On the song ‘Microdose’, off Armand Hammer’s amazing 2017 release Rome, Elucid quips at one point “Hauntological salute, spook you out your Yeezy boots”. The first time I heard this line, I had no idea what it meant but knew it was some kind of reference to ‘ontology’, the philosophical study of being. Googling hontology brought a correction to ‘hauntology’ and looking further into the idea of hauntology introduced me to the work of Mark Fisher. Fisher defines Hauntology as “the agency of the virtual”, that is how something which either no longer exists or has yet to come into being affects the present. The lyric referenced is surely referring to Derrida’s initial outlining of Hauntology in Spectres of Marx, hence functioning as a ‘salute’ to communism in some fashion. However, Fisher’s work with Hauntology centres around the promise of a better world that failed to come to pass after the post World War 2 move towards welfare states. Instead, the 80s brought neoliberalism to the world, and with it the destruction of public services.

“As public service broadcasting became ‘marketised’, there was an increasing tendency to turn out cultural productions that resembled what was already successful. The result of all this is what the social time available for withdrawing from work and immersing oneself in cultural production drastically declined”

Tying this into the removal of free time and public services in the form of grants and affordable housing, Fisher sees the material conditions that were necessary for new cultural forms to be produced as having been erased by market logic/Reaganomics. This leads to the ‘slow cancellation of the future’, future in Berardi’s sense of “the psychological perception which emerged in the cultural situation of progressive modernity”. While both Fisher and Berardi are from much older generations than myself, this failure to come up with new forms, ‘cultural conservatism’, is now at the point where someone born in 1995 is now recognizing eerie similarities between songs released only 13 years apart in their lifetime.

The remix of Old Town Road, by Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus, seems precisely ‘hauntological’ then, even with the inclusion of a more modern trap beat. On first listen, the song is strikingly reminiscent of Nickelback’s Rockstar. Fisher asks readers in 2014 to perform a thought experiment about songs being beamed back to a radio in 1995, where he believes they would be unlikely to cause any disruption to listeners, if anything, they would be shocked knowing that songs from the ‘future’ sounded so similar to what was already existent. Similarly, it is easy to imagine casual listeners of Old Town Road being convinced the song is a lot older than it is, it would not sound out of place alongside Nickelback or Kid Rock on a radio station 13 years ago. It is in this sense performing ‘anachronism’ as Fisher put it – while it wouldn’t have sounded out of place, there’s still not something quite right about it.

Fisher also argues, that despite the lack of movement in musical forms in this time period, that is not to say that nothing has happened. In the 13 years since Rockstar was released, there’s been a global financial crisis (which the Irish know far too well with the austerity measures targeting people due to the bailout of banks) and a resurgence of nationalism and far-right politics (Trump, Bolsanaro, the Five Star Movement, Brexit). However, none of this correlates with a serious shift in musical form, rather in that vein we see a continuation of Jameson’s nostalgia mode – “a formal attachment to the techniques and formulas of the past”. It’s possible to locate Death Grips’ ‘Year of the Snitch’ as an album trying to come to terms with this formal attachment to the past. Rather than, say The Money Store or the first half of the Powers That B, YOTS is not a particularly challenging listen. What attracts me to this album most is the ‘found-film’ vibe it creates with elements like the distorted circus sounds that start and finish off Linda’s In Custody. However, this doesn’t feature across the entire album and tracks like Dilemma and Hahaha wouldn’t totally out of place on an indie rock album, or even Black Paint (which admittedly slaps) sounds like a stadium rock track from the 70s. Death Grips have been one of the most creative bands of the 21st century and to come away from one of their albums genuinely bored is a new experience for me.

Though the root cause of the malaise on Some Rap Songs is not explicitly linked to the failure of the future to come in this context, it is possible to hear ‘hauntological’ elements in Earl’s latest album is well. While Earl was still dealing with a lot of the same personal issues on I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside and the melancholy permeates the beats, Some Rap Songs’ production takes a very different approach. Similarly to Fisher’s take on James Blake’s Klavierwerke EP, this album showcases a fragility in it’s production, partially assembled tracks, mostly shorter than 2 minutes, that come across as almost ‘virtual songs’, or ‘almost’ songs, somehow insubstantial yet emotionally cutting. The ‘lost futures’ that show up, show up in the form of a different world where some of these songs were entirely fleshed out and turned into actualities, where Earl’s life and career hadn’t been castrated by personal circumstance. Earl sounds like a rapper who has become increasingly jaded, due to his personal issues but also dealing with these in the public eye with media and label expectations levied on him continually despite the struggles he’s been facing.

The increasing subservience of rap, a historically political genre (going back to the ‘proto’ hip hip of Gil Scott Heron or the work of Grandmaster Flash, or Public Enemy), to the interests of capital has been disheartening to observe. The malaise and suffering present on Some Rap Songs could never be captured by someone like Drake, as modern hip hop is largely guilty of the emotional austerity Fisher found in dubstep. Mainstream hip hop is now only really allowed to exist as highly materialistic – and not in the Marxist sense. Rather commercialisation led to hip hop pushing back from it’s political roots, and indeed the dominant ideology began to seep into the lyrics. One of the best albums this decade, To Pimp a Butterfly, turned back to older forms of hip hop and jazz to make political statements. On DAMN, Kendrick instead uses more ‘contemporary’ forms and any message present in that album largely falls flat. Should this be a surprise?

My issues with Fisher lie largely in his use of Jungle as an example of a new form during the 90s, and that it would have jolted listeners in the late 80s precisely because of how different it sounded to anything else. I think you could take something like Death Grips’ The Money Store today and it would clearly sound like something totally different to people from earlier eras – but Fisher largely uses ‘mainstream’ music for his examples, which is why the inclusion of Jungle in an earlier era seems to disrupt his point significantly as it doesn’t seem like Jungle as a genre was ever getting the radio play of groups like Nirvana or the Spice Girls.