Mainstream Rave-sampling pop denies rather than laments Rave’s obsolescence.

Evidence

‘Party hauntology’ might even be the best name for the dominant 21st century form of pop, the transnational club music produced by Guetta, Flo-Rida, Calvin Harris and will.i.am. But the debts to the past, the failure of the future are repressed here, meaning that the hauntology takes a disavowed form. … Although ‘I Gotta Feeling’ is ostensibly an optimistic record, there’s something forlorn about it. Perhaps that’s because of will.i.am’s use of Auto-Tune – there seems to be Sparky’s Magic Piano-like machinic melancholy intrinsic to the technology itself, something which Kanye drew out rather than invented on 808s and Heartbreak. In spite of the track’s declamatory repetitions, there’s a fragile, fugitive quality about the pleasures ‘I Gotta Feeling’ so confidently expects. That’s partly because ‘I Gotta Feeling’ comes off more like a memory of a past pleasure than an anticipation of a pleasure that is yet to be felt. … Yet, the Black Eyed Peas’ Rave-appropri-ations didn’t function so much as revivals of Rave as denials that the genre had ever happened in the first place. If Rave hasn’t yet happened, then there is no need to mourn it. We can act as if we’re experiencing all this for the first time, that the future is still ahead of us. The sadness ceases to be something we feel, and instead consists in our temporal predicament itself, and we are like Jack in the Gold Room of the Overlook Hotel, dancing to ghost songs, convincing ourselves that the music of yesteryear is really the music of today. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 465

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘If Rave hasn’t yet happened, then there is no need to mourn it’ move — disavowed hauntology as the core temporal evasion of 21st-century pop — is a genuinely paradigm-shifting formulation about how nostalgia operates.
• XREF: Connects to Fisher’s broader hauntology thesis (Ghosts of My Life’s governing concept) and to the Overlook Hotel ghost-dance image from The Shining. — connects to: Black Eyed Peas rave revivalism denies rave history rather than mourns it — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 465; Rave culture’s energy may be one symptom of a wider cultural depletion — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1226

Broader Connections

• Black Eyed Peas rave revivalism denies rave history rather than mourns it #exemplifies (1.00) — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 465
• Rave culture’s energy may be one symptom of a wider cultural depletion #qualifies (0.75) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1226