Three observations:
1. house beats
There is a lethargy in the present. “From time to time I watch myself cook,” sing the Düsseldorf Düsterboys in “Ab und zu”. It’s a blues that falls like faint light on a puddle. Reflecting on your own tough everyday life. Which in a playlist almost seamlessly merges into the muted steel drum of Drake’s “Down Hill”. “I can’t remember when last did we feel familiar,” Drake sings in it. yes he sings HONESTLY, NEVERMIND is gently melancholic House. The dance floor seems far away. A memory. “We spent last summer so differently,” sings Drake, and he’s right. last summer That was in 2019.
This summer many are sick, in the heat, alone at home, ordering on the Internet while outside you can watch the shops die. It has long been a showroom, the shop. A place where you can pick up goods that you can only order online anyway. On YouTube, “The Proper People” walks through abandoned malls that are still neon-lit just before they are demolished. Is something beeping? Is that an alarm system protecting what’s long gone, or the synth from Drake’s “Massive”? Maybe also a machine in an intensive care unit, on a white corridor, which all the nurses, appalled by the circumstances of their profession – too few staff, too little money – have quit.
2. and empty offices
“You low earner!” is the insult of the hour among young people, students who probably don’t have a job yet. “And I just quit my job,” Beyoncé sings over the Korg M1 preset beat made famous by 1993’s Robin S and “Show Me Love” on “Break My Soul.” Beyoncé sings that she’s worked, no, “was worked” so hard, that she can’t sleep at night. Something she said more often in interviews. Even wrote in a 2011 essay about how she then took a year off.
Her line “And I just quit my job” stirs up spirits. Forbes magazine quotes the CEO of a search engine as saying that Beyoncé is very insensitive and doesn’t think about the current social context. A millionaire who is now motivating people to quit their jobs, just before the recession that is so certain. Angry videos followed on TikTok, with Beyoncé claiming to pretend she understands the working class. Art is taken very literally these days.
@peoplesoracle Beyoncé is not your friend! #breakmysoul #beyonce #celebrityculture #classsolidarity ♬ original sound – The People’s Oracle
Dall-E – a portmanteau of Dalí and Wall E – is the name of an artificial intelligence that you can feed online with a sentence or just a few words, and it will generate images for it. “Self-empowered woman has resigned and is riding a glass horse” can be imagined by the AI just as vaguely as our brains. If you give Dall-E the word “doctor”, she will show you pictures of alone white men in white coats. Dall-Es images are often unsettling. The faces distorted. The eyes empty.
3. something is off
The concept of liminality was coined by the Scottish ethnologist Victor Turner. It describes a threshold state in which individuals find themselves after they have broken away from the prevailing social order. Today, however, not only states but also places are described as liminality. Long empty corridors, underpasses. Computer games have long played with transitional spaces like endless offices. With no furniture and no people, these spaces lose their purpose. You become spooky.
? Buy “Automaton” by Berit Glanz at Amazon.de
Images of liminal spaces have been widely shared since 2020. Because the pandemic state feels like a threshold state. We’re disrupted in our 9-to-5 game. For “Break My Soul,” Beyoncé didn’t record a new video, but had dance scenes from her old videos edited together. “And I just quit my job,” she doesn’t lip-sync. Something is off. We’re reading Berit Glanz’s Automaton, a novel about a click worker who places time stamps on videos for a modest wage. “We spent last summer so differently,” sings Drake. “From time to time I watch myself cook,” sing the Düsseldorf Düsterboys.
This column first appeared in the Musikexpress issue 09/2022.