Pop Music and Hip Ennui : A Sonic Fiction of Capitalist Realism

"In Pop Music and Hip Ennui: A Sonic Fiction of Capitalist Realism, Macon Holt provides the imaginative and analytical resources to think with contemporary pop music to investigate the ambivalences of contemporary culture and the potentials in it for change. Drawing on Kodwo Eshun's practice of Sonic Fiction and Mark Fisher's analytical framework of capitalist realism, Holt explores the multiplicities contained in contemporary pop from sensation to abstraction and from the personal to the political. Pop Music and Hip Ennui unravels the assumptions embedded in the cultural and critical analysis of popular music. In doing so, it provides new ways to understand the experience of listening to pop music and living in the sonic atmosphere it produces. This book neither excuses pop's oppressive tendencies nor dismisses the pleasures of its sensations."--Bloomsbury Publishing. "In Pop Music and Hip Ennui: A Sonic Fiction of Capitalist Realism, Macon Holt provides the imaginative and analytical resources to think with contemporary pop music to investigate the ambivalences of contemporary culture and the potentials in it for change. Drawing on Kodwo Eshun's practice of Sonic Fiction and Mark Fisher's analytical framework of capitalist realism, Holt explores the multiplicities contained in contemporary pop from sensation to abstraction and from the personal to the political. Pop Music and Hip Ennui unravels the assumptions embedded in the cultural and critical analysis of popular music. In doing so, it provides new ways to understand the experience of listening to pop music and living in the sonic atmosphere it produces. This book neither excuses pop's oppressive tendencies nor dismisses the pleasures of its sensations"-- Provided by publisher Cover 1 Contents 8 Preface 9 Acknowledgments 14 Part 1 Pop Music and Hip Ennui 16 1 Kodwo Eshun: Sonic Fiction at Century’s End 18 2 Mark Fisher: Capitalist Realism after the Crash 36 3 Sounds Like the Future Will Never Arrive 50 Part 2 A Sonic Fiction of Capitalist Realism 58 Vignette: Jessie J at the Closing Ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics 60 1 Attention 66 Vignette: Busking on the London Underground 92 2 Complicity 96 Vignette: On “Bored in the USA” on Letterman on YouTube (Now Removed) 115 3 Catharsis 120 Vignette: The Stones 143 4 Home 148 Vignette: One of Two: Carly Simon’s New Boyfriend 171 5 Conjunction 174 Vignette: Two of Two: On Xiu Xiu and Mixing 198 Notes 202 References 205 Index 215