Pop music advances through mutual negation between styles, not peaceful coexistence

Evidence

What pop lacks now is the capacity for nihilation, for producing new potentials through the negation of what already exists. One example, of many possible. 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: Connects to Fisher’s broader modernist-vs-postmodernist argument about cultural production recurs across his essays; ‘pop is either modernist or nothing’ echoes his anti-postmodern critique of capital realism. — connects to: Pop’s dynamism has been driven by mutual negation between rival forms — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1091; Younger artists can treat a predecessor genre as playable style, not sacred inheritance. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1253
• SEED: Angle: a music criticism piece applying the ‘spiral of nihilating vortices’ model to a current scene — which coexisting acts actually define themselves by negating one another?

Broader Connections

• Pop’s dynamism has been driven by mutual negation between rival forms #corroborates (1.00) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1091