Neon Lights

I head to the neon lights; I don’t know why

I found myself, the other day, strolling toward the county fairgrounds on an evening walk, listening to Timecop1983’s Neon Lights.

Actually, “found myself” is a poor choice of words. I’d been planning this since March. This place; this moment; this song. I had it all mapped out. I knew exactly the memory I wanted to make – the nostalgia I wanted to manufacture, and then save for a later date. The fair is the climax of my year – easily my favorite event. It marks the passage of time, and divides the season of anticipation from the season of reflection. I planned to bottle some of it up and enjoy it, a sip at a time, in perpetuity.

I didn’t plan for the fairgrounds to be empty, for the tiniest monarch in history had declared war upon the world.  There was supposed to be a Himalaya here, and a Ferris wheel – a sea of illuminated food vendors, staining the distant sky with kaleidoscopic haze. Where were they? Where were the neon lights? And, if they weren’t there, why was I heading toward them?

Old friend of mine it’s been a while; you don’t know me, and I don’t know you

Timecop1983 belongs to the relatively young genre of “dreamwave”, an ethereal-sounding, analog-synth-heavy sub-genre of the wider retrowave, a modern music form which tries to recapture the auditory oddities of 80’s pop music, refined by hindsight and 40 years of development in composition technique. Counter-intuitively emerging out of the union of an obscure internet subculture and an even more obscure video game, it has grown into a mature meta-genre, now stretching from the minimalistic, Kraftwerky chiptunes of Nullsleep, to the sax-soaked, Eddie Money-esque sensuality of The Midnight. It’s been on my playlist for a while, and has been gradually creeping into my own musical work. It’s a warm embrace – a callback – to the childhoods of millions.

Only, I’m a 90’s kid. It’s not my childhood. I’m embracing an older man’s past.

Childhoods unite across time and space to play, as children do. What, in 2020, is the difference between ’85 and ’95? Are they not both objects? Abstractions? Things to gaze upon alike for their distinct beauties, and yet mourn, as an ex-lover, that your arms will never again enclose their bodies? What voyeurism is this? Whose nostalgia am I entitled to? And why am I going out of my way to artificially create nostalgic moments for consumption by a future me?

Derrida coined the term “hauntology” to describe the haunting, apparitional presence and temporal incontingency of a past ontology – a “way things were” which we can’t seem to escape from. He used the term to describe the titular “Specter of Marxism”, a dead philosophy that continues to appear as a faint, glowing orb in the found-footages of Western society, and leaves breathy, bone-chilling messages on our answering machines. His thoughts on the temporal properties of language (from which it co-emerges) warrant a future post of their own, but the term has come to be re-imagined in the fields of music and aesthetics as of late to describe a related but different phenomenon. It has also, on occasion, been ripped from its postmodernist foundation and redeployed as a critique, assertively wondering why, if everything is socially constructed, the past keeps on popping up, over and over again, in the form of concepts, norms, and artistic movements.

I wonder where you are, so close, but so far

Electronic music (theretofore considered the soundtrack of the future) started, around the turn of the century, to notice that it no longer sounded futuristic. Moreover, it noticed that it had forgotten how to sound futuristic. After 50 years as the music of a future age, it had become the music of a present type. It was now a genre – a style. It had formulas, and rules, and patterns and structures. It sounded like itself. Worse, it sounded, in 2005, more or less like its 1995 self.

Culture followed swiftly, with the “oddly satisfying” execution of a domino-esque chain-reaction machine that culminated in a very unsatisfying present: The death of futurism. The future, in the words of gravetender of futurism Mark Fisher, has been “cancelled”. While previously, technology and culture existed with each other in what game designers call a “flow state,” whereby the perfect, reciprocal interplay between them was the engine of relentless and open-ended creativity, the cultural constituent of the pair seems to have stagnated. Technology now “progresses” into the present, confined to an endless series of thematic and conceptual repetition. We’re still watching 20th-century culture, only now in HD.

The buzzing, clumsy, experimental optimism of the early internet has collapsed into a pile of corporate sameness – a sea of digital retail with all the variety of its chain-store-strewn, brick-and-mortar counterparts. Tech “innovation” now amounts to placing a fresh new interface on top of a 20 year-old social media format and then omitting a vowel in the product name to make it “edgy”. In Hollywood, the reboot and the origin story reign, and coming this summer, the robots will turn on their makers, again, in We’ve Done This All Before 3: The Final Beginning.

Neon lights and “electric” color palettes are still, arguably, the most widely-recognized symbols of futurism in art, long after we, as a culture, have abandoned the naive expectation that the workplace of 2070 will be a disco club with task chairs. Even our open-concept, environmentalist urban utopias of the future were lifted from the 60’s. Modernity is confined to the paradoxical fate of reaching into the past to grasp a time when we reached into the future, lest we resign ourselves instead to the Sisyphean repetition of old and stale cultural themes. Stagnation, or paradox? Red pill, or blue?

The past, as a virus, uses us as a host for its own replication, and we consent in order to, for once, experience the sensation of being infected with something. Best-selling 8-bit throwback games like Shovel Knight run on octo-core CPU’s and graphic cards with floating point units numbered in the thousands. Advanced audio workstations intentionally limit themselves to the soundbank of a Yamaha DX7 in order to reproduce a 40 year-old sound. The resources of the future, leveraged, diverted, to reimagine the past.

I watch the sun go down, here in London town

Never in modern history was the future more cancelled than now. Never in modern history was the past more present. New episodes postponed, tour dates to be announced, sports matches pending, travel suspended. All we have are archives and time, and so we consume, and wait. The “oppressive weight of the past” hangs over us like a stale air, and yet, this air sustains our life. The future keeps failing to arrive, and so we find one in the past. What 2020 affords us is not a deviation from this pattern, but the time to reflect on it. Instead of merely being stagnated, we’re forced to feel it too.

That gated reverb now mocks me just a little bit. Those saxophones peer at me with a sly gaze. It’s as if they know, that I know, that they’re all I have. My plan, hatched all the way back in March, has been put on hold. I’ll have to wait another year to go back to the past. The worst part is, I’ll enjoy it all the more for having had to wait so long. That’s what this virus has done to me – it’s what both of these viruses have done, to all of us.

I’ll even nod in agreement when people say “Once this vaccine gets here, in the near future, we can finally go back to the way things were”. I’ll pretend that statement implies something far more innocent than it does. I’ll head to the Neon lights. I can’t justify.