In 2011, pop music scholar Simon Reynolds was already observing popular culture’s fascination with its personal previous, noting that “we stay in a pop age gone loco for retro and loopy for commemoration.”
For Reynolds, this obsession with the previous has the potential to convey in regards to the finish of pop music tradition: “May or not it’s,” he asks, “that the best hazard to the way forward for our music tradition is … its previous?”
The scenario has not improved within the years since Reynolds voiced his considerations. Our fixation on the favored music of earlier a long time threatens our future by stifling originality.
Due to recording know-how, and now to newer developments in synthetic intelligence and machine studying, we discover ourselves increasingly in a spectral current, completely haunted by the ghosts of pop music’s previous.
Ghostly presence
This sort of hauntedness can provoke nervousness. Hauntology, a theoretical idea originating within the work of French thinker Jacques Derrida, was later utilized to musicology by critic Mark Fisher. Hauntology is anxious with reminiscence, nostalgia and the character of being. The current isn’t merely “current,” and the remnants of our cultural previous all the time linger or return.
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Are you haunted by ghosts of the previous and phantoms of your future? Welcome to the spooky realm of hauntology
A ghost, in literature, folklore and widespread tradition, is a presence from the previous of one thing or somebody that not stays. Is a ghost, then, from the previous or of the current? As hauntology would insist, a ghost is paradoxically each on the similar time.
In November 2023, pop phenomenon the Beatles launched a “new” track titled “Now and Then.” It acquired a rapturous reception from followers and critics alike, and was quickly topping the charts in the US and the UK, changing into the fastest-selling single of 2023.
The track contains a lead vocal observe by the late John Lennon, salvaged from a demo recording he made at house within the late Seventies, only a few years earlier than his homicide in 1980. It additionally contains archival guitar tracks from the late George Harrison.
The 2 surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, contributed new bass, drum, vocal and guitar elements (McCartney even performed a slide guitar solo mimicking Harrison’s sound and elegance), and producer Giles Martin (son of legendary Beatles’ producer George Martin) offered a string association and a tapestry of background vocals lifted from different iconic Beatles songs.
“Now and Then” was additionally celebrated for the technological sophistication of its manufacturing, and particularly for its use of synthetic intelligence. Utilizing software program that would inform the distinction between a human voice and different sounds on a recording, Lennon’s voice was remoted and reanimated, permitting McCartney and Starr to carry out alongside their long-deceased bandmate.
Ultimate masterpiece
“Now and Then,” along with being a “new” Beatles tune, is probably going additionally the group’s final: there aren’t any extra previous recordings to resurrect, and McCartney and Starr are each octogenarians.
Certainly, based on music critics like The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis, “Now and Then” is an emotionally satisfying “act of closure.” It stands by itself as a real addition to the Beatles’ catalogue, wrapping up the band’s profession and “by no means stoops to deploying clearly Beatles-y signifiers.”
Music journalist Jem Aswad, writing in Selection, characterizes “Now and Then” as a “bittersweet finale.” Whereas Aswad is mildly crucial of the track as an “incomplete sketch,” he insists on the similar time that any additional criticism is simply unwarranted bitter grapes, concluding that it’s “an sudden pleasure that marks the completion of the group’s final little bit of unfinished enterprise.”
Haunted, ghostly
Some critics, nonetheless, echoing Reynolds’s considerations, discovered “Now and Then” decidedly much less praiseworthy. Josiah Gogarty’s brutal overview, printed in UnHerd, argues that the track serves as “an indication of our cultural doom loop,” and likened it to a “séance, calling forth the warbling and the jangling of the lifeless.”
The recording contains McCartney’s count-in at the start and a few studio chatter from Starr on the finish, as if to reassure listeners that the track is a product of dwelling musicians.
On the similar time, the track is eerily placeless or ahistorical, caught someplace between previous and current: a haunted, ghostly factor, proof of a popular culture that has lengthy ceased to evolve.
Limiting the long run
The issue is the way in which songs like “Now and Then” are imbued with nostalgia: they threaten the long run and restrict the potential of the emergence of latest concepts.
Fisher feared the impact of this type of nostalgia giving rise to “a cancelled future.” We will readily think about such a future, as a result of we already inhabit it: a way forward for unending excursions by impossibly decrepit rock bands, numerous re-boots of previous motion pictures and tv reveals, the fetishization of all that’s classic.
Even essentially the most stunningly progressive technological developments — such because the AI that made “Now and Then” potential — seems to serve a regressive objective, specifically to resurrect the Beatles.
A beneficiant tackle “Now and Then” could be to view its association and manufacturing as capturing and amplifying the that means of the track lyrics: “Every now and then I miss you … I would like you to return to me.” These lyrics recommend the presence and absence theorized by hauntology, which is cleverly mirrored within the track’s haunted soundscape.
Much less generously, “Now and Then,” fairly than an act of closure, merely continues an ongoing pattern of wanting backwards in pop music. It signifies that our insecurities about our future guarantee we are going to stay perpetually entangled with its ghosts.
