And Jesus Said Follow Me and I Will Make You Fishers of Raincoats (or something)

I read two music-related books in the past month that got under my skin (in a bad way) and apparently won't leave me alone until I write about them in an attempt to figure out what my/their problem is. The first is Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life and the second is Jenn Pelly's Raincoats book on 33 1/3.  Both books feel, to me, written from a point of view best described as "living in total terror of the neoliberal hellscape that is 21st century life." This POV is foregrounded in Fisher's work, completely obscured in Pelly's, but both books feel like someone screaming from underneath several layers of thick gauze. Or maybe duct tape (gaffer tape, I suppose, in Fisher's case; gaffa tape, I suppose, for a fan of Kate Bush's The Dreaming).

The Fisher part of this essay is based almost entirely on memory, as I've returned Ghosts of My Life to the library, and partly on the couple dozen chapters of the 2018 anthology included in the e-book sample. The anthology itself is either unavailable from on-line booksellers or $30 and rising. The e-book is available, but costs $12.99. I believe Fisher would understand my skepticism regarding the ephemeral nature of digital media, and why I balked at shelling out that much money for a book that I could only read on a device that is only five years old, but rapidly fading. There are dots to be connected here regarding planned obsolescence as a vital function of contemporary capitalism/consumerism/etc., as well as the environmental and occupational pillaging that is a part of the manufacturing of said device. A difference between writing for money (as I have done elsewhere) and writing for free (as I am doing here) is that it's real easy to justify the sacrifice of supporting evidence in the name of airtight accuracy versus shelling out money you can't afford in order to claim some extra authority. If there mistakes in my response, massive factual gaps, let's just agree to consider it emblematic of our current flood of information and misinformation, agreed?

Here's an uncanny valley biography of him to save me the time. Note that the information in the bio, dictated by a computer-generated voice, isn't miles away from this New Yorker piece about him.


Fisher killed himself early in 2017, quite possibly--if his writing is anything to go by--after reading one too many end-of-year listicles proclaiming the greatness of Beyonce. Though I'm sure Fisher wouldn't like to hear it, his taste ran predominantly white, male, hetero, grim modernist, monochrome, and joyless. Fisher's depression was real. He wrote about it constantly, even recognizing that depression is a part-truth that fools its recipient into thinking it's a whole truth. That said, Fisher projects his depression into everything, whether the virtues of Burroughs, or the empty fun of Glastonbury. He also falls for an argument as old as Ecclesiastes and as publishable as Simon Reynolds' Retromania, namely that our culture and politics (but specifically music) have ceased to evolve and all anyone does is recycle the past. Fisher says something along the lines of there's no music being made today (roughly 2010 when Fisher was writing) that would sound surprising or unfamiliar to listeners in the mid-90s. Which is bullshit of course. Never mind the fact that any lyrical reference to anything internet or social media would be completely incomprehensible, I can think of three really obvious post-1995 example off the top of my head: Outkast's Bombs Over Baghdad, Missy Elliott and Timbaland's run of 98-02 singles, and Beyonce's Single Ladies. All songs that sounded like nothing that came before. Here's one from 2012 that Fisher died without ever mentioning that's fucking weird as hell.



But then what Fisher (along with Reynolds) is really mourning is the death of new ideas in guitar-based indie rock, or the music (and music criticism) he loved as a youth. That's why he never comes close to noticing the significance of a group like Animal Collective, where instruments are secondary to samplers and computers, an indie group that filled huge theaters and headlined festivals. One can trace a line from Panda Bear's Person Pitch to twenty one pilots' Stressed Out--the way the singer intones good old days is a dead giveaway. A few years ago when I was working at the local library, I watched a room full of teenagers, black and white, poor and not-so-poor, solemnly sing along to Stressed Out because the song had great significance to them. In the face of all that, Fisher's writing about the spiritual deadness at the heart of contemporary culture, especially compared to bands in his youth like, uh, Japan, rings hollow. Ultimately, Fisher's cultural criticism says way more about Mark Fisher, and the struggles of Mark Fisher, than it does about the culture he's writing about. The fact that Fisher finds signs of life in Burial, and, god help us, Sleaford Mods, only weakens his credibility.

Depression is an affliction that both illuminates and obscures. It sends you thoughts that are true, as well as thoughts which are not. it colors and saturates everything you see and think. That saturation is the source of its power. It prevents you from knowing what is real and what is not. When Fisher wrestles with his affliction, it makes for compelling reading. When he tries to extrapolate from it, when he uses it to create meaning, seeing it rooted in depression in capitalism, or pop music, he gets out over his skis. I say this as someone who loathes both neoliberal capitalism and lockstep poptimism with every fiber of their being: even if we were to live in a socialist utopia with UBI and challenging music on the radio that made our hearts swoon with glorious melodies and breathtaking imagination, Mark Fisher still would have been depressed, and he likely still would have killed himself. 

That's my entirely subjective opinion, of course, but as I read through Ghosts of My Life, I couldn't help noticing that there was very little about Fisher's actual, you know, life. It feels a little trite for him to locate the source of his trauma at the fact that Ian Penman and Paul Morley no longer write for NME. 

Having said all that, I'm extremely sympathetic to many of Fisher's ideas, as well as his analysis. It's not that Fisher is wrong--about capitalism, or poptimism--it's, like any depressed person, the ferocity of his vision prevents him from seeing all of this. In one sense, the title of this site is meant as a joke, a semi-clever play on words. But in another, more accurate sense, it strives to go beyond Fisher's project, to not settle for easy answers, to not be seduced by aspects of the culture and our society that merely confirm our worst ideas about those things. We strive to also see the joy, the glorious insanity of being alive at this point in time, for however much longer this timeline lasts. A criticism of contemporary existence that doesn't include laughter, and irreverence, is a criticism that is incomplete, to the point of being dishonest. 

For the sake of space, and the short-attention-span of the typical 21st century reader, we'll get to the Pelly book in the next installment.