Commonplace Shook

This piece derives from years of simmering misgivings about how some music critics have been writing about the mass-market, Top 40 pop music which, we are told, has experienced a renaissance in the last decade, what could be called, and will be here, “manufactured pop music.” It is more specifically a response to “Pop Utopianism: A Manifesto,” written by Trevor Link (@loosejoints) and posted on the Occupied Territories tumblr, where it accompanies an MP3 and video mixtape called “We Need To Talk About K-Pop.” I’ll try to provide a brief summary of what I think “Pop Utopianism” is about, but the following will still make more sense if you read that first; it should be said that is of some length. This work is shorter, but, mercifully, it contains no references to Freud, which should count in its favor.

“Pop Utopianism” is an impassioned explanation of why Link finds K-Pop enthralling, placed in the context of wider plea for what he refers to pop music. The four foundational points of Pop Utopianism are, in brief:

(1): Pop music is at its most utopian when rooted in our experience of pleasure. This is because pleasure confronts us with an inescapable sensation of how we would like life to be like, a glimpse of utopia.

(2): Pleasure in itself is hardly controversial, but in order for this pleasure to be truly utopian or transformative, it must be ecstatic pleasure without imposed limits.

(3): Pop’s unrestrained sense of pleasure strongly aligns it with play, as well as fantasy.

(4): Perhaps more than most forms of music, pop music (including disco) is not only rooted in the body but is also embodied.

Link connects his argument to past debates about whether Disco was reactionary, Capitalist, inauthentic when compared to folk and rock music (this was preceded by debates about folk vs. rock, a “body music” in its time, to be sure) and to the concept of “rockism” in which music critics treat other genres as fundamentally unserious. The arguments, both borrowed and original, are convincing enough, however I don’t think they are convincing when used to make the arguments Link does about modern pop music. Debates about folk vs. pop (the distinction being entirely artificial, pop music simply being folk music written after the introduction of recording and mass media) rock vs. hip-hop and pop vs. the academy should be long buried by now. We all, or at least anyone remotely interested in discussions such as these, accept Pop in its many forms. Link, however, wishes to actually narrow what can be considered pop to the Top 40, its direct stylistic forebears and its transglobal cousins, such as K-Pop. “Sophisticated” music which “strives for the pleasureableness of pop music but which intellectualizes this pleasure and subdues it” is disqualified as providing only “safe, intellectually satisfying half-pleasures, “clever, yet ultimately tepid.” Link goes on to say that those who enjoy this “sophisticated” put themselves ‘above’ pop music “because it cannot serve their fascistic, anti-social, and narcissistic (not to mention non-pleasureable) aims.” Well, now that the F-word is out of the box, there’s no point in resisting it:

We need to talk about the intrinsic fascism of manufactured pop.

Now, I can’t stress enough that I’m not suggesting that Trevor Link is a fascist or that his passionate enjoyment of K-Pop is fascistic. It’s telling, though, how his manifesto and mixtape are sprinkled with fascistic language. We’ve already seen the denunciation of sophisticated intellectuals and their devitalizing intellecualization. In writing about K-Pop, the songs are described with words like ‘undeniable,’ the performers as ‘commanding,’ Link often asks in bewilderment how anyone could not like a particular song, and what might possibly be wrong with someone who doesn’t. Pop music defined in this manner is that music which speaks directly to a some pure, untainted and authentic human nature, presumed to be shared by the mass of society. Those who lack this nature or would turn against the spirit of purely pleasurable music are perverted intellectuals. This music is in turn performed by pop singers who “are constructs pulling together material from a kind of collective unconscious, the actualization of social desire,” which would also function as a concise description of the theory behind the Führerprinzip.

If the pop music Link is talking about encompasses certain pleasurable musics but not others (the ‘tepid’ ones) then we need to find a good way to distinguish what exactly the pop under discussion in the Pop Manifesto is; it will also serve as a good definition of ‘manufactured pop.’

I suggest that manufactured pop music is characterized by a central concern to maximize two attributes: ‘hookiness’ and forcefulness. Forcefulness commands the body to join in certain physical rituals; hookiness commands the mind to return again and again to certain sets of tunes. The myriad hooks in any particular manufactured pop track serve a second purpose of making it even more indistinct: not sticking with any single element for long enough to distinguish the song, the entire body of contemporary manufactured pop becomes an inseparable set of hooks and commands.

I label it “manufactured” not because it is made with computers or other machines It is manufactured because it is made in an assembly-line process to function as an interchangeable commercial commodity. The use of machines only determines its manufactured quality to the extent that technology is used a) to increase efficiency and b) to increase the power of command. Synthetic sounds can be given an overwhelming power; new production methods attempt to subdue the listener, keeping ahead of its audience as the public ear becomes accustomed to an ever wider range of sounds. Motown could be seen another assembly-line system for creating pop music, and should be seen as a historical predecessor of modern systems of pop music manufacture, of studio systems in both Korea and the US. An important difference for the listener is that Motown’s sound was finely-tuned decades before the loudness wars, so while the songs may have been created purely to illicit the most direct forms of pleasure, the forcefulness of the music was not overloaded, and it was not yet necessary to have four ‘hooks’ per song. This is a quantitative difference which I think becomes a qualitative difference: Motown and other pop-music factories of the past may have been making manufactured pop music, but it was different in kind from the music we are increasingly being asked by critics to openly embrace.

This recent contestation that we should all be listening to manufactured pop music because it efficiently delivers certain narrow forms of pleasure, that if we refuse there is something wrong with us – this is a distinctly fascist impulse. That is not to say that I believe that manufactured pop music creates fascists, or that Trevor Link is consciously or unconsciously acting as a fascist, or even that I have no interest in K-Pop or any song to be found on American charts. I find K-Pop fascinating enough as a specific instance of manufactured pop music that each time I discover a K-Pop song I can actually listen to, I’m filled with a particular delight. Any pop music that we discover anywhere can be included in our personal or social utopic visions and used along the path to them. If you like a song, that’s fine. If you like an entire genre, good for you. We can listen to pleasurable, worthwhile music from production centers in Motown or the Brill Building in decades past or a new hit pumped out of YG Entertainment last month. However, privileging a particular form of pleasurable popular music as the only legitimate form of Pop (Link executes a simple reversal of rockism by implying that the inauthenticity and artifice of pop music is actually what makes it authentic) denies listeners the choice of which qualities in music, in which combinations, are important to them: the hookiness and forcefulness of the music is instead held aloft as the supreme values for pop music, the songs with the most force and the strongest hooks are judged better than other songs in an imagined competitive arena (and performers can literally be judged in competitive arenas which are then broadcast on television.) This is an attempt to strangle the wonderful, messy heterodoxy that has emerged with the Internet. At the time that Richard Dyer wrote his “In Defence of Disco” (it’s the article that comes right after two defences of paedophilia in the summer 1979 edition of Gay Left) it would have made sense to simply appropriate the pop music that was widely available for purposes of pleasure, spontaneous community creation, identity play, and the like. There is no reason to accept this state of affairs today. We have as both listeners and producers of music an unmatched power to create a thriving ecology of pleasurable music on local and global scales.

So, there: I’m bothered by being told that I should be listening to more Top 40 pop, and that if I don’t enjoy it, I’m stuck up, over-intellectual, and just plain wrong. “Pop Utopianism: A Manifesto” and this piece and Link’s are both the results of immediate reactions: Link would never think to write such a lengthy exposition on K-pop if he did not find the direct experience of K-Pop to be exceedingly pleasurable, and I would find no need to label manufactured pop ‘intrinsically fascist’ if I didn’t find the experience of listening to much of it to be viscerally unpleasant. Again, if those K-Pop songs do bring Link pleasure, and that pleasure holds up to later scrutiny, as it seems to have done, then good for him, and plentiful thanks for creating an annotated mixtape that serves as a nice introduction to the genre for outsiders – a number of these songs I hadn’t heard before, and a few of them I can even tolerate or enjoy (if you’re curious, “Nu ABO,” which is toned down just enough to be listenable, and “Lucifer,” which sounds like it comes from an alternate universe.)

That being said, while the enjoyment of manufactured pop is defensible, I don’t think the idea that it can serves as a utopian model withstands scrutiny. The utopian model of manufactured pop is false because it is based on a ‘limitless pleasure’ which is only poorly simulated by maximizing and overloading a few narrow pathways of pleasure, just as the huge amounts of high-fructose corn syrup in a soda assaults our receptors of sweetness, and a fast-food hamburger latches on to our umami receptors while overloading our senses with a bevy of added chemicals. In both manufactured food and manufactured pop, we see a product designed to be a commodity which will impel its consumers to return again and again. This sort of utopianism based on the illusion of limitless pleasure fails because any inspiration to think of a better future is rerouted to a media that invites us to the false, shallow utopia it has constructed in the present day. The actual products that Coca-Cola and McDonald’s sell may do work on the body to prepare us, but it’s the advertisement that they and other corporations broadcast that really insist that these commodities function as a direct link to utopia. In K-Pop this link to images and in turn to the broader consumer society are very clear: K-Pop videos are even more overloaded than the songs that accompany them, and most of them are little more than a hyperactive succession of the alluring limitless number of colorful, shiny, and novel material objects that a commodity-producing world economy promises us; the experience of watching could only be replicated by candy-flipping in a haute shopping center.

Deflecting criticism of manufactured pop music by making dated claims that such critics are over-intellectual elitists who hate or misunderstand pleasure and the body is akin to branding a critic of fast food a health nut or giving the label of teetotaler to anyone who points out that methamphetamine is too powerful a stimulant. The idea that consumer goods, pop music among them, are appropriated by consumers in creative ways was an important one when it was introduced many decades ago, but since then we have seen that these activities have their limits. A commodity system cannot be defeated by the many small actions of consumers integrating products into their lives and personal narratives in ways unintended by producers. Capitalism is entirely capable of adapting to such.

Manufactured pop music cannot serve as a utopian model because it is already part and microcosm of the dystopian economic model of the present.

It may also fail as a model for utopia, but I’d like to briefly present another musical form that has existed for some time now but is only very recently receiving broad attention and increased critical appraisal, and which I think is intrinsically more transgressive.

Juke, even more than K-Pop, is centered around a dance culture. Unlike the dancing that one encounters in a K-Pop video or the dismal setting of a typical American club playing manufactured pop, where dancing is routinized, directly or indirectly choreographed, the “footwork” dance culture surrounding juke involves explosive, unbounded bodily self-expression (point number two in the manifesto) in a social setting. With its unconventional rhythms, abrasive textures, and counter-intuitive structures, it demands little but attention to the ways in which it subverts expectations. The lyrics of manufactured pop are generally agreed to be fairly meaningless (not a problem in itself) the words instead functioning as “vocalized beat” which add to the hookiness of each song. Juke, built upon unceasing repetition of words, phrases, or vocal noises, brings this pop logic to the fore, and plays with it in productive ways. Some Juke tracks are built around words or phrases that could easily be seen as violent, casually misogynist, or as objectifying women. The most interesting work done by Juke occurs when words and phrases are repeated so many times, in such rapid succession, that not only do they cease to hold any meaning, they actually begin to sound like other words and phrases. The function of the voice in manufactured pop music is taken to such an extreme that the music travels through meaninglessness and discovers a new territory of possible meanings. These are possible meanings, and are very much undetermined, as the new meanings will be decided upon by the brain of each listener as it begins to test different interpretations of the vocal sounds being heard. (“When I came?” “When I gave?” “When I cave?” “Spinn?” “Spit?” “Spill?” “Rashad?” “Ur-sher?” “Watch out?”) This is an crucial part of Juke’s transgression and even perhaps its utopian potential.

Whereas manufactured pop presents its listener with a centrally produced object of narrow, superficial perfection, Juke takes rough, imperfect elements from the world around it, combines them in an initially jarring manner, and in the process creates transcendent, ecstatic moments which are legitimately surprising. Absolutely nothing is surprising about the feelings which manufactured pop music is supposed to instill in you as a listener and a body; each element of the music is engineered to sickly extremes in an attempt to elicit specific, expected reactions, inviting you into a false contemporary paradise. Juke invites listeners to join in an unfolding process of creating utopian situations. It suggests that utopia is not something that that will be sold to us, but that utopia is something we can find, something we can construct from elements of the world around us, even if they may be ugly and mundane.

Part 2: Real Existing Pop Dystopia

Continuing dialogue in a case like this might be of limited productivity – there’s much talking at cross purposes, for many different reasons, but I’m still very pleased that Trevor Link took the time to write a considered response to my broadside (all one really can ask) as a means of clarifying his own position, even if most of my points were either not understood or flatly rejected. I’ll take the opportunity to also write a second rejoinder in which I can strive for further clarity, even if most of his points I will not understand or flatly reject.

While I believe there are some irreducible differences in opinion here, much of the misunderstanding or disagreement may stem from very different definitions and usage of language. This was probably inevitable when the word most central to the discussion was “pop,” a word that has been stretched near the point of illegibility. One of my the two main motivations for writing “We Need To Talk About (The Intrinsic Fascism Of) Manufactured Pop Music” was to try to work out exactly what Link meant when he used the word “pop” in talking about music. His pop utopia doesn’t include the music that those fascistic rockists might enjoy (how odd is that he says “How many sophisticated consumers of music wouldn’t be caught dead listening to, say, the Beach Boys” when, have you ever heard of Pet Sounds, one of history’s most critically fawned-over albums? Or does “The Beach Boys” here mean “Surfin’ USA” and “Kokomo?”), and the “sophisticated” music “which strives for the pleasureableness of pop music but which intellectualizes this pleasure and subdues it.” This could not be the world of pop I recognized, that gloriously multivarious constellation of all those musics that come from outside the academy and the court and don’t aim at abstract extremes (Serialism, Noise, and certain other explicitly experimental genres – not that they don’t have their merits, but they could quite reasonably denied the label ‘pop’) that I derived great pleasure from. The pop that Link discusses must be something different, something narrower, and there must be some attributes that delineate it from the greater body. From what I could tell, what set the ‘pop’ he was discussing apart was that it did not have any ‘limits’ – that it took its focus on ‘pleasure’ to extremes. This was something that seemed familiar – this described as a category so many of the unpleasant songs that I had been made to listen to by radio stations, bars, clubs, and those friends and acquaintances who will justify the worth of any song with the phrase “it’s so catchy!” or “I miss the 90’s!” ‘Manufactured Pop,’ then, to describe this subset of pop music which passes the test of being ‘unintellectual’ enough to be authentic and truly pleasurable. (And may I note how bemusingly surreal it is be called over-intellectual for my response to a 7600+ word essay on pop utopianism that cites Deleuze. DELEUZE.)

To mirror the numbered list of replies in “’Pop Utopianism’ And Its Discontents” at times perhaps being indulgently glib, before making a final attempt at clarity:

1. Link writes:

If I do focus on chart-based pop, it’s precisely because there is a tacit assumption in, at the very least, North American culture that it’s okay to dismiss and ignore this type of music. Until that changes, I’ll continue to champion it, though wholly out of love and never out of mere contrarianism.

First of all, this ignores a distinct shift in “alternative” and “mainstream” music criticism in the last decade towards an embrace of more and more chart-based pop music in the last decade – simply find search for Pitchfork Media’s reviews from the 90’s, then compared those to their list of Top 20 albums of 2000 and then to their track and album best-ofs for the last few years. If you’re feeling a bit masochistic, you could even subject yourself to the writing of Sasha-Frere Jones. The image of the snooty music journalist dismissive of “pop” is outdated, at least among the under-60 crowd. That’s only focusing on critics and those who actively seek out their advice – on a broader view, it’s simply absurd to say about “chart-based pop” that in North American culture “it’s okay to dismiss and ignore this type of music” – exactly the music that more than any other (except perhaps a few classical pieces which have been given particular social functions) is impossible to dismiss and ignore because there are commercial and social structures which deliver it to as many physical and social spaces as possible. 2. I failed to engage with the ideas about the politics and taste of music “i.e. how rock can be linked to authoritarian ideologies” because it was easily the weakest part of “Pop Utopianism.” Rock music (entirely ignoring Rock’s root identity as, and frequent return to, hip-swiveling R&B) is, via Dyer, assigned “thrusting and phallic qualities…which in turn suggests a verticality, an “up-and-down”-ness, that is very potentially authoritarian and hierarchical at root (hence the elitism so prevalent in rock music cultures.)” This is garbage pseudo-Freudianism which doesn’t hold up to any interrogation. (Is the up-and-down-ness in the bodily movement that accompanies some rock subgenres and subcultures? Are mosh pits authoritarian? Are the screaming teenage girls at a Beatles concert jumping up and down all trying to assert their dominance over the lowly subordinate screaming teenage girls who are merely clapping and swaying? Are they subliminally embodying the hierarchical patriarchy that flows through that Liverpudlian White Male Rock & Roll? Is the up-and-down-ness sexual? Is all male sexuality authoritarian? Is the ghost of Andrea Dworkin haunting this space? All of this would hardly, in any case, seem consistent with the pleasure-above-all mentality of “Pop Utopianism.”)

More importantly, this attempt to brand rock snobs authoritarian drastically misconstrues the nature of authoritarianism, particular its fascist strands. No fascist movement I’m familiar with has ever been about cultural distinction, sophistication, or intellectual purity. They instead focus on the right and necessity for certain groups to have power over others due to tradition, strength or notions of purity – inherent qualities which put them at the apex of a natural order. The qualities of those chosen groups cannot be reasoned with or denied, just as we are asked not to reason with or deny “pure” pop music and the pure, uncomplicated feelings they engender. My reference to Führerprinzip was in no way facetious; the Führer is supposed to function as the conduit and amplifier for the collective desires of the volk (excluding those nasty degenerate intellectuals who spoil all the fun) in a similar way the pop mega-star functions as the conduit for the collective desires of the modern consumer-citizen. Fortunately, the pop mega-star does not have the same evil role, but the logic is analogous.

It’s a bit hard for me to understand how one criticizes the hierarchical nature of rockism and then turns around to credit the church with a function of “actualizing social desire” similar to the dance floor (is David Guetta Cardinal Ratzinger?) but that is a small point that doesn’t go much of anywhere, except to Lady Gaga, who, again, is a chart-pop figure we have been told to take very seriously by many critical voices in quite a number of publications, and again, I find largely but not entirely unlistenable, due in large part due to awful, overloaded production.

The accusation of ethnocentricity is quite easy to laugh off: I’m accused of displaying “no real knowledge of what K-pop means in the Korean context or what makes K-pop different from other forms of pop music.” But “Pop Utopianism” / We Need To Talk About K-Pop is centered around the idea that K-Pop exemplifies the positive qualities found in manufactured pop universally, so I’m not even sure what I’m being accused of. Yes, K-Pop as a phenomenon is portrayed by Link as superior – especially in its sincerity – to American strains of global manufactured pop, and I would agree that the pop mixtures being made now in Korea are distinctive. If it’s agreed that both strains are, fundamentally, Link’s Pop, what I label manufactured pop, then it’s irrelevant to the argument what exactly the smaller differences are. In regards to Link’s “formative academic period in life…spent researching indigenous cultures and religions” which makes my supposed “suspicio[n] of anything that overturns individuality” he finds in my writing to be “somewhat offensive,” I find the implied flattening of difference between “indigenous” socialities and the socialities of industrialized, specialized, mass-media connected cultures to be deeply puzzling coming from what is portrayed as an anthropological perspective.

3. Link dismisses my “reductive,” “simplistic,” ‘endlessly repeated’ use of the phrase “manufactured pop music,” which, again, is a term summoned to deal with the narrowing, reductive definition of pop used in the Manifesto. One of his reasons for casting doubt on the phrase is its power to invoke critiques of the classical Hollywood system. I actually think this is a productive analogy: both genres produced many works of worth and diverse qualities, and many works of questionable worth, but the system in which all these works are produced and distributing has problematic, ideologically destructive and dystopic elements; there’s a reason why Godard could love Hollywood films and so hate Hollywood.

Link casts the assembly-line metaphor as denigrating the care, attention and artistry put into the actual creation of pop tracks:

Teddy Park can be a hit-maker for YG Entertainment, but he’s also purely an artist as well, no different from any other artist throughout history. (And if you ask me, he’s a really good one too.) The author’s description of “a new hit pumped out of YG Entertainment” strikes me as crude, a degrading way to describe what is a highly creative process.

But each pop song can be both – the specific creation of an individual and the interchangeable new hit pumped out of YG Entertainment – there’s nothing contradictory about this. Stargate and Ester Dean can care greatly about the music they make, but ultimately most of their material will also be input for a system seeking revenue and market share.

The maximization of hookiness and forcefulness in manufactured pop music is also responsible for how tiringly formulaic it can be if the system calls for a musical product that can reliably command the widest possible spectrum of listeners, then the music will tend to use a narrow set of elements and structures, in a more limiting way than the sense in which any music of an identifiable genre must use some common and therefore predictable elements. That Nickelback is both singularly horrid and hugely successful is tied to the fact that you can play two of their hits over each other. Certainly artists can innovate at the same time they aim for the common denominator, and there are plenty of good to great songs that can be found within the system of manufactured pop. (I invoked Motown in a clumsy attempt to preempt questions of well-pop-has-always-been-manufactured-what’s-different now? I certainly have no desire to valorize any period as a golden age of pop music – plenty of the material released on Motown and contemporary labels is rather forgettable, no less than in any era, but a particular production aesthetic renders that forgettable material less actively unpleasant as bad or mediocre pop music from other pop eras. While I do delight in connecting with a well-written pop song, my listening is broadly more driven by considerations of timbre and overall sonic texture. There’s no reason to deny that production sounds change withtechnology and fashion, and that along with new creative opportunities come misuses and new chances to bludgeon listeners.)

4. Link contests that as my rebuttal gets closer to speaking directly about K-Pop, it gets worse. I “express surprise” (actually, I don’t, but thanks anyway) that I actually find “a couple” of K-Pop songs I can enjoy (in the We Have To Talk About K-Pop mix, I have heard K-Pop before and they number more than two) and my implication that “K-pop as a whole is largely unlistenable” is “rather offensive…mostly because it assumes that there might be some objective grounds on which he can write off and condescend to an entire nation’s pop industry.” For Link,

personally, I could never imagine making such statements about any country’s musical output, even if I had little interest in it, because what I value as a music listener is the idea that there’s good music everywhere.

On the other hand, its easy for me to imagine making such statements about any country’s musical output because I would make that statement about ALL countries with pop music, and I would do so precisely because I deeply believe in the idea that’s there good music everywhere. That belief has lead me to spend enough time searching for good music from anywhere and everywhere that I have encountered very large volumes of bad or painfully mediocre music from all around the globe. For each sublime tune or intoxicating eddy in the global pop flows, there are many blandly derivative copies of commercial forms and schmaltzy traditional performances. Music is amazing and there’s a terrible lot of it that’s not very good. Bad music, however, can not only vary in how good or bad – how pleasurable or unpleasant – it is judged to be from the perspectives of different listeners, it can take on new qualities in different times and different places and when it is taken as inspiration or reappropriated for sampling – small moments in otherwise unremarkable bodies of work can become the nutrient matter for rich, lively new forms.

The one statement to which I actually do take offense comes when Link says he “hate hate hate[s]” the “facile comparison of pop music to junk food” because it’s “silly and ungrounded, and again, it betrays another kind of class prejudice.” Here, the accusation of class prejudice actually bristles: if you (this is the generic ‘you’) can’t accept that any serious opposition to the system of industrial agriculture, which has fast food as its quintessential distributional form, includes a fundamental insistence to the right of all people to the healthy food denied them by the socio-economic system of which agro-industrial production is a central part, and instead fall back on lazy stereotypes of privileged Whole Foods Liberals (and, by the way: fuck them) then you’re a slimy reactionary who has no right to speak of utopias.

The analogy holds. Preparing sweet or fatty foods is not evil, just as making saccharine pop songs is not evil. Some of the end results may be transcendently delicious, many will be basically satisfying in expected ways, some will be unpleasantly overwhelming in their over-use of certain ingredients, and this reaction will be determined to a great degree by the predilections and sensitivities of the recipient. None of the results is unethical. However, the system of fast food and industrial agriculture that commoditizes and distributes sweet or fatty foods on a massive scale is harmful in very real ways that are much more than a matter of aesthetic snobbishness.

This is the second and much more important reason I had for writing “We Need To Talk About (The Intrinsic Fascism Of) Manufactured Pop Music” – the conception of “Pop Utopianism” needs to be problematized and interrogated because it ignores the ways in which manufactured pop is embedded in the real existing dystopia of the contemporary global economic system, which functions by presenting us with a continual supply of commodities which provide certain narrow, easy forms of pleasure, and it asks us to not think further about or reassess this initial pleasurable reaction, instead continuing to acquire similar commodities (perhaps with some added superficial novelty) which will elicit similar pleasurable reactions. This is precisely what the Manifesto asks of us – don’t over-intellectualize, simply be happy with a product so wonderfully tuned to illicit pleasurable reactions in your brain-body interface.

Pleasure is vital to any true utopian vision, because it is vital to human experience and any true utopian vision has a deep consideration for human wellness and flourishing (but it can’t just be one person being “really really happy,” unless you’re arguing from a solipsistic or peculiarly monist perspective.) Yet we can see that the simple vision of unreflective pleasure presented in “Pop Utopianism” cannot serve as a utopian model because it is already the model of the still far more dystopian economic model that rules the world around us. The effects of production, distribution and consumption for manufactured pop music are innocuous compared to most of the tangible commodities we consume – some artists are taken advantage of, some music industry executives get too much money they don’t deserve, some snobs like me have to repeatedly hear a set of songs they don’t like (one can also consider the socially corrosive settings that manufactured pop is often experienced in – the “dismal clubs of forced-fun music” that Gavin Mueller dubbed “utopias of date rape;” I wouldn’t emphasize this aspect as much, first due to the troubles of proving causation, and second because the manufactured pop form Link is specifically celebrating may not have the same correlation.) The point is that the uncritical relationship to superficial pleasures is much the same. Moving beyond our real existing dystopia will involve reflecting deeply on the pleasures presented to us, their richness or shallowness, their quickness or longevity, and their wider implications. As rhetorically or personally abrasive as I may have been at times in this essay, I am sorry that Trevor Link experiences clinical depression, and (I think) I can understand how that could make intense pleasures all that more important, but it must be recognized that pleasures can be qualitatively different from each other, that they can be deep or fleeting, healing or destructive.

We inch closer to utopia by both celebrating and critiquing our pleasures; by constructing truly wild, diverse, changing, decentralized, heterodox ecologies of music, which will include ABBA, Juke, K-Pop, and all the “over-intellectualized” “half-pleasures” that “Pop Utopianism” maligns.

If we can imagine evolving beyond capitalism and the other dystopias we struggle with, we can imagine moving beyond pop music and non-pop music.

There’s a great deal of money to be made from this intellectual property, but on a cursed, derelict planet, there is no time to do so. Yet it will happen. In The Last Jedi, characters have always run out of time, and then manage to escape from their fate anyway. Time in Star Wars is the cyclical, ahistorical time of myth. Myth is not the only timeless time. There is the time of waiting, stretching infinitely into the future. There is the time of impossibility, in which the sequence of events overflows time’s causal capacity. (Six hours to catastrophe? We’ll just skip over to this other planet somewhere in the galaxy. Cut back to us whenever you’d like.) And there is the time of inevitability, in which time becomes irrelevant because all destinations are predetermined.

The Force Awakens existed in the timeless time of inevitability. It knew it was a Star Wars film because it knew it was a remake of A New Hope. That was its purpose, and it was a functional film. Last Jedi has the audacity to actually believe that it is a new Star Wars film, a 21st century version of a bizarre, goofy, pseudo-Daoist 70s sci-fi movie. It can be very difficult to see the films beneath the original trilogy. If you saw them at the right period in a certain kind of childhood, they occupy a distinct mental space. There’s Star Wars, and then there are all other films.  They are of course in many ways bad films, a fact incapable of tarnishing their Star Wars-ness. With the prequel trilogy, George Lucas was too engrossed with telling his ponderous epic and innovating in the field of fast-aging CGI to even bother making films. There, Star Wars metastasized and overwhelmed its medium. The measured and canny Force Awakens, in its attempt to recreate the Star Wars-ness of Star Wars, was perhaps more an experiment in memory manipulation than a film. Many 'fans' are angrily disappointed in The Last Jedi. They are enraged by Last Jedi attempting to be a film. Abrams' finely-tuned homage delivered the idea of Star Wars directly to the part of the mind dedicated to it. Rian Johnson, impudently enough, seems to have at least tried to create something interesting.

In its willingness to be its own film, Last Jedi is willing to fail. Indeed, it makes failure its central theme, and in doing so, makes it the main thread running through the whole franchise. Yoda failed, Qui-Gon failed, Obi-Wan failed, and Luke failed. In the wake of his failure, Luke sees truer than his teachers, although perhaps all of them began to see clearly only after their defeats. He sees the vital unity of the Force, its absolute and uncontainable autonomy.

In his sublimation, does Luke fulfill the prophecy of bringing balance to the Force, having left behind only Kylo and Rey, the one dark and the other light? No. The prophecy of a chosen one bringing ‘balance’ to the Force was the ideology fantasy of a decadent theocratic order doomed to fall. In leaving the physical plane, Luke is letting go of the fantastic narrative which has structured his entire life. All those fashioning themselves ‘Jedi’ or ‘Sith’ have fallen victim to the grandiose melodrama of the myths they have created. Kylo Ren is easily manipulated by Snoke’s tales of blood and destiny, which change so transparently to fit his strategic needs. But Snoke ends up believing in those same visions, and thereby becomes another victim. There is no grand narrative determining events; there is only the chaos of initiative, the ludicrous autopoietic power of the universe itself. This is the truth Luke finds in his hermitage. The future is continually made by the inherent dynamism of the moment.

The Jedi Order destroyed themselves, victims of the very ideology that sustained them as an institution. The Last Jedi is the first film in which we can clearly see why the Republic fell, and why its restoration after the jubilant toy-marketing victories of Return was so fragile and brief. This is because it is the first Star Wars film which takes political economy, and not just political intrigue, seriously. The endless marginalia that was the Extended Universe contained minutia of various Galactic mega-corporations, but this is the first time the question has been raised on screen - who makes all the death machines we see blown up in such quantities, film after film, and why? The why is simple: profit.

With the introduction of political economy comes a clearer view of what the Force is. It is not a biological quality waiting to be discovered and verified by celibate bureaucrat-monks. It is built out of quotidian routines and skills. It is not the inerrant ability that manifests in impossible podracing skills, it appears where the labor of the stable sweeper shades into magic.

If the Jedi have never been the genetically-chosen custodians of cosmic destiny, who are they? Like the Sith, they are merely people using power in pursuit of ends which are not guaranteed to be righteous or wise. The Sith and Jedi may draw from opposing valences of the Force, but this does not make one of them the inverse of the other. That idea is just another effect of their shared ideology. The dark and light sides were never synonyms for 'Evil' and 'Good,' they are simply politico-aesthetic moods. The Empire took control of the galaxy in a few decades because the military-industrial complex necessary had already been built under the Republic. The supposed heroes built the imperial structures, they just took on different management. The Jedi and Sith are the Democratic and Republican parties of a galaxy far, far away.

Tearing the veil of ideology from one's eyes, what does one do with the knowledge that everything is of one substance? Spinoza kept grinding lenses, and died from the effects of inhaling glass dust. Luke disappears in a puff of logic. Has he fulfilled his role, or abjured it? Regardless, everything will continue without him. Luke will not be the last Jedi. But while the future will bring forth more Jedi, ‘The Jedi’ must indeed come to an end. Their failures must be rectified, and they are not up to the task. But if we must do away with the past to preserve a future, how much must we destroy? The conflict between Millenial Kylo and Millenial Rey is about what it means to transcend the past, but they have both come to understand that it is necessary.

Last Jedi's productive ambiguity is this: the timeless temporality of the myth, of the eternal moment of infinitely accelerated capital circulation, is also the temporality of absolute contingency, of a radical break with the past. It is the condition of possibility for a landscape filled to the horizon with franchises and reboots, but also for building what must replace it. Our world is Disney's world. We live in multiple timeless times at once. We wait. We know things can’t continue. Yet they do, somehow finding the remaining time that isn’t there. Disney (which owns everything) believes things can continue, forever. It believes in the timeless infinity of capital’s circuit. Disney believes in the mythic structure. JJ Abrams made A New Hope, and it doesn’t ultimately matter what dark meandering the middle film goes on, because JJ Abrams will come back and make Return of the Jedi again. Everything will go as it has before. The money will be made.