29 July 2009: "Indie Buzzbands 2 watch in 2k10: Hooting@TheBlowfish"

This post is about the uncanny. Unusually for Carles, he draws heavily upon a Biblical source for the substance of these humorous theses about a once popular band from the 1990s. He seems to have in mind chapter one of the Book of Ecclesiastes, particularly these verses:

9 The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
10 Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.
11 There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.

Of course, by speculating about a return to prominence for Hootie and the Blowfish, Carles is suggesting that whatever the next popular musical group with broad trans-subcultural appeal should be, it will be essentially no different from the bands that have achieved similar success in previous years. That is to say that no aesthetic progress is marked at the mass level. Instead, an entropy reigns at the level of popular culture; no new spiritual energy enters the closed circuit; there is only a repeat of the same forms and the same tired appeals. Hence Carles's incisive irony, along with a telling reference to our postmodern condition: "As you can see by their post-modern album cover, Cracked Rearview is surely going to change the way that music + album art are created for the rest of time." But his entire point is that nothing changes and nothing is new under the sun. Popular culture has traveled into a blind cul-de-sac, and the appropriative strategies of the postmodern only underscore the generalized poverty of inspiration.

Carles's repeated references to the music media indicates his general skepticism of their ability to breathe new life into exhausted tropes through the tactics of marketing. With cutting sarcasm, he notes, "I am excited about the Pitchfork magazine picking up on this band. I think that with the right amount of blog buzz, and coverage from magazines and Pitchforks, they will be around for a long time to come." In a sense, this is more true than true, as bands in this mold will always be with us, though their faces and names will be superficially altered. Hype, always histrionic about the possibility of the new, perpetually repeats itself, reduces to an undifferentiated "buzz," and effaces novelty itself. When Carles urges "Please friend this band on myspace, so that if they get big, we can say that we wrote about them first, and found out about them because of blogs" he shows how the so-called new mnedia forms have already been co-opted and been made to succor the status quo.

Confronted with such an artistic impasse, Carles suggests, culture collapses in on itself, and blandness (represented here by his selection of a quintessentially dull band) becomes the only means of expressing aesthetic energy. "A lot of people say that the music industry is ‘in the shitter’, but I honestly believe these next 10 years are going to be the ‘Golden Age’ of Pop + Indie music." He is perhaps hoping here that the event horizon of mediocrity will be shattered, that in the quiescence of boredom, in the very outhouse of recycled and regurgitated pop excrement, a new cultural form can emerge that finds dynamism in stasis, gold in dross, sublimity in the monolithic sameness. In the post-backlash cultural era, about which Carles barely dares to theorize and can only imply through various mechanisms of negative theologistics, an audience's aesthetic responsiveness will be perfected in its ability to ignore altogether the contradictions involved in the safe and familiar being represented as the new. Familiarity itself will become deeply unfamilar. An unheimlichkeit will leave its indelible mark on all experience.