Liberatory Neomedievalism: Richard Dawson's 2020
In one of my classes, a common theme has been nostalgia and the related phenomenon of the “nostalgic mode.” It’s probably not surprising to longtime readers that this came up in a class I teach. However, this has led me to get a firmer hand on Jameson’s idea of the Nostalgic Mode. To explain it simply, look at the early films of George Lucas: both American Graffiti and the original Star Wars are nostalgic films referencing the 1950s. In the former, the 1950s is depicted; in the latter, the style of a particular type of media from the 1950s (science fiction adventure serials) is replicated. Both are nostalgic, but one achieves it without direct textual reference, working solely through the presentation of the material and the style in which it is executed.
There is no clearer expression, in my mind, of Marshall McLuhan’s axiom that the content of a piece of media matters about as much as what’s stenciled on the casing of the atomic bomb. The content only matters insofar as it is reflective of the stylistic components that shape the text as a whole. While I’m a bit skeptical of some of McLuhan’s broader points, I think that this is a perfectly fine point to make here – I think that it’s more rhetorical than anything: the tendency for those taking in a piece of media is to ignore the form and focus on content, positioning it thus – as the stencil on the casing of the nuclear device – is more a statement for effect than in fact.
The real work is being done under the surface.
Let’s circle back around to nostalgia, though.
Mark Fisher, writing about the a 2005 song by the Arctic Monkeys in his second major book, Ghosts of My Life, commented on the Nostalgic Mode in music by saying that:
Two examples will suffice to introduce this peculiar temporality. When I first saw the video for the Arctic Monkeys’ 2005 single ‘I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor’, I genuinely believed that it was some lost artifact from circa 1980. Everything in the video – the lighting, the haircuts, the clothes – had been assembled to give the impression that this was a performance on BBC2’s ‘serious rock show’ The Old Grey Whistle Test. Furthermore, there was no discordance between the look and the sound. At least to a casual listen, this could quite easily have been a postpunk group from the early 1980s. Certainly, if one performs a version of the thought experiment I described above, it’s easy to imagine ‘I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor’ being broadcast on The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1980, and producing no sense of disorientation in the audience. Like me, they might have imagined that the references to ‘1984’ in the lyrics referred to the future.
There ought to be something astonishing about this. Count back 25 years from 1980, and you are at the beginning of rock and roll. A record that sounded like Buddy Holly or Elvis in 1980 would have sounded out of time. Of course, such records were released in 1980, but they were marketed as retro. If the Arctic Monkeys weren’t positioned as a ‘retro’ group, it is partly because, by 2005, there was no ‘now’ with which to contrast their retrospection. In the 1990s, it was possible to hold something like Britpop revivalism to account by comparing it to the experimentalism happening on the UK dance underground or in US R&B. By 2005, the rates of innovation in both these areas had enormously slackened. UK dance music remains much more vibrant than rock, but the changes that happen there are tiny, incremental, and detectable largely only by initiates – there is none of the dislocation of sensation that you heard in the shift from Rave to Jungle and from Jungle to Garage in the 1990s. As I write this, one of the dominant sounds in pop (the globalised club music that has supplanted R&B) resembles nothing more than Eurotrance, a particularly bland European 1990s cocktail made from some of the most flavourless components of House and Techno.”
For a long time I believed that musical innovation came in 11 year waves. 1955 gave you Rock and Roll, 1966 gave you the mainstreaming of Psychedelic Music (both Pet Sounds and Revolver came out that year), 1977 gave you Disco and Punk, 1988 gave you House. 1999 broke the cycle – it gave you not a revolution in the form of the music but in the distribution of music through Napster.
This is, however, largely a lie: where do Rap and Hip-Hop fit into this? What about all of the post-this and that-wave genres? They’re all invisible. Still, it’s handy narrative to make the next point: the popular music of the 21st century has been dominated by the nostalgic mode. One could argue the whole mainstream and underground business. However, if there’s serious innovation going on, it’s not being played on the speakers in your local shops.
Music production in the 21st century is not simply dominated by this mode, it’s been captured. If the problem is that the dominant mode of musical production is set up to translate talented musicians into purveyors of a retro sound, the answer lies in repurposing Deleuze and Guattari’s appropriation of Nietzsche:
Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to "accelerate the process," as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven't seen anything yet.
It might seem out of place to quote from a passage dealing with a recommended free trade policy for the then-unaligned powers in the Cold War of the 20th Century, but the fact of the matter is that, if we take Deleuze and Guattari as trustworthy sources, then we should also accept – at least provisionally – their statement that there is only one economy. The economy of dollars and cents, stocks and bonds, is also the economy of desire and libido. There is also an economy to time: we’ve all been told that time is money, and Tom Waits once postulated that “time is just memory mixed with desire.” There is an equivalency here that I can only scratch the surface of in this piece.
If we intensify the process that produces music in the nostalgic mode, it we push nostalgia far enough that we reach a degree that no one can have nostalgia for that point, I suggest that we encounter what Edgar and I have, in the past, referred to as “Metachrony,” a sort of ecto-chronological mode of artistry that melds the past and present in a way that brings the past alive. Previously, I have postulated that the music of folk-punk band Blackbird Raum heads in this direction.
Upon reflection, I realized that British folk musician Richard Dawson also does so with his album 2020, which was, ironically, released in the last days of 2019, an attempt to make something hyper-contemporary instead of focusing on the false present of the immediate past. However, what is most notable about Dawson’s album is not how contemporary it is, but how it explodes the nostalgic mode by introducing medieval and early modern characteristics into his music. The result is that the music creates a continuity between the past and present.
It is possible that, by doing a close read of several of these songs, what I’m called “Metachrony” might come clearer. It is also possible that I’ll simply get off in the weeds as a I normally do.
Let’s start at the beginning [Links go to the album’s band camp page.]
Track 1, “Civil Servant”
The opening track for the album, functioning as a thesis statement of sorts for the whole project, follows a low-level employee in the British Civil Service, whose primary duty is to deny benefits claims for suffering people. The narrator’s life is described in broad and depressing terms: he wakes up shortly before work, drags his feet on his way, and dreams of calling in sick to lay on his couch and play video games, and after work he goes to the local Weatherspoon’s to play on the fruit machine (to translate for an American audience: playing video poker at a chain bar) and drink Peronis. He is quite clearly suffering from what we generally call burnout, exacerbated by the fact that his job is literally causing harm to innocent people.
Ultimately, he follows his inclination to call in to work, but once the dam is broken everything comes spilling out, resulting in what was initially just an attempt to spend a day playing Call of Duty becoming a principled and emotional exit from a soul-killing career:
I'm not coming into work today
I'm really ill
Not coming into work today
Or for that matter any other day
I'm sick to my soul
I refuse to do this dirty work anymore
I refuse, refuse, refuse, refuse
Refuse, refuse, refuse!
The repetition of “refuse” through this outro is, functionally, the thesis statement for this song: the cri de coeur of someone who has been pushed to the brink, who is so burned out by being forced to participate in something that runs so counter to his moral sense.
It is also, I would say, an excellent example of the medievalism at work here: Dawson’s voice rises and falls in a pattern that will be familiar to anyone who has seen the middle ages portrayed in film. The result is that this isn’t just a lonely man refusing to take part in a system that grinds him down: this is every person forced to support a way of life that he finds nauseating. In that moment, the nameless civil servant who wants to beat the creep in the next office with a sellotape dispenser is possessed by the spirits of Boadicea, Watt Tyler, Captain Swing, and General Ludd, part of a continuous but broken line of people pushed to the brink by the way that things are and sickened by it.
Track 4, “Jogging”
My song of the summer the past couple years running: a short, narrative sketch of a guidance counselor who was deemed redundant at the school where he worked and is freelancing as a result. This is a man who had a satisfying career and become alienated by the termination of that work: now, he spends his free time looking online at houses he knows he will never move into, he sees judgment on the face of the clerk at the grocery store, he hears curse words emerging from a busker’s mouth in the middle of “Wonderwall.”
So, in an effort to combat this, he sees his doctor, gets prescribed psychiatric medication, and begins to jog two miles a day spending, as he notes it, “hundreds of miles going nowhere.” There’s a relentless, desperate positivity to the song: he knows this is all in his head, he knows where it comes from, he can’t do anything about it, but he has this ritual that he clings to that brings meaning to the exercise.
The instrumentation on this track is particularly striking. I’ve heard guitars described as “angular” quite often, and one of the hosts from the podcast Wyrd_Signal described a Marilyn Manson track as sounding “water damaged,” but more than anything else, the frantic guitar in this track sounds destroyed. The instrument this song is being played on has a quality that makes it sound like it got thrown into traffic and emerged, miraculously, in a shape that can technically still be played like a guitar. But the energy mustered by Dawson and channeled through it suggests that this man is not simply jogging but running full tilt on at least one broken leg. Crunching, jangling, and other such words don’t really seem to do it justice.
As the narrator gets out of his apartment, though, he can’t help but witness the world around him, sorrowing at the inhumanity that people are subjected to:
There's a Kurdish family on the ground floor
Had a brick put through their kitchen window
The police know who did this, still they do nothing
It's lonely up here in Middle-England
In the end, this turns around a bit, and the speaker – who seems like a faithless evangelist for physical exercise – begins to grow yet more particular, to the point where there is a “you” to the song that enters the picture. It becomes clear that this isn’t just his internal monologue, this has all been a very strange encounter with a lonely man who is winding up to make a pitch to the listener:
I know I must be paranoid
But I feel the atmosphere
'Round here is growing nastier
People don't smile anymore
There's no such thing as a quick-fix
But jogging has provided me
A base on which to mould my time
And let my worries go a while
I know I must be paranoid
But I feel the atmosphere
'Round here is growing nastier
People don't care anymore
Would you like to sponsor me
For running the London Marathon?
Though it's really daunting
We're aiming to raise a thousand pounds for the British Red Cross
The break in the meter for the last song is, in actuality, the height of comedy in context. It mirrors the experience of being hypnotized by the words of someone who is delivering what ultimately amounts to a monologue, and then being shocked out of it by them suddenly asking a question.
I’m given to understand that a lot of the lyrics on this album are based, at least in part, on conversations that Dawson had with people after shows he played during the tour for his last album, 2017’s Peasant.
Track 6, “Black Triangle”
A song that tells the story of a man entering middle age who recounts having seen a UFO when he was younger with his friend, Neil, after the two came home from eating at a Chinese buffet. The craft is described in detail, but the two of them live fairly different lives thereafter: Neil goes on to be an engineer and drive a succession of expensive cars. He’s happily married and raising several well-adjusted children.
Our narrator, on the other hand, is a UFO enthusiast. He runs a website and youtube channel, documenting phenomena. He says of his own marriage that, “my wife found / Someone else to love her / Better than I,” but gets along with his ex-wife’s new husband and takes his daughter, Beth, camping some weekends.
The song ends with the narrator and Beth witnessing the eponymous Black Triangle, the UFO that our narrator and Neil saw in their youth, appear overhead: a mysterious messenger materializing in the smoke over the campsite, darkly silhouetted against the limb of the Milky Way. It does something that I always appreciate in stories: it sandwiches the mundane between the fantastic, or vice versa. The narrator of this song has been shaken out of what we might call the consensus view of reality, he might be strange and hard to talk to about things other than his particular interest, he may never be a “normal” person, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a caring father or a – if not necessarily caring – conscientious partner, and doesn’t seem to allow his ego to get in the way of things.
What’s very interesting about this track musically is the fact that it begins with a musical bed that wouldn’t be out of place in something like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but then seems to pass back through the mists of time, arriving in a monophonic, almost sylvan space as the story begins, with a slow and steady percussive foundation.
Track 7, “Fulfillment Center”
The centerpiece of the album, an oddly arabesque piece about working in an Amazon “fulfillment center,” monitored and manipulated by a machine who serves as an intermediary for the management – who are described as people “from on high.” Getting more into the nuts and bolts (I’m not exactly a music theory guy) but it seems that he’s making heavy use of heterophony and polyphony here, creating a complicated and arresting musical textures. He’s documented as having an interest in Sufi Qawwali music and, while I’m not terribly well-versed in it, I believe that his engagement with Islamic music goes deeper than most laymen.
I believe, upon reflection, that this is all a reference to the “mechanical turk.” which is also the name of Amazon’s task-for-a-pittance service. The mechanical turk was supposedly a chess-playing automaton that was held up as a marvel of mechanical engineering for 84 years – it was unveiled in 1770, and was destroyed by a fire in 1854, at which point the creator’s son revealed that the device had worked through the simple expedient of having a guy inside.
Now, the fact that it required a very small chess master of unusually small stature probably provided work to a segment of the population that would not otherwise have had the opportunity to make use of those particular skills, but it serves as a useful metaphor: a lot of the time when something appears to happen automatically, or by magic, it’s useful to check and see if there’s a guy inside. More often than not, the answer is that, yes, there is indeed just a person slightly out of view who’s doing all of the complicated work and we’re acting like that’s not actually the case.
But this song seems to ask: this skilled chess player small enough to hide inside a racially insensitive caricature, who is he when he’s at home?
Not literally, admittedly: the song is about an older person working in an amazon fulfillment center, as the title suggests, but when the invisible labor – the people who have to pee in plastic bottles and perform 300 tasks an hour so we can get our shaving cream and jewelry and game consoles and toasters and whatnot – isn’t laboring invisibly, is it just like us?
The narrator of this song laments not being able to see their children over the holidays because of compulsory overtime, and dreams of opening a cafe somewhere some day, and remembers their departed coworkers – none of whom the narrator really knew:
A young lad trying to make some cash in the Christmas rush
Fell asleep on his feet and was asked not to return…
A lady in her mid to late fifties keeled over
And started convulsing and frothing at the mouth…
A gentleman who spoke little English
Started to scream at the top of his lungs
No one could understand what he was getting at
Everyone stared ahead and kept working until
Someone came from on high to escort him from the building.|
All of this is pressured onward at a frantic pace by the driving instrumentation, which only lets up in the brief moments where the narrator describes shuffling home to get a few hours of sleep. He ends with a plaintive restatement, in new words, of the thematic heart of the album:
There's more, there has to be
More to life than killing yourself to survive.
What I consider to be important here is the stumble in the first line of this couplet, changing from a statement of fact (“there’s more”) to a less certain but no less forceful moral judgment (“there has to be / More”), as if they aren’t certain that it is actually the case, but doubly certain that – for there to be such a thing as justice – it must be the case.
Track 10, “Dead Dog In the Alleyway”
Quarantined at the end of the album, an instrumental track called “No One” serving as a fire break, this five-and-a-half minute track is a melancholy and soulful portrait from the perspective of a homeless man, alienated from society, abandoned and victimized by passers by. The title of the song comes from the object of the narrator’s meditations: a, “Dead dog in an alleyway, dreaming of home,” lying on burst trash bags and abandoned.
The dead animal and the narrator are parallel to each other: both are undeniably still there, not erased but simply tossed aside.
Beyond drawing a portrait of the speaker, it also shows us the world from his view. It’s a strange picture, both sacred and revolting:
Over there in the labyrinth of neon:
You can hear the voices lift through the icy air,
Hooting and projectile vomiting
And the distant sound of sirens.
There’s something about the song that is classically carnivalesque, a profound reversal that gives it the charge that makes it all work and all hang together – before it was decided that the year would end in December and begin again in January, the start of the year was the start of Spring, and this was marked in many cultures by a festival where the world was turned upside down: the king would serve, parents would obey their children, and the most foolish would be treated as if they were the wisest.
There is an undercurrent in this song, where the speaker is made sacred. He is a homeless man beaten in an alleyway next to a dead dog: there is a version of the world where he is given love, care, and respect: but much as I feel Marshall McLuhan understated the weight of a medium’s content for rhetorical effect, I feel that Dawson is going as far into his reversal for rhetorical effect: this man is not just worthy of consideration as a free and equal member of society – he is, in fact, sainted. He is, in fact, elevated to the highest position that a mortal can occupy, and he uses that not for revenge but for benediction.
Ultimately, it’s a song about empathy and solidarity, about recognizing the fact that everyone you encounter is a being to whom the world is given: a center of awareness positioned to see and feel things with the same intensity and validity as any one of us. The fact that there are people out there who we turn out without a thought, that there are people to whom unprovoked violence just happens is insane. How can we see any amount of truth or beauty in such a world?
Conclusion
I’ve not covered the whole album – there’s a lot of great material here. The anonymous solidarity in the face of natural disaster found in “The Queen’s Head” (a folk song that speaks of “the guy from the vape shop”), the gruff gentleness of the father-son relationship depicted in “Two Halves,” the borderline neo-noir paranoia of “Heart Emoji,” all of them really hit.
What I think is best shown by Dawson’s music, though, is that continuity with traditions and folkways is not necessarily something that is incompatible with a leftist stance. What we have here isn’t “traditionalism,” because that’s not about the actual past, simply about a longing for an imagined past that never was. Dawson, on the other hand, puts his listeners in continuity with the past: we see our connection to prior historical eras and see their trace in our modern moment. It is, in a word, hauntological.
A big part of this is the fact that he’s obviously not obsessed with “purity” or “authenticity.” He draws inspiration not just from contemporary and traditional anglophone music, he references Sufi Qawwali music and Kenyan folk guitarist Henry Makobi. While he’s primarily interested in the past of not just England but that part of England he’s from, he wants to share that culture and history with people, not put it up on a pedestal and call it “natural” or claim that it’s what everything else is aiming for and simply missing the mark.
This enthusiasm and empathy that allows him to make this music work: to allow the past to erupt into the present and for us to see ourselves reflected in it, even if we were never there to begin with.
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