the soundtrack of stuck culture
The culture industry forging shamelessly ahead by reanimating icons of yesteryear (stuck culture) creates a dissonance that borders on madness (stuckness). This dissonance is exacerbated by an analogous one in American politics. In an era that cries out for new solutions, new statesmen, and new propositions, we are met with increasingly zombified versions of the old. The current administration is a doddering and belated sequel to the Obama years; Trump’s political career is itself a cynical reboot of his career on TV.
And Boomer culture will not go gently, in politics or in art. ABBA, that favorite band of John McCain and Colin Powell, are currently touring their latest record without the band members themselves. Instead, they have been replaced by digitally rendered “ABBAtars” of their younger selves, who perform with a live backing band. Bloomberg reports, “As the ABBAtars perform their 100-minute show seven times a week, they will never suffer from aching joints or hoarse voices on stage.” Stuck culture, with its spectacles of lucrative longevity, is also incomplete, incoherent, incorporeal.
The members of ABBA have a combined worth of over $1 billion; the mere announcement of two new singles—after a 40-year hiatus—sent them shooting up the streaming charts. One much-discussed instance of stuck culture is the recent wave of investment in old music, which investors see as a safe bet due to its iconic status and associated nostalgia. Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, the Beach Boys, and other classic rock titans, have sold their catalogs for hundreds of millions of dollars. In a Pitchfork piece I quoted last year, an investor put it bluntly: “Why would you spend your time trying to create something new at the expense of your catalog?” Earlier this year, Ted Gioia found that “The new-music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs.”
These safe investments in the old, however, are not merely the acquisitions of a static set of lucrative songs. These catalogs are—and will be—used to generate new permutations of themselves, not to retain loyal fans but to generate younger ones. One massive hit from this summer may offer a preview of what’s to come: the Elton John / Dua Lipa track, “Cold Cold Heart (PNAU Remix).” Not the remix of an Elton John song, nor a sampled song in the vein of Young Thug’s “High,” it is a remix of Elton John himself, of his commercial viability. Four old songs (“Sacrifice,” Rocket Man,” “Kiss The Bride,” and “Where’s the Shoorah?”), stitched together by Australian trio PNAU and interpolated by one of the world’s biggest pop stars, earned Elton John his first number one hit in 16 years. He didn’t have to record anything new.
As PNAU’s Nick Littlemore admitted, “You’re playing with something that harks back to everyone’s childhood […] you’re playing with that nostalgia. […] Maybe that’s just the world that we live in, and capitalism and commercialism in general. We’re afraid of new ideas. They’re not road-tested.” He explained that it was “more a case of Elton saying, ‘I wanna be on the radio. I wanna be cool with the kids.’” The song has over a billion streams on Spotify.
If “Cold Cold Heart (PNAU Remix)” represents the conservative road-safety of stuck culture, it doesn’t quite capture the feeling of stuckness. It’s too recognizable as a byproduct of it, gimmicky in its overt familiarity. It is impressive not as art but as advertising: catchy, seamless, endlessly loopable. The feeling of stuckness, I think, is better found elsewhere, in music that is not explicitly derivative so much as relentlessly nostalgic. It’s hard to think of a better example—with the exception, perhaps, of The 1975—than The War On Drugs.
Founded in 2005 by Adam Granduciel and Kurt Vile, The War On Drugs has always had a somewhat bewildering critical reception. When you read things like “This is classic rock on MDMA” and “What if Don Henley’s ‘The Boys of Summer’ was 10 minutes long?”, as The Atlantic’s Spencer Kornhaber wrote in his 2017 review of A Deeper Understanding, you might expect them to be criticisms. In fact, they are observations quickly superseded by Granduciel’s storied perfectionism, the vague way “he taps the past with a sensibility that’s new.”
Kornhaber’s positive review is not unlike a comment by Sun Kil Moon’s Mark Kozelek that “You sound like Don Henley meets John Cougar meets Dire Straits meets ‘Born In The USA’ era Bruce Springsteen,” except that Kozelek was elaborating on an earlier insult. Upon hearing The War On Drugs playing at the same time as him at Ottawa Folk Fest, Kozelek grumbled: “I hate that beer commercial lead-guitar shit.” Kornhaber seems to admit Kozelek’s point, before waxing about “the ever-pretty, ever-nostalgic haze of his [Granduciel’s] arrangements.” His poptimism amounts to the inverse of Kozelek’s gripe: I love that beer commercial lead-guitar shit.
I agree with Kornhaber and the many champions of The War On Drugs, that they make immaculate music. Listening to it loud, particularly the last couple records, it sounds incredibly refined, as if the spirit of 70s and 80s rock music has been slowly and respectfully distilled. Henley and Springsteen and Dire Straits are there somewhere, but also Tom Petty, particularly Full Moon Fever. Unlike “Cold Cold Heart (PNAU Remix),” it is music that engages with, and finds inspiration in, older music. Impressed by the dedication, I find it lacking in substance. You can hear the vintage amps and old guitars and studio wizardry. But to what end?
Kornhaber goes so far as to ask, “Does music this visceral need to mean anything?” before concluding, remarkably, that it doesn’t: “it’s worth remembering that music, across eras, has often been about envisioning paradise through sound. He’s executing that mission with extreme care, finesse, and—most remarkably—consistency.” Jeremy D. Larson’s 2021 Pitchfork review of I Don’t Live Here Anymore makes essentially the same point: “It’s easy to ignore the daffy mythopoetics of Granduciel’s songwriting and just listen to the alchemy this band has perfected, a complex machine that produces something joyously simple.”
Part of what makes The War On Drugs emblematic of stuckness to me is that their critical appeal is made of the same stuff as their music, a retreat into authoritativeness and familiarity. Kornhaber and Larson prefer to focus on the record’s hyper-engineered rock sound and Granduciel’s auteurism, ignoring what the songs might mean and refusing to elaborate on how “alchemy” or sonic “paradise” are anything more than derivative nostalgia. The band and praise for it are both marked by a nostalgia that doesn’t acknowledges itself as such, an appraisal that stops just after the moment of recognition, and a skillfulness that is still a settling for less.
Far from “daffy mythopoetics,” Granduciel (a play on his given name, Granofsky; “of sky” is du ciel in French) writes middling lyrics about inertia and uncertainty. Lost In The Dream (2014), A Deeper Understanding (2017), and I Don’t Live Here Anymore (2021) are lyrically vague to the point of hollowness, at times silliness. Kornhaber and Larson’s reluctance to tackle them is because to do so would undermine their praise; the lyrics are overcast and liminal (“Like a stranded kid in a doorway”; “Shelter in the doorway / From rising storms”; “I’m gonna walk through every doorway”). Clichés abound (“Love’s the key to the games that we play”).
The narrator is also constantly adrift in self-doubt: “Am I losing myself?”; “Can I be more than just a fool?”; “How can I be free?”; “Where do I belong?”; “Am I damaged?” This is apparently rooted in Granduciel’s own experiences with anxiety. In a 2014 interview with Loud And Quiet, he talked about how he had
resigned to not leaving my bedroom and just listening to a handful of demo’s I’d finished before I went into this mental collapse and I started having physical manifestations of this panic and anxiety. […] I think that my anxiety fed into wanting to work on the album all the time in a real studio and make it sound awesome. […] I thought if I could be super focused on the music, then I wouldn’t be focused on the sensation in my neck that I was convinced was cancer.
Eventually, he (sort of) moved past his paranoia: “You have to just get to that point where you feel that twinge in your neck and you ignore it, because it might be a brain tumor but it might be nothing, and you can’t do anything about it either way.”
The War On Drugs makes music about ignoring the twinge that you feel because it doesn’t matter anyway. In Granduciel’s songs, powerlessness is a given, nostalgia is a comfort, and action is suggested more than it is taken. The lyrics are as weak, indecisive, and cautious as the soundscapes are roiling and triumphant. Small feelings map onto grand, familiar chords. It is rock music for a mixed affective state, despair all dressed up in grandiosity. If you can’t actually triumph, make something that sounds like you can.
On “Burning,” a “Dancing In The Dark” soundalike, Granduciel sings:
Come and ride away
It’s easier to stick to the old
Surrounded by the night
Surrounded by the night, and you don’t give in
Two records later, on “Old Skin,” he sings wistfully about escaping the old, that thing that was easier to stick to:
I’m talkin of the old time
Feeling dead this way
Tired of the old life
Feeling dead this way
Surrounded by the inertia of nostalgia, but only able to articulate that inertia through further nostalgia—this is the stuckness that The War On Drugs enacts. It’s a perfectionist’s melancholy; as if, in polishing classic rock’s chrome to unparalleled brilliance, it has also effaced whatever it had to say.
What did it have to say? In “The Boys of Summer,” brought up by Kornhaber and others as a detectable influence on The War On Drugs, Don Henley sings:
Out on the road today
I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac
A little voice inside my head said,
‘Don’t look back, you can never look back’
The lines were evidently inspired by Henley’s actual experience. As he recounted in a 1985 NME interview, “I was driving down the San Diego freeway and got passed by a $21,000 Cadillac Seville, the status symbol of the Right-wing upper-middle-class American bourgeoisie—all the guys with the blue blazers with the crests and the grey pants—and there was this Grateful Dead ‘Deadhead’ bumper sticker on it!”
Henley’s incredulousness now seems quaint, perhaps because we’re still living in that world, the world of the guys with the blue blazers. The issue for many classic rockers was that their anthemic indictments of American culture actually became great billboards for it. It is a predictable American irony that the nostalgia inherent in Henley’s song—“I can see you / Your brown skin shining in the sun”—eclipsed any questioning of nostalgia it supposedly contained.
Befitting Boomerish nostalgia, Henley’s song is more boastful than elegiac, acknowledging that “those days are gone forever” but insisting on their wet, hot memory. Granduciel, on the other hand, is a nostalgist of form only. He makes music of defeat and disbelief, wedged between technical mastery and the inability to say anything new. Stuckness never sounded so slick. “When we talk about the past,” he sings, “What are we talking of?”
ben tapeworm