Listen: Demonologists — Unhealthy Culture
Listen: Scott Walker — Clara
Listen: Clipse — Ride around Shining
As quickly as hauntology arrived, it got busted. Everyone laughed at last year’s EMP topic in whiggishness as it applies to music and cultural crit, but Reynolds’ attempt at making spurious linkages sexy, if not plausible, is de rigeur. As interesting and well-researched as it is, Greil Marcus’ academo-punk touchstone Lipstick Traces is still based as much on hard evidence and established discursive communities as it is coincidences and serendipity.On that score, Penman’s scathing, hilarious rejoinder is perhaps unnecessarily theoretical — it’s not hard to demonstrate how a vague category like hauntology is impossibly bankrupt prima facie, right?
What might’ve been more interesting is some discussion of how this haunted music connects with present day politics and sociology, and how those things might inform the way critics are hearing music these days. What makes so-called “hauntings” so interesting to us right now? What do bands like Excepter have in common with Scott Walker? How do eerie beats connect Clipse and Burial to the frightening hiss of Nachtmystium and Xasthur?
For me, it’s the sense that violence is once again America’s cause célèbre. What was once overshadowed by America’s megalomaniacal misadventure in Iraq is the nihilistic sectarian violence of a budding civil war. Domestically, Clipse’s chilling coke tales capture the matter-of-fact elegance with which Chris and Snoop function as murderous Marlo Stanfield’s angels of death in the recently concluded season of The Wire. In both cases, it’s just business, amoral and asymmetrical, with uncertainty and fear lurking in the collective consciousness.