Mark Fisher was one of the only music journalists who wrote as if our lives depended on it. In fact, he wasn’t even really a music journalist, at least not in the traditional sense of a news and reviews hack. He started his now infamous blog, K-Punk,‘because it seemed like a space – the only space – in which to maintain a kind of discourse that had started in the music press and the art schools, but which had all but died out’. The music journalism he was lamenting was of a kind where ‘fine art, European cinema, avant-garde literature’ were being discussed in the pages of NME and so on in the UK, alongside features on popular music: ‘no sob stories’, Fisher said, ‘but for someone of my background, it’s difficult to see where else that interest would have come from.’ His project was to explore the ‘popular modernism’ that this kind of writing about music, and music itself, represented: a consciousness raising experience that could spring from music and journalism which smuggled conceptual thinking into the mainstream and directly into people’s ears and homes.
Joy Division, The Fall and The Temptations were all key touchstones which this post doesn’t have the scope to go into fully, but are all available to read in the posthumous tome K-Punk from 2018. On music — which was just one of the cultural products he wrote about extensively alongside film, literature, philosophy and politics — he’s at his best when at his most diagnostic. Highlights include the great sadness at the heart of Drake’s Nothing Was the Same in which Fisher asks perhaps the question of late capitalism: “if you have everything, why are you so sad?”.
He’s at his worst though during the frequently despondent and bitter moments in K-punk: one of his main overarching takes is that culture had stopped producing new material, that today any semblance of musical innovation had gone; we’re doomed to repeat ourselves endlessly. Franz Ferdinand, whose mainstream ascendency feels like a distant and surprising memory, were a frequent target for his rants — a revival of a dead sound, a deliberate attempt at popular-retro-ism as opposed to Modern music (Arctic Monkeys were also in this bracket), which gives a sense of the time of his output. One obvious response to these claims is who cares? You think indie-pop is shit, so? But Fisher felt that popular modernism was important, not to say crucial, and that its death represented something horrifying about the 21st century: that late capitalism had so assimilated and ultimately crushed cultural innovation from all but an elite few, that all that was left — especially for working and lower middle-class people and even more especially for the UK’s youth (he worked for some time as a Further Education teacher) — was a social, psychological, not to say spiritual malaise. That the consciousness raising writing and music that he had encountered as a teenager and had so informed his own adult life would not have a chance to touch today’s young people was one of his primary concerns.
One of the other cultural products that Fisher hated was Glastonbury, which is, of course, on right now. His rant in K-punk, while caustically funny, is also the bitter apotheosis of the book.
“What’s positively sinister about Glastonbury now is that it’s not just accidentally crap, it’s systematically crap — the hidden message screams out: it’s all finished, roll up, roll up, for the necrophiliac spectacle, it’s all over.”
What’s “finished” for Fisher is the cultural vitality of the 20th century and its sense of pushing forward into the future. Look at this year’s Glasto line-up — Elton John, Guns’n’Roses, Arctic Monkeys — and he seems to have a point (though can you even really headline Glastonbury without some kind of retro appeal? Stormzy stands out in recent years as an exception). Last year though? Are Kendrick Lamar & Billie Eilish, dead retro-artists with nothing to say? I’m not so sure... (One thing that Fisher points out in his rant is the lack of representation for black musicians and musicians from diverse backgrounds in general, which Glastonbury and other festivals have been doing more in recent years to address.)
That Paul McCartney headlined the festival in 2022 represents the UK’s zombified culture would have been a classic Fisher take. But in the introduction to the unfinished Acid Communism Fisher referenced The Beatles as an example of Popular Modernism, smuggling a countercultural anti-work / anti-drudgery narrative into their music, the subtitle was “No More Miserable Monday Mornings”:
“I’m Only Sleeping” (“stay in bed, float upstream”) was the twin of Revolver ’s most self-consciously psychedelic track, “Tomorrow Never Knows” (“switch off your mind, relax and float downstream”). If the lyrics to “Tomorrow Never Knows”, minimally adapted from The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead , seem somewhat pat, the music, the sound design, retain the power to transport. “It wasn’t like anything else we’d ever heard”, John Foxx recalls of “Tomorrow Never Knows”,
but somehow seemed instantly recognisable. Sure, the words were a bit suspect, but the music , the sound — organic electricity, disintegrated transmissions, lost radio stations, Catholic/Buddhist mass from a parallel universe, what being stoned ought to be like — weightless, timeless, revelation, moving over luminous new landscapes in serene velocity. It communicated, innovated, infiltrated, fascinated, elevated — it was a road map for the future.
These “luminous new landscapes” were worlds beyond work, where drudgery’s dreary repetitiveness gave way to drifting explorations of strange terrains. Listened to now, these tracks describe the very conditions necessary for their own production, which is to say, access to a certain mode of time, time which allows a deep absorption. The refusal of work was also a refusal to internalise the systems of valuation which claimed that one’s existence is validated by paid employment.”
In the simplest terms, the introduction to Acid Communism pinpoints 60s countercultural ideas an alternative. For Fisher, we live in “The Spectre of a world which could be free” but are tied to the drudgery necessary for existence under capitalism; these lyrics of an altered state of consciousness, of indolence and joy, suggest, he claims, an genuinely alternative way of thinking and, perhaps, of living. These thoughts remind me of the David Graeber quote, that “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently”. How specifically we make it differently isn’t as important to Fisher as merely suggesting and reiterating that it could be different, which some may view as a big critical shortcoming and others an exciting charge of potential.
That Fisher chooses to reference The Beatles in his introduction is ironically revealing, however, as I’m sure he was aware. Paul McCartney famously remarked:
“someone said to me, “But the Beatles were anti-materialistic.” That’s a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say “Now, let’s write a swimming pool”.
This melding of the psychedelic-peace-and-love-ism of a figure like John Lennon, with a blatantly commercial ambition, is the same clash that, it seems, Fisher loathed about Glastonbury. The festival’s origins: £1 entry meant no financial barriers, its vaguely pagan solstice timing and ritual significance and the presence of the new age traveller community all pointed towards a cultural product that was inclusive and could be socially transformative. Many peoples, coming together. Its contemporary iteration is quite different, containing only a shred of the new-agism and vaguely psychedelic experience (see the fake stone circle) that the original festival represented, which is frequently overshadowed by its global superstar appeal and celebrity private glamping with frequent helicopter arrivals direct from the white mansions of West London. It’s very expensive.
That said, to dismiss it out of hand misses precisely why The Hatred of Glastonbury is so interesting: not because the festival was and is just outright shit — there’s little point in writing about that — but because it contains a kernel of something dear to Fisher’s heart that is or was there but has become somehow last or buried in a sea of commercial ambition. Fisher didn’t live to see Jeremy Corbyn’s speech at the festival in 2017 (the height of his popularity), but his choice of words, a quote from Percy Bysshe Shelley — “Let us be together and recognise another world is possible if we come together” — seem uncannily in acknowledgement of Fisher and Graeber’s ideas, tapping into the kernel of transformative experience present at a festival like Glastonbury.
Where Fisher identified young people as disenfranchised in Capitalist Realism, Corbyn, in his speech, acknowledged the opposite in his wake:
“what was even more inspiring was the amount of young people who got involved for the very first time. Because they were fed up of being denigrated. Fed up with being told they don’t matter. Fed up with being told they don’t participate and utterly fed up with being told that their generation was going to pay more to get less in housing in pensions and everything else…”
It would be possible to dismiss Corbyn’s appearance on the pyramid stage as an example of something that Fisher also frequently commented on: the question “what if you held a protest and everyone came?” referring to media that has a political cause or critiques capitalism — see Live Aid, Wall-E (2008), Network (1976) — while existing wholeheartedly within the commercial culture industry. For Fisher, the protest for everyone is an ironic symptom of how thoroughly capitalism has become “the only game in town”, that, unlike other political systems in the world today, capitalism can accommodate its own critique and stay as strong as ever. That said, so called “Corbynism” did, for a time at least, appear to present a genuine alternative to contemporary politics in the UK, which is why the British establishment hated it so much. If Fisher was writing today he might refer to Corbynism as another “Spectre”, which was killed by controversy (that I’m not going to comment on here) before ever being able to truly come to fruition; a failed experiment in an alternative vision for the future of the UK.
Corbyn’s speech provides a glimpse into Glastonbury’s potential, that the festival experience contains a kernel of something, a countercultural feeling where abstract concepts of Peace, Love and “another world” being “possible” can take on, if just for a moment, a real and significant meaning for people. That the festival is, for many, prohibitively expensive is part of the sadness that surrounds it — is it just the rich who are allowed to feel this first hand? Corbyn seemed to resonate with this feeling — “another world is possible if we come together”.