Is This It?

I generally don’t believe people when they say they have strong feelings about new music. I believe that what is often mistaken for strong emotion is in fact something called satisfaction: the antithesis of forward motion, a comforting delusion that yesterday isn’t so different from today and is also a safe approximation of tomorrow.

Contemporary music has increasingly become reduced to an art of implication, celebrated in accordance with its ability to convincingly summon to mind a series of familiar genre tropes and historically saturated narrative structures. It often doesn’t need to do anything in particular with the history it references in order to receive praise, it simply needs to infer that said history exists in the first place, ideally in a manner that is immediately recognizable and coherent to the listener. Let me trace out some thoughts: Charli XCX’s Brat is a very good record about what good pop records are supposed to be, but not a good pop record in its own right. The hits don’t hit on their own—they sound uniformly like pretty much any other Charli song, without a single obvious standout track strong enough to register as relevant on its own in the absence of the supporting hype of an entire album (the best of Brat’s offerings pale in comparison, for instance, to “I Love It,” “Boys,” or “1999”). Instead, the hits hit because it’s Charli singing them, and also because it’s impossible to shake off the slimy, Adderall and Parliament-caked breath of a hundred voices drooling statements down your neck like, “Charli’s writing bangers again,” or, “Charli’s in her club era,” or—and this is the most inhumane of them all—“If you don’t like it you don’t like fun.” Bar Italia doesn’t really sound like the “next big thing” in art rock—there are about as many no-name bands who sound similar enough to them (read: normal bands) as there are copy-and-paste dive bars for said bands to play every other weekend. And yet, we implicitly accept that Bar Italia are the next big thing in art rock, if for no other reason than the fact that their delicately crafted aversion to the limelight, coupled, of course, with their involvement with a big label and a big booking agent and a big publicist, makes it clear that there is nothing else they could be—their existence in the public consciousness is within itself the most important indicator of what separates their art from the pack. The Dare is undeniably a pop star, even though the thought of saying anything positive about his music (as opposed to, say, the vibes of his DJ nights, or his glamorously high-low lifestyle, or his generally charming media persona) is seemingly understood to be an act of social suicide among even his most fervent supporters.

There is no point in trying to litigate whether these musicians are “good” or “bad,” although many so-called critics have taken their best stab at doing so nonetheless. The point, rather, is that these musicians are very good at cohering to a pre-established idea of who they are supposed to be, and that this coherence is perhaps both the only thing we want from them and also the only justification for their existence at all (part of a good performance, in this case, also involves the artist publicly expressing their complicated feelings about needing to perform a bit in the first place, therefore establishing the humanizing plausible deniability necessary for enjoying their work without the embarrassment of seeming left out of the joke). We know Charli is good because we have plenty of other examples of pop girlies entering their club-era to weigh her against; we know Bar Italia is good because we have plenty of other examples of emaciated Brits forced to hire a more competent backing band once the venues start to have better sound systems to weigh them against; we know The Dare is good because we’ve seen a hot guy before; and on and on. The issue with this coherence, it should go without saying, is that there isn’t anything particularly emotionally riveting or life-affirming about witnessing culture do a passable rendition of what we’ve already vaguely accepted it should be doing anyways.

Oscar Wilde, a man hopelessly addicted to living in spite of his own self-destructive desires, once said that cigarettes offer the greatest pleasure because they have the dignity of leaving one unsatisfied. By contrast, in place of both pleasure and dignity, contemporary music most often offers us deep satisfaction (ironically, Charli has carved a remarkably stable brand out of playing the part of human ashtray). This satisfaction cynically prolongs a sort of hypnotic delusion that we will not be destroyed and made anew by history, that our fears of a final judgment will soon be subsumed by a pleasantly narcissistic elongation of the present into eternity. It is not the art itself which produces this satisfaction, but rather the catharsis experienced via the constant reassurance that culture as we know it, and thus our very subjectivities as we are able to recognize and articulate them, will be reproduced anew tomorrow—the art is merely a figurative representation of this delusion, a chain of endless mini-messianic jolts that hit with the profound dullness of trying masturbate on SSRIs, mechanical performances of life-for-life’s-sake dressed up with the theatrical grandiosity of Hellraiser-style cenobites yet devoid of both the real pain and the real possibility of self-annihilation that lend desire meaning. Bill Fay: “She sat smoking a cigarette, the fire on her legs/in the dust filled room, she wished that the cigarette could last forever…I know that chair I’ve sat there/As one goes out another one sits down/In the dust of that room they wish that the cigarette could last forever.”

Satisfaction promises us a future in which there will still be more pop stars blasting cigs to diet “bangers,” more greasy haired, four-eyed introverts occupying the dead air in Brooklyn coffee shops, more hot-in-a-weird-way guys filling the seat next to Nick Cave at whatever fashion show is happening that month. What satisfaction doesn’t offer us is any explanation of why we should want what it has to offer in any sort of fervent or rabid way—what it doesn’t promise us is a dignified relationship to desire, because desire involves both the possibility of not getting what we want and also the possibility that what we actually want might go against what we understand to be best for us. Satisfaction brings us closer to “life” as a stable, reproducible fantasy, but not life as something which can only become pleasurable when in close proximity to the possibility of its own dissolution. One longs for the anticipation of May ’68 coursing through Jagger’s yowl “I can’t get no satisfaction,” or the post-Soviet Americana death-trip of Westerberg’s croon “Look me in the eye, then tell me that I’m satisfied—are you satisfied?,” with its surreal assurance that love might somehow still be possible in the end of history.

Music today increasingly aspires to the ideal of pure translatability. Thanks to digital streaming, we have never had greater access to the near entirety of recorded music history. Thanks to streaming, the life of the musician has also never been more financially impossible nor spiritually degrading. As a generation of ostensibly-democratically informed listeners drunk on the spoils of historical immediacy, our critical language appears increasingly bent upon mangling music into a decontextualized web of referents, small bites capable of traversing between cultural contexts without any apparent change in meaning or impact. Where a more utopian mind might expect this sudden wealth of historical richness to open up new possibilities for inverting or perverting the prevailing logics of taste and pleasure into something perhaps capable of making actual emotional sense of the present (one thinks of Genesis P-Orridge’s modus operandi: “industrial music for industrial people”), what we are often greeted by instead is a progressively intensifying obsession with historical-awareness-for-historical-awareness’-sake, a culture increasingly organized around a sadistic rubric which positions music’s value as coterminous with its ability to dog whistle one or another pre-established structure of feeling. Within this logic, one may take liberties with remixing and splicing together seemingly disparate styles (Is Post Malone rap or pop or country? Is Caroline Polachek an avant-garde vocalist a la Elizabeth Fraser or a pop girlie a la Charli?), so long as the component parts remain individually legible—the successful execution of such increasingly random combinations, in fact, often seems to become a more propulsive alibi for an artist’s cultural relevance than the music itself.

Satisfaction disposes of the need to self-historicize or reckon with what has been destroyed via the progressive churn of time, collapsing all reference points into a contextless catalog of stock images—some of these images might appear to imply a sense of “datedness” or “old-time” attitude (one can’t help think of the countless Grateful Dead and Gram Parsons drag kings terrorizing the dive bars of Silverlake and Highland Park), but often only in order to convincingly register as something intelligibly entertaining to the present via a sense of anachronistic quaintness. At the same time, in order to function properly, satisfaction relies upon repeated, aggressive reference to both the shortcomings of the past (who can blame the older crop of musicians for not having the same tools at their disposal as their contemporary inheritors? What is the inheritor’s existential purpose if not to further perfect the cache of pleasures laid at their feet by the older crop?) and the optimistic possibility of a future which will unceasingly progress towards some final moment of cultural perfection (positing the “perfection” what already exists as an end goal disposes of any tedious need to question whether the cultural forms already our disposal are the same ones we will need, or will want, in the future—for example: the obsessive tendency on the part of contemporary music critics to not only call any band with reverb-soaked guitars “shoegaze,” but also to then nerdishly compare and contrast said “shoegaze” bands to the other “shoegaze” bands of yesterday inherently jettisons any serious space for asking what function “shoegaze” even serves figuratively today in the first place, collapsing the historical distance between then and now into a flat-circle of increasingly technically refined variations on a theme).

I have to apologize, I’ve been terribly misleading; I am supposed to be saying something about Chanel Beads’ debut record Your Day Will Come, I just don’t know how to explain my frustration with them any other way. This record strikes at the heart of everything that has become degraded and debased within contemporary pop music and its critical discourses (critical is perhaps a generous word), and it feels impossible to talk about it seriously without also talking about the function of popular emotion today as a whole. Chanel Beads writes music that has the exceedingly rare ability to bring us closer to the edge of destruction, to bring us closer to some gesture that might offer a way out from the deadening rush of psychobabble currently crushing the entirety of cultural history into a pancake of mutually shared talking points, but they seem to run from this power at every turn. Your Day Will Come, at its best moments, sounds a bit like a childishly perverted funeral soundtrack. Snare drum samples whip and thrust with the out-of-place discomfort of a perfect ass-slap; Shane Lavers and Maya McGrory’s vocals often appear to blend into a wholly alien, androgynous swirl of sincere affections; layers of synths and pedal-warped violins contort themselves into some strange affective middle ground, straddling, on the one hand, pure tortured romance and, on the other, the pompous humor of an American teenager doing their best “Oui oui, mon ami!” style mockup of a French dandy. Most importantly though, Chanel Beads can actually write memorable songs. Their best hooks seem to resolutely deny clear historical comparison—much of the music is genuinely strange (without obnoxiously announcing itself as “strange,” as so many of Chanel Beads’ self-aggrandizing contemporaries are prone to doing—you know the ones I’m talking about), both uncomfortable and thrilling. It’s a deadly potential. Even the cover art appears to rush towards some self-destructive impulse, blending annihilation and rebirth in one frame: plump Victorian figures gaze out into a maritime abyss, the suffocating flash of an imaginary nuclear warhead just off-frame lighting their sympathetic smiles—while our day has yet to come, the Victorian era’s is in its swan song. The record evokes a certain whiff of death washing ashore, a frail-in-brain-chemistry yet strong-in-spiritual-resolve allure rooted in the possibility of finding a god of one’s own without prior referent, a god waiting just on the other side of mutually assured destruction.

Chanel Beads show us they can do this in flashes, and yet rarely deliver on the promise. The songs are almost uniformly too short, usually just a verse and chorus followed by an undeservedly indulgent outro, lacking either the fury or pointedness that once allowed a hardcore 7” or rap mixtape to pleasurably exhaust itself in such a short runtime while still feeling wholly justified. There is nothing revolutionary, antagonistic to prevailing taste, or even delightfully quaint about writing such short pop songs—one need only look at the runtimes of any Drake record to understand that flooding digital platforms with a glut of half-baked, prematurely aborted bangers is the reigning rubric around which contemporary music is strategically organized. Your Day Will Come’s production makes heavy use of fabricated MP3 corruptions and janky club-DJ transitions, hammering away at the listener with a degrading sense of obviousness: this music is “good” because it convincingly replicates the generation-defining experiences of millennials coming-of-age in the era of the transition from Napster to Spotify, signaling its contemporary relevance to a millennial-gen Z cusp audience not through the introduction of some novel structure of feeling capable of rendering what it feels like to live today or what we might want it to feel like to live tomorrow, but rather through an intentional reproduction of the contingent set of outdated feelings we had to pass through, and thus had to become painfully familiar with, in order to get to the present. The result is a strangely narcissistic assurance that even though we are quickly becoming ancient history, this doesn’t mean we need to start thinking of ourselves historically—let’s just enjoy the tropes that we already take as constitutive of our cultural consciousness for as long as we can muster. It’s an exhausting experience for such a short record, if for no other reason that we’ve already been forced to live through this history once out of sheer chance and (hopefully—I’m asking a lot here, I know) should have no strong desire to live through it again out of our own free will.

Chanel Beads cite Blue Nile and Prefab Sprout as influences, and they show in certain moments that they are more than capable of going toe-to-toe with such greats when it comes to imparting a destabilizing excess of pure emotion upon the listener (“Idea June” is perhaps the most effective in this regard), yet they shirk away from the obvious sense of shame and self-embarrassment that such emotion demands as payment—they seem to fear that such denigrating inflections might get lost in translation, that the listener is too fried to really feel anymore. Most of the highest-level decision making is predictable: the second to last song is “the long ambient one”; the first couple tracks are about big feelings, and then the fourth (“Embarrassed Dog”) introduces a gust of face-saving trip-hop cool, preemptively anticipating the tendency for Pitchfork reviewers to lazily resort to panning records as “one note” whenever they can’t drum up an actually interesting observation; nods to thickened shoegaze style reverb and Euro synth-pop—both of which feel wholly unrelated to the music Chanel Beads seemingly aspires to make—flit in and out just often enough to keep things feeling safely “contemporary.” They seem to obsess over the idea of loudly announcing that they have a secret weapon—the idea of loudly announcing, in other words, that they’ve come up with some exceedingly clever remix of referential nodal points that will make their music unimpeachably “good,” if for no other reason than the fact that nobody else was smart enough to mash the same three or four generally popular genre tropes together first. Ironically, Chanel Beads largely fails to realize that they already have a secret weapon: the ability to write a good pop song that can stand on its own two feet. In place of risking the embarrassment it takes to commit oneself fully to writing a good pop song that might lend some sense of dignity to the experience of being alive today or even paint a vision of a more desirable future, they so often peter out at the last minute, running back to the safety of the “interesting” mash-up, the pleasant satisfaction of brevity, the meekness of art which does not ask more than it should of you.

What makes Your Day Will Come both frustrating and ultimately deserving of real judgment is that—despite Chanel Beads’ best efforts to run from themselves at every turn, and despite their apparent fear of indulging themselves to the point of risking total collapse—the record does not convincingly cohere into something easily placeable and some stubborn impulse towards self-destruction persists, shining through the cracks. They deliriously kick and scream, lobbing out haphazard signals that they’re a Downtown New York band, that they’re a 4AD band (no offense to their actual label, Jagjaguwar, of course), that they’re an indie band for ketamine fairies or a club band for indie cokeheads, yet nothing legibly sticks—the repeated attempts to pre-package themselves seem to largely just detract from what they actually stand to offer, which is a slice of throbbing, actual history, some condensation of idiosyncratic star power that contorts received expectations and forces the listener to catch up to the feeling of real emotion. There are flashes of real pain, of the possibility for Chanel Beads to demand more from life than it has on offer, if they would only take the risk making such a demand in the first place. Pray that day comes.

Is this it? Are we willing to accept a world in which pop music is degraded into an empty container for laundering the names and egos of the least imaginative among us? (Stick to making that podcast about movies and crowd surfing like a 16-year-old seeing MGMT at Coachella for the first time at every show you slap your name on—nobody is buying that you know what you’re talking about when it comes to writing music, they just like being able to get into your parties). Peter Steele, a master of conjuring real, sexy, deadly emotion if there ever was one, once wrote: “I don’t want to be, I don’t want to be me/I don’t want to be me, anymore.” I include the three inversions of the same line here because they feel telling. I don’t want to be: I don’t want to exist in a world so undignified, a world which offers so little in the way of real emotion and yet is so neurotically obsessed with denying this fact at every turn. I don’t want to be me: I don’t want to continue to find satisfaction in the offensively meager assurance that I will have the privilege of being able to wake up tomorrow and experience the same pleasures I did yesterday—if these are the limited cultural styles of selfhood I am allowed to coherently want, I would rather not be somebody at all. I don’t want to be me, anymore: the destruction of satisfaction is something which must be fought for historically, which means fought for now. It is an incisive act of trying to reinflate the historical register, an act of denying infinitude and relocating ourselves in the painful thrall of our own contingency and impermanence.

One must be prepared to be inundated with cries of elitism for having the gall to demand more of life. Note: it’s ok to call an obviously focus-grouped to death work of art what it is—merely acknowledging a truth that nobody is attempting to hide is an entirely neutral and sane action. The fact that anyone should take this as you saying “they aren’t allowed to enjoy it” is more so indicative of the fact that they have to willfully ignore a plain truth in order to resuscitate mere “enjoyment” in the first place—as well as an indictment of their profoundly passive expectation that culture should merely provide us a consistent stream of individual sips of serotonin bumping entertainment value and nothing more—than it is proof of your own cruelty. One must be prepared to face extreme disdain, because to demand the destruction of satisfaction is also to demand the destruction of not only ourselves as we currently exist, but also the world as we currently know how to desire it. Reject their delusional refusal to acknowledge the shared death-trip we are all locked into; live in spite of them. I want to live in spite, and I believe Chanel Beads do too. In order to reject satisfaction, we must push each other aggressively closer towards the brink of this precipice of real emotion, the precipice of a new world formation struggling to be born—if our day is to finally come, it will only be through committing ourselves to such acts of mutually assured destruction.