Simon Reynolds on the ‘very human’ future of dance music

There’s been a lot of talk in recent months about the death of music journalism – from mass redundancies at Pitchfork to FACT Magazine announcing the end of its iconic mix series. There are stories about streaming services and social media taking over the listening habits of a younger generation, and fear-baiting headlines about AI and the future of music creation. Cutting through the noise, however, is a new book by OG music critic Simon Reynolds, best known for his era-defining books on dance music such as Energy Flash and Rip It Up And Start Again, as well as being a close confidant of the late theorist Mark Fisher. His first book in eight years, Futuromania attempts to outline pop music’s future by looking at the artists behind some of its biggest innovations – from the invention of dance music with Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer, to illuminating profiles of Ryuichi Sakamoto, Boards of Canada, Burial, and Daft Punk.

Describing Futuromania as the “inverted mirror image” to his 2010 book Retromania, which put a focus on pop music’s obsession with its own past, Reynolds adopts the role of a born-again humanist, exploring the “flesh and blood” human creativity that underpins the electronic songs that we love, despite them often being associated with the impersonal and non-human. “The music (or for that matter the machines on which the music was made) would never have existed without human ingenuity and human imagination – including all those theories and fantasies about becoming-machine, cold dark futures, the posthuman,” he writes. “This is a kind of game we are playing with ourselves, a trick of imaginative projection.”

Given all the changes shaking up the music landscape at present, we take this opportunity to speak with Reynolds about electronic music’s future, what he thinks about AI and streaming services, and if it’s ever possible to escape the nostalgic feedback loop dominating culture.

You described your new book, Futuromania, as the ‘inverted twin’ to 2010’s Retromania. What did you mean by that?

Simon Reynolds: Twisted sisters is another way I would say the same thing. It’s not really a sequel, or even an answer to the previous book, but it has a relationship with it. The first one was pretty gloomy, because it was inspired by what was going on in the 2000s. It came out in 2011, but it was inspired by the state of music and culture – which was pretty overrun by retro [at the time] – and the effects of things like file sharing, YouTube and the internet. I felt like music culture was drowning in Retromania. Futuromania, then, is really about the case for optimism – I’m very excited by all this Auto Tune-based music and conceptual electronic music trying to do new things, like footwork and [musicians like] Jlin. There has actually been more futuristic music that was released after Retromania came out, which has raised my spirits a bit.

I feel like a topic that dominates art-music-cultural circles is that because of the algorithm, AI and streaming, we’re all slowly becoming ‘the machine’. What led you to the other side of the discussion?

Simon Reynolds: Yeah, it’s an evolution I’ve gone through. When I was a young man I read a lot of French theories about ‘the death of the author’. I actually read an essay about it recently called ‘The Anti-Humanist Tone’, which is about a critical thinking tone that consistently emphasises machinic processes in personality. It was really big in the 90s, when the internet was taking off – people like Mark Fisher really went for this tone. It crosses different fields, but it emphasises the impersonal system and the machinic structures. It was a way of thinking of culture that was quite intoxicating and for a long while I would call myself an anti-humanist. But now, I kind of think of that as fashionable bollocks, it’s not actually how I see life.

As I got older, I came to appreciate the uniqueness of each individual, and I also had this intellectual engagement with Mark Fisher. In one of his blogs, he talked about going to the countryside and how amazing it was. He said, ‘It really opened my eyes. I now see birds as marvellous little machines’. And I thought, why not see machines as botched little animals? He felt all those poetic things that you feel in the country, but felt he had to explain it through this 90s anti-humanist language. 

We build all these systems and we complain about them as if they’re out of control, as if they’re controlling us, but we build them. You look at the internet, it’s all boiling with human emotions – mostly, unfortunately, the ugliest kind. All these machineries and technologies and mediation systems are all fueled by humanity, they didn’t just spring out of nowhere.

There‘s definitely been a resurgence in that thinking in recent years. I think it’s become trendier as technology continues to accelerate at a rate that would have once been considered sci-fi. At the same time, culture feels like it hasn’t really progressed. When I look at music scenes – I’m based in London — a lot of young music seems to be stuck in the past.

Simon Reynolds: I think at the moment, you could look at the landscape of culture and see a lot of stuff that would renew that sort of argument I had in Retromania, where there’s so much ‘stuck’ music. It’s still post-punk bands who get good reviews – post-punk has gone from a historical phase, to being a settled style that you can just inhabit, like the blues. I think AI is interesting, or at least the uses that apply to music, because on the one hand, it’s incredibly science fictional, but it’s also regurgitative, it depends on the existing body of human creation to reprocess. I’ve only experimented with it in terms of writing, just seeing if it could imitate me or other writers that I knew, people with a distinctive style. It can’t do it. It’s just aesthetic.

“As a born-again humanist, what you respond to with music is the desires within it, or behind it. I don’t know if AI can be said to have desires” – Simon Reynolds

I was at the Oneohtrix Point Never show a few weeks back in London and they had all these digital puppets. Seeing them singing the AI music felt like you weren’t just seeing a tool, but a non-human intelligent life form.

Simon Reynolds: Yeah, I don’t understand why it’s a gain, really. What are we getting from communing with something that isn’t human? I probably would’ve been more excited by these developments a long time ago. As a born-again humanist, what you respond to with music is the desires within it, or behind it. I don’t know if AI can be said to have desires. Maybe the things that come out of these non-human judges will be so startling and weird that that will be interesting in itself. I suppose it’s a question of what you are relating to, and how you relate to it.

How do you think the algorithm and the increased mechanisation of music consumption is affecting our listening habits and music production? A report came out the other day that analysed the lyrics of songs for the last 40 years and it was saying music’s becoming –

Simon: Negative and angrier.

And self-obsessed, repetitive and shorter.

Simon Reynolds: I think it still relates to what I‘m saying a larger sense, that the whole thing runs on human emotions and these things are appealing to the worst in us, but they‘re doing that because someone sees an advantage in it. You talked about music choice being driven by the algorithm but it’s not because the algorithm has any any desires of its own, or an agenda of its own. It’s that an agenda has been implanted in it, which is to get people to keep using their device and stay within it. So they offer them easy, musical satisfactions that are adjacent to what they already like, and train them to listen in an unadventurous and passive way. Is that the sort of thinking?  

I think I’m more interested in the effects that that has on the way that people are consuming music. Nowadays, the cultural gatekeepers have shifted from people like writers or magazine editors or production houses to algorithms. There’s obviously still people who actively look for music. The digging culture is still there, but it’s been squashed by the flattening force of the algorithm, which encourages this passive, ‘I’m just going to sit here and aggregate data’ thing.

Simon Reynolds: Yeah, people are tired, they don’t want to exercise choice in some ways. There are always people using music like that, as background, as a kind of elective music, ‘muzak’ in a way. You’re using music to optimise one’s other activities, whether it’s exercise, or housework, or driving, or sitting around reading the newspaper or something. I don’t know if that’s a completely new thing. 

I think radio was better insofar as you would be occasionally ambushed by something outside your taste and you probably sit through it. Because you didn‘t have so many options to jump somewhere else, you‘d probably sit through and then maybe, after a bit, you’d like it. Even up to quite recently, I’d listen to hip hop radio in the car in LA and I would hear things that I hadn‘t been expecting to hear and be really startled by them – like Billie Eilish on the pop station. 

“People are tired, they don’t want to exercise choice in some ways” – Simon Reynolds

I’ve been thinking about the role of the artist as a content creator. To be an artist now, if you want to survive, you have to either have a million side hustles or market yourself relentlessly. The same thing can be said about all kinds of cultural production, like writing. But I feel that in the 90s you could be the most esoteric, private person and that would be fine, it would become part of your image. From my experience, at least, that doesn’t seem to exist anymore. What do you think?

Simon Reynolds: Hm, yeah. I mean certainly with electronic music and dance music in the 90s, you had no idea what an awful lot of the people making it looked like. You didn’t really know whether it was one person or several people, you could be hazy on what gender or race they were, or even where they were from. But because it went through record sales, and solid objects were sold, the artists could actually make a living from that. A lot of them would also be DJs and make money that way. But now I can’t really think of any doing that. For the most part, people are out there in front of their music a lot more. I can’t think of many where anonymity is still a sort of inverted sales strategy. Like Underground Resistance, where the whole thing was that we don’t know much about them, they’re shadowy figures.

I’ve got these students that I teach at CalArts and some of them are into their little rap collectives, like quite obscure ones, but it seems like they are almost as much about the merch as they are about the music. They probably make more money off these t-shirts than they make off other things. That seems to be a small-scale version of the larger scale [model used by] the Taylor Swifts or whoever, where music is one component of a whole array of stuff you’re getting revenue from.

It’s an aesthetic package. I feel like Drain Gang is a really good example of that. 

Simon Reynolds:My son’s really into Drain Gang. I think that's probably another place I came across this idea. So, they just have tonnes of merch, right? It’s a vibe or identity that’s suffused through all the things you put out. Diversification has been going on for a while – like rappers with clothing lines or pop stars with perfumes. When this student was talking about this rap collective, the music was barely mentioned – it was much more about an amorphous coolness, or vibe, which emanated from them as a collective. 

Futuromania is out now via White Rabbit