brettworks

“What’s audible in millennial-angst music isn’t piety but a profound sense of loss: not of something remembered but, in this retro, YouTube, internet meme era, something re-remembered” (518).

“The centrality of sampling and quotation in contemporary music, alongside the perennial accessibility and audibility of music’s entire back catalogue, means the past is always alive in our present, history always tangibly in the mix” (539).

“We don’t listen to music chronologically, whether it’s chosen or randomised–prompted by biorhythm or algorithm–and neither do we hear it chronologically. Whether in a shop or a hipster café, coming from a phone on a bus or a muscle car on the street, heard in a film soundtrack or in a TikTok, we’re besieged by music from a randomised temporality” (549).

“We’re lost in music, spun round by it (like a record, baby). Music is both representative and constitutive of the hauntological presence of history, of the constant incursion of the past upon a porous present. Moreover, as memory is communal rather than purely personal, public rather than entirely private, this temporal openness interconnects with social openness, with the solidarity and collectivity that music has captured and conveyed over the decades, mixing and remixing us all” (549).

“We’re perpetually exposed to an affective archive of music from the hauntology that is history: as revenant original recordings, as atemporal cover versions, and as evocative sampled snippets from a randomised past. Music is thus continually mixing and remixing history with the contemporary, and this recurring past doesn’t just feel alive, but alive with possibilities–and encountering them, so do we” (559).