In episode 28 of her column, Julia Friese explains the term flop era.
Three observations:
1. shape shifting
It still exists, the rigid notion that at some point you will have arrived. Self-optimized on target. Fed up. Then finally you are who you “always” should have been and from now on you have the task of maintaining this being. Shapeshifting is basically only allowed for adolescents, as well as in games: role-playing games, computer games and acting. You should live out your desire to be someone else in the dark of night or once a year behind a mask at carnival. Having a fluid identity is considered queer. So as anti-mainstream, different, disrupting the status quo.
Only artists are excluded from this. They serve us as vessels for our fantasies, so they have to constantly change their shape. Each album should be readable as a new era. At best, the music style and visuals should be as different as possible from the previous version, but without denying them. Iconically successful examples would be: The-Tin-White-Duke-Bowie (STATION TO STATION, 1976) Eso Madonna (RAY OF LIGHT, 1998), Dirrty-X-Tina (STRIPPED, 2002) or also the angry, political, artistic Beyoncé (LEMONADE, 2016).
An unpopular persona change is called a flop era: an album and its aesthetic world lag behind the success of its predecessors. Think, for example, of the no-longer-pin-up Katy Perry (WITNESS, 2017) and the instead-Madonna-I-would-rather-be-Björk-Gaga (ART POP, 2013). Based on this, pop consumers say: “I’m in my flop era right now” when they don’t seem to be succeeding. They perceive their life as a succession of omens. As if there was a marketing plan in the background.
2. … and as always, only the wording was present
Taylor Swift is calling her 2023 stadium tour “Te Eras” tour to perform 44 songs from ten albums. On Instagram she wrote that she was in her “era’s era” – that is, in her era. A circumstance due to the fact that she has released a lot of different things in recent years: Pandemic folk records (FOLKLORE & EVERMORE, 2020), regular glitzy pop records (LOVER, 2019 & MIDNIGHTS, 2022) and, for the purpose of collecting rights, new recorded-old-records (FEARLESS & RED, 2021).
An offer that is too diverse in marketing terms, which the storyteller is now presenting as a retrospective without using exactly this old term, or even the even more apocalyptic “Greatest Hits”. She frames herself as an Oscar-worthy every-taylor-all-at-once. As an artist in the making who can suspend a coherent present to be the sum-of-all-yesterday.
3. connected to everything in the here and now
The scholar and author Juliette Singh, in her essay No Archive Will Restore You (2023, Merve Verlag), describes the belief that man is a discrete, material being, an idea as modern as it is Western, white, Eurocentric. All our affective states – like our thoughts – are never originally our own and our present state is always an archive of all previous states.
An insight that always seems new to you swimming in western waters. Perhaps the “Era’s Era” is the most sincere, yes, the most natural of all: Your own filling level is subject to fluctuations. You are not always the same. But always in the making. Is always the sum of its surroundings, always success and flop in one, always in the now, and always somehow nostalgic. Madonna goes on tour again in the summer. With a retrospective. However, the “eras” are called “decades” by her – their presence is thus finally archived.
This column first appeared in the Musikexpress issue 06/2023.