Contemporary pop is trapped between a vacuous present and an unrecoverable past

Evidence

The image becomes more than a comment on Bowie — the man who once traded on his ability to escape the past is now trapped by it. It also functions as a diagnosis of a broader temporal malaise. What is this white space, this void? An optimistic reading would construe it as the openness of a present that is not yet decided. A bleaker take — one in keeping with the hackneyed quality of the music — would see the white space as standing in for the vacancy of the present, with nothing there except a necessarily failed attempt to escape and recover the past. That’s our pop predicament in 2013, a predicament which The Next Day couldn’t seriously have been expected to resolve. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1314

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Why this counts: not the claim’s novelty but the way the cover design stretches into a whole diagnosis of temporal malaise — a present that reads either as undecided openness or dead vacancy recoverable only by failed retro.
• XREF: connects to: Hauntological pop music can express unresolved doubt through an aesthetic of greyness — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 447; Synthpop’s futurism is now a superseded past rather than an available future — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 448; Contemporary pop’s return to modernism may overcome the postmodernism it recycles — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 983 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Contemporary pop lacks forward momentum because the present is crowded out by the past #corroborates (0.95) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 381
• Twenty-first-century pop culture stagnated as artists mined the past rather than the future #corroborates (0.92) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 381
• The blanked-out past signals a present hollowed of genuine newness #corroborates (0.85) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1314
• Postmodern pastiche blurs the present into a timeless simulacral past #expands (0.78) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 86
• Pop’s current malaise is that its missing vitality goes unnoticed rather than being mourned #expands (0.75) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1089
• Pop’s ability to host counter-cultural experimentation may be historically spent #corroborates (0.72) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1021