Water Music III: Burial at Sea?

For the first two parts of this essay, see here, and here.

VIII.

I spend so much time talking about the submarine topicality of Vaporwave in order to disentangle it a little bit from established vapor doxa, which talks about Vaporwave predominantly in terms of a specific kind of historicity. A lot of the discussion around it works to place the genre within the discourse surrounding hauntology; that is to say, it relates Vaporwave to the question of lost futures, of artifacts from a past that hold the traces of a future that never came to pass. The discourse on hauntology is a very British thing in origin, and the names to drop here are, of course, Simon Reynolds and, especially, Mark Fisher. In the 2000s, Fisher took the term hauntology (from Derrida) to analyze music that spoke about how “hopes created by postwar electronica or by euphoric dance music of the 1990s have evaporated – not only has the future not arrived, it no longer seems possible”, ruined as these hopes were by their gradual, or sudden, digestion by commodification. Simon Reynolds profited a lot from Fisher’s work in his 2010 monograph Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past, which discusses, among other works, Eccojams Vol. 1 as an example of how pop music obsesses over Utopian horizons that were opened up by its own ‘earlier stages’, but then closed down again by the inevitable capitalist co-efficient of all pop culture. 2010 was just a bit too early for a larger overview on Vaporwave, but then Grafton Tanner’s Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts (2016) did a lot to place Vaporwave squarely and systematically on a hauntological continuum (just check out the “Ghosts” in the title, that favored noun in hauntology); stressing how the genre takes fragments from a time during which the Internet still held all sorts of Utopian, yet pragmatic, promises; hopes for a better future, a better existence, and the like; and how Vaporwave tracks show how these promises have been denied during the ongoing process of transforming the Internet into something like a police-state supermarket.

But is this really true? Let’s look at how Fisher’s prime example for hauntology in music, Burial, works. Quote Fisher:

“Burial is an elegy for the hardcore continuum, a Memories from the Haunted Ballroom for the rave generation. It is like walking into the abadoned [sic] spaces once carnivalized by raves and finding them returned to depopulated dereliction. Muted air horns flare like the ghosts of raves past. Broken glass cracks underfoot. MDMA flashbacks bring London to unlife in the way that hallucinogens brought demons crawling out of the subways in Jacob's Ladder’s New York. Audio hallucinations transform the city's rhythms into inorganic beings, more dejected than malign. You see faces in the clouds and hear voices in the crackle. What you momentarily thought was muffled bass turns out only to be the rumbling of tube trains.”

And I suppose if you listen to a Burial track, you will feel that Fisher’s description is really fitting; the metropolitan mournfulness, the melancholic dereliction; how “[s]natches of plaintive vocal skitter through the tracks like fragments of abandoned love letters blowing through streets blighted by an unnamed catastrophe” – all poignant wistfulness, 3D-depth nocturnal emotion. Ontologically jilted music. Although Fisher must do some work to wrestle Burial’s music out of a submarine connotation (“Burial's sound evokes what the press release calls a ‘near future South London underwater. You can never tell if the crackle is the burning static off pirate radio, or the tropical downpour of the submerged city out of the window.’ Near future, maybe... But listening to Burial as I walk through damp and drizzly South London streets in this abortive Spring, it strikes me that the LP is very London Now - which is to say, it suggests a city haunted not only by the past but by lost futures. It seems to have less to do with a near future than with the tantalising ache of a future just out of reach.”), I can absolutely see how Burial’s music mourns futures lost, be they small-scale biographical, like a life or a love not lived; or large-scale social, like an actual political realization of rave culture’s Utopian strands missed. And just as hauntology does not simply mean a melancholic recalling of lost futures, but a keen will to realize those futures after all, to make those foreclosed horizons open up again, Burial has these moments of great hope, of revelatory euphoria even; such as the quasi-messianic consolations of “Come Down To Us”.

Yet the “damp and drizzly” South London streets are not a London under water, as Fisher makes clear; the water on your face is the faint rain as you walk home from a party way past midnight, feeling a strange and characteristic mixture of melancholy and elation. And I would claim that, indeed, Burial’s organizations of despair and redemption – profoundly temporal things, just as that feeling you feel on your nocturnal way home is a profoundly temporal feeling – are extremely unlike Vaporwave phenomenology. True, Burial equally obsesses over foregrounded media conditions – crackles, statics, tape disintegrations – and is “about” media in just the way this formulation could even mean anything in the first place (recall Fisher’s “abandoned love letters”-characterization of the plaintive vocal samples, which really piles up synonyms of media: samples, letters, the female voice, distance).

Yet in his case, hardware is spectral (“Ghost Hardware” – the ghost is the machine), but not submarine, not wetware.

To make my point clear, let’s take another look at one of the tracks from part I of this essay, namely Saint Pepsi’s “Enjoy Yourself”. Enjoy yourself re-listening to the track, and re-watching the video:

The video riffs on “Mac Tonight”, a character McDonalds used for advertisements in the late 1980s: a lounge-crooner-like figure in suits and sunglasses, and with a head shaped like a crescent moon. It was a very successful campaign, but it was stopped short by a lawsuit in 1989.

In order for this to have a hauntological quality, it would require the foreclosure of a Utopian future; that is, Mac Tonight (or the associated advertisement campaign) must harbor a Utopian promise within its structure, just like the politics of emergence associable with 1990 rave culture.

But Mac Tonight’s promise is the pleasure of a hamburger dinner. Now, anyone who has ever had a late-night McDonalds burger will tell me that there is almost infinite libidinal power to be associated and gained from it, and rightly so. But does it really qualify as an Utopian promise of the sort that Mark Fisher (or, for that matter, Derrida) would be interested in? Unlike some obscure Rufige Kru track from 1993, Mac Tonight is an immediately, unashamedly, brutally, explicitly capitalist artifact. And unlike the raw futurism of a Rufige Kru track, Mac Tonight was an already-nostalgic figure, designed to appeal to baby boomer nostalgia for 1950s crooner sound. Fittingly, the song Mac Tonight sings in the commercial was not original at all, but a pastiche of “Mack the Knife” as recorded by Bobby Darin in 1959 (it was Bobby Darin’s son who brought the advertisement campaign down with a copyright lawsuit). And of course, “Mack the Knife” is not an original song by Bobby Darin either, but an English translation and ‘singleification’ of the “Moritat of Mackie Messer” from Bertolt Brecht’s and Kurt Weill’s Dreigroschenoper (1928).

Mac Tonight, then, has some tense relationship to eras of the past; quotes, maybe even celebrates aspects of a bygone era, but I don’t think that this makes it a hauntological figure. Rather, it curiously brings to light how little both the quoted 1950s and the quoting 1980s are a lost future worth regaining by foregrounding, among other things, its racism: although the figure visually quotes, say, Ray Charles, it is literally as white as the moon (indeed, Mac Tonight enjoys a second career [moonlights?] as an alt-right symbol; the fitting position for a literal emblem of whitewashing).

The original Mac Tonight, then, is an emblem of racist nostalgia, appropriating a socialist song via its schmaltzy 1950s appropriation, to advertise products of the wealthiest fast-food company of the world. In order for “Enjoy Yourself” to be hauntological, we would be required to call this a foreclosed Utopia. I would wager that this is a hard task, but also that this is a task Saint Pepsi's track is not really interested in.

Instead, it amplifies the cruelty; introducing into this sordid mixture of cynicism a glitching, incessantly repeating assemblage of samples from Michael Jackson's "Off the Wall", without doubt a telling choice of song to be stolen by Mac 'Whitewash' Tonight; and with Jackson's trademark simultaneity of sensuousness and fragility numbed, suffocated almost, in favor of a hollowed-out crooning-as-marooning as remote and impersonal as any mall muzak. "Enjoy Yourself", it insists, between burps of terminal funk; "there ain't no rules (down here?)" it proclaims, hovering between the two huge yellow arches in the sky, advertising a hamburger dinner via a song first offered to Karen Carpenter, a person suffering from anorexia nervosa.

In the light of all this, are 'lost futures' really the first thing that comes to mind? Does this track look at a past era in search for hopes that went unfulfilled? Is it not both easier and more true to the ‘feel’ of Saint Pepsi’s song, to say that what “Enjoy Yourself” does is listening to how Water Music – the white-bright occasionality of Bobby Darin’s lounges and Mac Tonight’s TV commercial slots – inevitably sinks below the water line into a space where light and luminosity reaches the listener only in ways, where sound is warped and tends towards something like pure reverb. And as the water does its filtering, it uncovers disturbing frequencies inherent to that Water Music; frequencies that, in spite or because of how they come to the listener as disembodied and without origin – curiously suspended in the dark water, drifting in and out of audibility as the waves of the music and the waves of the river sometimes drown out whole notes, whole stanzas, even – are thrown into a submarine relief.

Note also, how Fisher contrasted Burial’s hauntological sound with Johnny Dark’s 2006 Can’t Wait EP:

“The ultra-exuberance of Johnny's sound – ‘garish rather than grimy’ - contrasts starkly with the mournful restraint of the Burial album. Instead of the ‘can't wait’ of 2-step's anorgasmic anticipation-plateau, Burial is haunted by what once was, what could have been, and - most keeningly - what could still happen. Johnny's sound has all the freshness of newly sprayed graffiti; the Burial LP is like the faded ten year-old tag of a kid whose rave dreams have been crushed by a series of dead end job.”

I don’t think the vibes of “Enjoy Yourself” – or of luxury elite’s “Beverly Hills”, or of glaciaere’s “Pool Water Dripping from the Diving Board” – really evoke faded graffiti tags, and there would be quite some justification to calling them ultra-exuberant: isn’t there almost an obsession with exuberance to Vaporwave – with its luxuriating track titles, riddled with a wide array of East Asian characters; with its nestled allusions to a synthetic, pan-global sound; with its sheer sonic densities (glitches piling upon samples piling upon reverb effects, etc.); with its palette of both neon and pastel, its palm trees, its saxophones, its marble statues, it’s “RUBY DUSK[s] ON A 2ND LIFE NUDE BEACH […]”? In turn, if “Burial's schizophonic hauntology has a 3D depth of field”, according to Fisher, is the “oppressive, claustrophobic flatness” Fisher contrasts this with, not pretty much a vapor characteristic? Finally, look at the video games favored within the respective aesthetics: Burial samples the rain-covered espionage industrial chic of Metal Gear Solid 2, and Silent Hill with its psychotopography of trauma; Vaporwave is enamored with Ecco’s intergalactic warfare in coral reefs. Rain and fog there; submarine summer sun luminescence here.

Talk about exuberance.

Distancing Vaporwave from hauntology is important, I think, because calling it hauntological means defanging its bite. First of all, because the inexactitude of that label when applied to Vaporwave is already the expression of a general inexactitude in the handling of the label – from Derrida to Fisher to Reynolds to Tanner to online anons, ‘hauntology’ has been brutally diluted as a term and is now overly concerned with the backwards-looking, melancholic, neurotic quality of hauntology. So what it amounts to is little more than a defeatist sad stance, endlessly obsessing over lost futures rather than creating new ones, perceiving both the present and the years to come only darkly, blinded by the tears still falling over past loss. I quoted how Fisher’s intro to Burial works like a transition in which the near future first loses out to the present, and then the present loses out to the past (the italicizations are mine): “’[…] a near future South London underwater. […]’ Near future, maybe... But listening to Burial as I walk through damp and drizzly South London streets in this abortive Spring, it strikes me that the LP is very London Now - which is to say, it suggests a city haunted not only by the past but by lost futures.” Hauntology, here, is already something that has to be gained through a diminution of the present, and even more so of the near future, in favor of a highly complex past; a past which is well proto-messianic and somewhat unpredictable, but still the past. In a way, hauntology became what is still and simply leftist sadness.

(In fact, and just as an aside, I think it would be worthwhile to reconsider that original press release speaking of Burial’s sound as the sound of a near-future, tropically hot and damp London, half submerged, and caught in perennial downpour. Especially when including his more recent releases, his back catalogue could really be readable as evoking [or preparing, outlining] the sound shamanism of an urban rain world.)

In Vaporwave – as in, most likely, all Underwater Music – time and loss are treated differently. I will be very blunt here and say that to my ears, what Vaporwave says is that since roughly the early 1990s, Water Music sinks down over time into a technological dispositive that is both functionally and factually partly submerged and can be conceived of as a submarine totality; a body of water that, unlike, say, the River Thames, not only filters, but records; that is, keeps recording under water what has been recorded as Water Music. Ever since that technological dispositive is in place, that is the case, which is to say, it still is; Water Music still sinks down into that body of water (and we do not know whether that body of water will ever disappear). And in this body of water, the disintegration of info (of sound) works differently than above the water line. Memory and loss are organized differently; and Vaporwave is about that reorganization of memory rather than about the content(s) of memory.

So although the sonic carcass slowly sinking towards the digital ocean floor, disintegrating, and picked apart by vapor fish, bears innumerable traces of past eras, the hunger of the fish and their rows of shiny little teeth are directed towards that carcass as present in front of them, and the ways they scan the reefs for predators is, ultimately, futurable.