ENDLESS DEADBEAT SUMMERS, REDUX

This is not the long-promised post on chillwave and hauntology (which at this point looks like it's never going to happen, let's be honest). It is a start, though.

I'm a latecomer to the hauntology party (indeed, at this point it's almost passe--although, Simon Reynolds doesn't think so: "There are those who say that hauntology’s moment has passed… that a good five or six years after the genre-not-genre coalesced, its set of reference points and sonic tropes has been worn threadbare."), but it seemed to fit in really well with something I'd been thinking about for awhile w/r/t chillwave: namely, that its callback to the past (in this case, the 1980s) was not simply an attempt to "redo" or "reclaim" those sounds, but to wrestle with the future projected by that era (the Reagan years).

As Mark Fisher points out, hauntology is, in many respects, the flipside of capitalist realism. That is, if capitalist realism works to foreclose our imaginative possibilities, to describe capitalism as our absolute, untranscendable mental horizon, to make any other system of economic, political, and social organization literally unthinkable, hauntology appears as what is already part of our imaginations: the future as described by the past. All those (not) forgotten ideas and visions and dreams about what the future will be; ghosts that haunt our present moment, shadowing everything, visible out of the corner of the eye, audible in silences and bursts of noise that cloak and mask our daily lives. It's not surprising that many of those past-futures that haunt us are fairly utopian in scope: jet cars, hoverboards, fins on everything, crystal cities, colonies on the moon, extrasystem space exploration, etc., etc. All the things we were promised, all the things that unbeatable optimism in the continued growth and improvement of our lives under capitalism made seem palpably real, tangible, but just beyond our grasp for the moment.

In his short story "The Gernsback Continuum," from the seminal Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, William Gibson's narrator suddenly sees that past-future in the present. It becomes his reality. As his conspiracy theorist friend Merv Kihn tells him in an attempt to reassure him that he's not crazy, he's haunted by

"semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own . . . you saw a different kind of ghost, that's all. That plane [the narrator has seen a ghostly luxury airliner that was planned but never developed in the 1930s] was part of the mass unconscious, once. You picked up on that, somehow."

After his conversation with Kihn, the narrator has a second, more intense vision of the past-future:

I looked behind me and saw the city.
The books on Thirties design were in the trunk; one of them contained sketches of an idealized city that drew on Metropolis and Things to Come, but squared everything, soaring up through an architect's perfect clouds to zeppelin docks and mad neon spires. That city was a scale model of the one that rose behind me. Spire stood on spire in gleaming ziggurat steps that climbed to a central golden temple tower ringed with the crazy radiator flanges of the Mongo gas stations. You could hide the Empire State Building in the smallest of those towers. Roads of crystal soared between the spires, crossed and recrossed by smooth silver shapes like beads of running mercury. The air was thick with ships: giant wing-liners, little darting silver things (sometimes one of the quicksilver shapes from the sky bridges rose gracefully into the air and flew up to join the dance), mile-long blimps, hovering dragonfly things that were gyrocopters. . .

Where before the past-future could be glimpsed out of the corner of the eye (those Mongo gas stations with pumps shaped like "raygun emplacements" and "superfluous central towers ringed with those strange radiator flanges that . . . made them look as though they might generate potent bursts of raw technological enthusiasm" and which, even in the story, are disappearing) now it takes over the landscape, replacing the California of the late 1970s/early 1980s, the built up American boomtown of the post-WWII era. There's something quaint in the narrator's vision (what we would now call a certain sense of retrofuturism), a childlike quality in its spires and silver beads that's miles away from Oedpia Maas' circuit board waiting to be plugged into. What's more, the narrator encounters the inhabitants of this past-future city:

They were the children of Dialta Downes's '80s-that-wasn't; they were the Heirs to the Dream. They were white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They were American.* Dialta had said that the Future had come to America first, but had finally passed it by. But not here, in the heart of the Dream. Here, we'd gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, of foreign wars it was possible to lose. They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world. And in the Dream, it was their world.

In the end, the narrator manages to escape the past-future--the Dream that claims our world as its own and which we can only ever be haunted by, never participate in--by watching television, forcing the past-future to become, once again, "peripheral." Of course, this is no accident: in the early '80s, with the rise of networks like MTV, the US was busy exporting a new dream of the future to its citizens, the Reaganaut vision of the US as the sole hegemonic force in the world, the (hopefully) triumphant destroyer of the "evil empire," the force working to enact, not just locally but globally [an ironic "think global, act local" before its time?], capitalist realism.

The connection with television is vital here. For many chillwave bands, old television shows, old videotapes, and old video games are cited as influences as often as any musicians (in this, the coining of the term "chillwave" as a generic tag, Carles of Hipster Runoff lists one of the genre's defining criteria as "sound[ing] like something that was playing in the background of 'an old VHS cassette that u found in ur attic from the late 80s/early 90s'"). Those old media artifacts often surpass supplementing memories of the era; they are the memories of the era. If your memory of your childhood is a memory of the pieces of culture that exported the dream future America was going to enjoy (and that you, luck you, were someday going to live in), there are some pretty powerful semiotic phantoms that are going to shadow everyday life.

Mining these old cultural artifacts for inspiration and glimpse into lost futures is hardly new, though. Boards of Canada tipped off a major source of inspiration in their name, and artists on the Ghost Box record label like Belbury Poly, The Advisory Circle, and The Focus Group have cited old films and television shows as influences (particularly the work of BBC Radiophonics Workshop in soundtracking many of those shows and films). Nitsuh Abebe, in an excellent article for Pitchfork earlier this year, pointed out that the core elements of "chillwave" have essentially been about in indie music for almost two decades at this point. Indeed, that article has an excellent companion piece, so to speak, in a largely forgotten and underappreciated (it seems to me at any rate) article that Abebe wrote about the rise of post-rock in the UK in the 1990s, "The Lost Generation: How UK Post-Rock Fell in Love With the Moon (And a Bunch of Bands Nobody Listened to Defined the 1990s)".** Many of Abebe's description of the sound of the Lost Generation bands describes chillwave bands fairly well. Seeing Neon Indian live, My Bloody Valentine seemed like their biggest influence. Stereolab is perhaps too polished and refined for chillwave, their retrofuturism pointed to the 1950s and early 1960s, but they don't sound too far off at times. And speaking of My Bloody Valentine, Kevin Shields seemed to have the chillwave sound figured out back in 2003 (one of my favourite pieces of music in the world, right there).

So, the real questions, then: what makes chillwave different? Why now? What's its connection to hauntology (which seems to be a British thing, by and large)? To make a stab at answering them in reverse order: I think chillwave is a specifically (or, perhaps more appropriately uniquely) American form of hauntology, one that reflects the country's different relationship to capitalism and capitalist realism. It's happening now because a generation raised on a particular dream-future promised to it by capitalism/capitalist realism has come of age and seen that future entirely fail to come about (a failure confirmed by the 2008 financial crisis). In response, the summer, the golden California boom and its utopian vision, can only be endlessly gestured toward. Steps in this direction had already been taken by other artists (esp. Christian Fennesz on his 2001 album, Endless Summer), a point made by Mark Richardson here, but it's crystallized now because the music works well "for being alone in a room with only a computer to keep you company." Indeed, Fennesz might have been ahead of the cultural landscape of indie rock when he released that album. The past two years have seen an explosion of music about and dedicated to the idea of an endless summer. Bands like Girls, Wavves, and Best Coast have exported a new version of California sun-drenched pop. Chillwave bands have extolled the virtues of being chill, bro, and taking in those endless summer days. Suddenly, everyone seemed to be singing about summer, about the beach, about long days and long nights and the pleasure of it all.

As for the final question, what makes chillwave different? Well, a lot I think. Much of the hauntological music that people like Fisher and Reynolds triumph (the releases on the Ghost Box record label, for example, or the music of Boards of Canada) are rural, arcadian-sounding releases. The lost futures exist “In a Beautiful Place Out In the Country” (when the artists take an urban term, like Burial, for example, it is a decaying, destroyed urban landscape inhabited by those very ghosts that live in the past-future). For chillwave, though, as an American expression, the landscape is the beach, the endless summer that takes place at the edge of the American Dream. In his article on "Hauntology, spectres and phantoms," Colin Davis refers to the work of Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, who were:

interested in transgenerational communication, particularly the way in which the undisclosed traumas of previous generations might disturb the lives of their descendants even and especially if they know nothing about their distant causes. What they call a phantom is the presence of a dead ancestor in the living Ego, still intent on preventing its traumatic and usually shameful secrets from coming to light. One crucial consequence of this is that the phantom does not, as it does in some versions of the ghost story, return from the dead in order to reveal something hidden or forgotten, to right a wrong or to deliver a message that might otherwise have gone unheeded. On the contrary, the phantom is a liar; its effects are designed to mislead the haunted subject and to ensure that its secret remains shrouded in mystery.

In this case, that lying phantom is the golden capitalist dream of the 80s, its secret and traumatic shame being its impossibility. Indeed, so much of chillwave, lyrically, deals with loss, with missed opportunities, with longings that can't quite be realized, and projects a kind of empty hedonism or pleasure seeking in an attempt to fill the void caused by those unrealized longings. And, in a kind of existential dread that seems almost absent from British hauntology (or at least, hauntology seems to encounter different types of existential dread), the reclaimed dream, the relived past-future in chillwave is not comforting or melancholy, but threatening. Even as the endless summer beckons, though, it ends. What’s left is always receding from our grasp. Or at least it should. With the proliferation of chillwave bands, summer doesn't seem to be ending. As Ian Cohen jokingly pointed out earlier this year, "I never realized that the idea of an 'endless summer' could actually be something of a sinister threat rather than a dream scenario." What happens when the dream takes over, as in "The Gernsback Continuum?" Do we look to TV for a new dream to disappear into? Or is this one of the points that Mark Fisher made in Capitalist Realism: "Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism's ostensible 'realism' turns out to be nothing of the sort." When our dream of endless summer turns into a nightmare summer that won't end, that won't offer any relief, is that the moment in which we can start to dream about escaping?

Alright, so like I said, it's a start. If you've stuck with me this long, I'd really appreciate some feedback on this: I really think this needs to be pushed in a number of different directions. If anyone is interested in a link dump/source sharing, I'll post up all my bookmarks on hauntology and chillwave.


*I'd be interested to know what people think of their curious Aryan-ism. Why is that the necessary link to their American identity?
**There's reference in that article to the fact that Simon Reynolds, one of the early adopters of the concept of hauntology and its applicability to a certain type of contemporary music, was also the coiner of the term "post-rock." That guy does get around, doesn't he?