967 and not 2023, and it's about sadomasochistic sex rather than infidelity. The actual form of the song as well sets it apart from the pop of Sam Smith. Lou Reed's vocals are deeply erotic, such as when he proclaims in the chorus ‘I am tired, I am weary’ in a style reminiscent of someone experiencing la petite mort. The manner in which he says ‘bleed for me’ also represents a deeply sexual experience. Sam Smith meanwhile makes eroticism unerotic. They sing in a slight moan with a big powerful voice almost imitating a preacher that gets off on hearing the confessions of their churchgoers. But the actual sins being described is only infidelity, it's hardly the dark subterranean caverns of eroticism. Whilst the chorus takes the form of a choir, presumably referencing church choirs in contrast to the title ‘Unholy.’ Kim Petras similarly just does slightly erotic pop vocals. In their attempt they have transgressed in neither form nor content, they are just doing bland pop with a bit of erotic undertones. This is all the point of Hauntology. Contemporary culture lacks any vitality and turns to imitate past forms that did. Or even without imitation, just an empty void of identity. Similarly, there is a complete lack of culture built around the music. There exists ‘stan culture’ but it is only identification with consumption habits. I’m a Sam Smith stan if I’m always consuming Sam Smith content one way or another and making my own Sam Smith content. That is not a cultural movement like Glam or Rave culture, it is simply fandom. As Fisher points out, the lack of any cultural movements around music is one of if not the most deadening aspect of Hauntology.5
This is where Adorno and Fisher break off. In his later work ‘acid communism’ he says of the 60s that “On one level the 60s revolt was an impressive illustration of Lenin’s remark that the capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with.”6 Whilst, Adorno says of the same music that it makes the horrific consumable. I think Adorno is mostly correct here. The actual nature of the world didn’t fundamentally change because of protest music, not that Mark Fisher believed it would, and consistently political music has got worse. ‘Boys will be boys’ by Dua Lipa says nothing that isn’t shared by infographics on Instagram. Political and transgressive music borderline does not exist and if it does it always replaces political consciousness. A great example of this is the 2009 campaign to make ‘Killing in The Name’ christmas #1. Essentially, in order to block that years’ X-factor winner taking the christmas #1 spot, there was an organised campaign to make Rage Against the Machine’s song ‘Killing in The Name’ the christmas #1 single. It was a revolt against Simon Cowell and the corporate music machine that was X-factor, it's mostly fallen off these days. It did succeed and RATM also played a free concert to raise awareness about homelessness, Tom Morello also donated the royalties he made from the campaign. However, the entire event was contained within Sony Music Entertainment. The vastness of the culture industry sounds like a government conspiracy theory, but is completely true. RATM were signed to Epic Record, which is a subsidiary of SME. Joe McElderry who won X-factor 2009 and was RATM’s competition was signed to Syco Music which was a subsidiary of Syco Entertainment of which Sony owned a 50% stake in. Ultimately, the campaign did two things, gave money to homeless charities and to Sony. Even to bring this back to Harry Styles, Styles was signed to Syco with One Direction which was owned half by Sony and now is part of Columbia Records which is owned by Sony. This goes to show that the actual structures of the culture industry are more important than the content. The revolt against Simon Cowell helped line the pockets of Simon Cowell. The actual structure of the culture industry is designed in such a way to ensure nothing ever truly escapes it, even the velvet underground is mostly owned by Universal Music Group.
So Fisher or Adorno? If this is a decision that had to be made, I would say Adorno’s analysis of culture is more correct than Fisher’s, but they are ultimately not contradictory. Fisher is able to analyse the aesthetic distinctions between pieces of culture, whilst Adorno hits the structures behind popular culture. In reality, it is not Fisher or Adorno, it is Fisher and Adorno.
Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life (Hampshire: Zero Books), pp. 8-9
ibid., p.15
Mark Fisher, ‘K-punk, or the glampunk art pop discontinuum’ in (ed.) Darren Ambrose, K-Punk: The collected and Unpublished writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016) (London: Repeater Books, 2018), p. 274
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (London: Verso), p.156 §96
Mark FIsher, Ghosts of My Life, p.27
Mark FIsher, K-punk collected writings,
slay