Pop’s dynamism has been driven by mutual negation between rival forms

Evidence

Both the Birthday Party and new pop nihilated one another: far from existing in a relation of mutual acceptance or of mutual ignorance each defined themselves in large part by not being the other. One shouldn’t rush to conceive of this in simple-minded dialectical terms as thesis-antithesis, since the relationships are not only oppositional — there is always more than one way to nihilate, and it is always possible for any individual thing to nihilate more than one Other. It seems at least plausible to suggest that the capacity for renewed nihilation is what has driven pop. So let’s dare to conceive of pop not as an archipelago of neighbouring but unconflicting options, not as a sequence of happy hybridities or pallid incommensurabilities, but as a spiral of nihilating vortices. Such a model of pop is utterly foreign to postmodern orthodoxies. But pop is either modernist or it is nothing at all. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1091

Categorization

• XREF: Builds directly on chapter 61’s claim that ‘A hegemonic realism retroactively erases cultural possibilities it cannot absorb’ and chapter 12 on pulpy modernism; also connects to Fisher’s ongoing anti-postmodern polemic. — connects to: When two signs collide, one genre’s codes dominate the other.; Pop music advances through mutual negation between styles, not peaceful coexistence — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1091; The popist-versus-indie music rivalry mirrors class politics as a phoney war — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1212
• DEFINE: Introduces ‘nihilation’ as a technical term for how cultures generate novelty by negating existing forms rather than hybridising with them.

Broader Connections

• When two signs collide, one genre’s codes dominate the other. #expands (0.78)