There isn’t often consensus on the British left. But for at least the last fifteen years there has been widespread concurrence on one thing: a highly melancholic view of contemporary music. The accompanying argument will be familiar to many readers. Here are its greatest hits: following a relatively progressive, dynamic period of pop-cultural production between the immediate postwar years and the triumph of neoliberalism in the 1990s and 2000s (the era Mark Fisher defined with his concept of ‘popular modernism’), the aesthetic development of popular music has dramatically slowed. 

The experimentation and popular creativity enabled by the relative equality and working-class empowerment of the social-democratic era has been subordinated along with everything else — so the argument goes — to the whims of the market. This has left us with little but a nostalgic fascination with pop music’s own past, and sets of disconnected, hyper-local, hyper-individualised subcultures, which do little to contribute to any kind of mass cultural project. At this point in human history, it would seem, popular culture, like politics, offers us no opportunity to imagine a more just future beyond capitalism.

It’s a seductive narrative, and not without merit. Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds are the two writers most associated with it: the latter as the foremost prophet of ‘retromania’ — the title of his influential 2011 book — and the former as the populariser of ideas developed by more academic thinkers such as Fredric Jameson and Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi regarding the so-called ‘slow cancellation of the future’ (a suggestive phrase first used by Raymond Williams, to whom we will return).

Yet the most dynamic explorations of such ideas emerged some time ago, in the late 2000s and early 2010s. As any self-respecting materialist will tell you, social conditions can change a lot in the space of a decade. 

Liam Inscoe-Jones’s new book Songs in the Key of MP3 is the latest in a small but growing wave of attempts to challenge what has been called the ‘lost futures’ discourse. His approach is part polemic, part biography, part criticism, proceeding from an early claim that the ‘forecasts’ of a figure like Fisher — i.e. that cultural progress would continue to stall under the weight of hegemonic neoliberalism — ‘were premature to say the least. The 2010s did not, in fact, transpire to be a decade of stagnation at all, but instead became a period of startling transformation … [during which] genre became redundant once and for all.’

The bulk of the ensuing book is divided into five chapters, each dedicated to a different artist Inscoe-Jones argues represents a radical new direction for pop: Devonté Hynes, FKA Twigs, Oneohtrix Point Never, Earl Sweatshirt and SOPHIE. Venturing beyond the lost futures-style defeatism he criticises, Inscoe-Jones points to the re-evaluation of cultural time in Hynes’ work (which is ‘committed to the idea that all art has the potential to be beautiful … [clearing] the way for an alternative future, one where true genius is appreciated while it’s still being made, and not simply once it’s over’); FKA Twigs’ digitally-mediated assertion of femininity; OPN’s semi-accelerationist attempts to mainstream fringe aesthetics; Sweatshirt’s influence on the development of genre-splicing alternatives hip-hop; and SOPHIE’s radical, sensual commitment to pushing the boundaries of sound itself.

This is speedy, enthusiastic stuff, somewhat reminiscent of Kit Mackintosh’s Neon Screams (2021). Like that book, Songs in the Key of MP3 impresses most in the sheer excitement with which its author views his subject — and it makes several incisive points along the way, even if some of its attempts at wrangling with big themes are a little less satisfying. The broader arguments against a wholesale lost-futures denialism of aesthetic progress are convincingly made. The SOPHIE chapter is by far the strongest. In one key passage, Inscoe-Jones directly challenges Fisher’s contention that a great deal of contemporary music would not shock a listener from previous decades by listing a whole host of sounds which would not only have that effect, but would simply not have been possible to make before. 

Yet the more specific and complex ideas he rails against are rebutted less effectively: for example, his response to Reynolds’ concern that what is often presented as uniquely synthetic, genre-splicing work is merely ‘diversely derivative’, ‘avoid[ing] having one influence by having lots of influences’, never quite meets the challenge directly, instead reaffirming that the results of such processes are aesthetically pleasing, without pinpointing how exactly they disprove Reynolds’ charge.

But theoretical quibbles may be beside the point here. This is not an academic text, but rather a work of passionate music criticism for a general audience, and it works very well on those terms. It’s useful to situate Songs in the Key of MP3 within a broader grouping of contemporary writers seeking to move on from ‘lost futures’. One example of this trend is Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy: or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism, which seeks to reckon with the specifics of digital culture in Jamesonian terms (note the nod to Postmodernism in her title), linking the aesthetics of ‘speed, flow and direct expression’ to broader shifts in political economy. 

Another is Paul Rekret’s Take This Hammer: Work, Song Crisis, which is more explicit in its anti-‘lost futures’ approach, and perhaps the most successful attempt to reposition music and critique within a radical project fit for the current conjuncture. Rekret takes specific issue with Fisher’s conception of popular modernism — ‘an inventive and counter-hegemonic culture running roughly from the 1960s to the 1990s, now discernible only in its withdrawal’ — arguing that such an idea is tied to a specific, linear narrative of progress enabled by Fordist capitalism, inextricable from a particular experience of time, labour and leisure, and exclusionary of social groups and sets of relations which do not fit with the typologies of this framework. 

Such conditions shaped how ‘popular music was produced and consumed and so also, the terms in which it could express an experience of time outside the wage. But in the contemporary era where the “standard” job has become the expiation and not the rule, things grow more and more messy and indistinct.’ Thus, for Rekret, the preconditions for popular modernism — both as a theoretical tool and as a cultural phenomenon — simply do not exist anymore, and he cites various ways in which the theory may be untenable even when applied to the Fordist age. 

In their shared attempt to approach similar problems (that is, how to properly critique our cultural conjuncture in ways which move us on from a left-melancholic ‘lost futures’ position), this small but growing body of work represents a valuable, overdue intervention. In fact, one might link them to an ongoing resurgence of interest in the Welsh leftist thinker Raymond Williams, and in particular his conception of cultural materialism: ‘a theory of culture as a (social and material) productive process and of specific practices, of “arts”, as social uses of material means of production.’

One aspect of cultural materialism that is particularly relevant here is Williams’ schema of the dominant, residual and emergent: a framework through which we can both locate hegemonic (dominant) cultural forces, potentially counter-hegemonic traces of older social formations (residual), and new potentialities which gesture towards future sites of resistance or opposition (emergent). 

This formulation allows us to avoid falling into nostalgia or nihilism for their own sake, while also allowing us room to consider possible alternatives, parallels or subcultural elements within or beyond any given cultural-political impasse. In many ways, the ‘lost futures’ writers mourned the state of the dominant, and sought comfort in elements of the residual while paying insufficient attention to other kinds of residual radicalism or emergent cultures which fell outside their specific sets of references.

The work of scholars like Rekret and Kornbluh, with varying degrees of engagement with Williams himself, attempts to correct some of those oversights — as does the more kinetic journalism of Inscoe-Jones and Mackintosh. In his patient, materialist emphasis on the complexity of cultural process and its relationship with capitalist hegemony, Williams may prove to be a useful theoretical mascot for the contemporary moment. The new wave of critique that follows his example, though hardly optimistic or voluntarist, does at least grapple with the idea that our cultural futures may not have been cancelled after all. In this respect, to paraphrase a famous Williams title, it represents a resource of hope.