TUBSTACK 5: IMMEDIACY

protest music, abstract music, being clever, being dumb

mike kelley as ‘the banana man’

I thought it’d be interesting to apply some contemporary theory to music because, let’s face it, musicians aren’t reading that shit. I don’t blame them: most academics still write in very unmusical prose. The book I’m about to talk about suffers from the same problem- she uses the term ‘connective collectivizers’ in the acknowledgments- but it contains some useful ideas.

“Immediacy or The Style of Too-Late Capitalism” by the Marxist academic Anna Kornbluh came out on Verso last year. The basic argument is : contemporary culture is characterised by a lack of mediation. Amazon and Uber Eats deliver everything to our homes. The internet grants us instant access to porn and the history of recorded music. Everything is obscenely convenient and we’ve been conditioned to receive it immediately.

This can be applied in all sorts of ways but Kornbluh talks a lot about art. She believes immediacy culture has made art less abstract. There is no longer a ‘grey area of complexity’. We want to be transmitted the core meaning, the point of an artwork immediately because we can’t deal with the impatience of figuring it out via meditation. I work at an institutional gallery and I see this often: every exhibition is laden with straightforward political readings of the work. At the Tate’s Mike Kelley exhibition, the wall-text describes a video in which Kelley dresses up as ‘The Banana Man’ and chases a sexy lady suspended from a pole attached to his crotch as “revealing a critical attitude towards US political history and a persistent deflation of symbols of power.” Kornbluh ties this to a broader political instinct in which emotional reaction or instant online conflict is preferenced over the mediation tasks of organising, strategising and convincing.

I think she’s right that if you’re wanting to make political art right now, being abstract is your best bet. Try and trick people into empathising with your point of view. Tribalism and the politicisation of everything means that most people will switch off the moment they sense you’re trying to convince them to take a particular well-known stance. Whoever you’re addressing likely already agrees with you (and is secretly bored) or has come to their own conclusions. Another piece of political art isn’t going to convince them. It’s classic Trojan Horse stuff: let the meaning sink in when it’s too late.

The new right have discovered this tactic. Look at the aesthetics of say, Passage Publishing, the ‘neoreactionary’ press who publish people like Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin. Their covers would look right at home in some po-faced Berlin art bookshop. These people are trying to stage an aesthetic coup. Though it's a tall order to assume the new right will sever the presumptive leftism of artist types- to cross the aisle you have to be overly into politics in the first place. But, to the extent that art can change anyone’s mind, the right have more ground to gain than the left.

All of that said, I still tend to be drawn to the immediate. Like Sontag, I’m not particularly into metaphorical prose and tend to feel that places like academia encourage interpretation and mediation over style and sensuality. Maybe that’s down to being a musician. We don’t tend to be very smart. Writing these essays, and reading the academic work it leads me to, makes me feel like a genuine moron sometimes. I recently took an IQ test and it turns out I have the same score people keep attributing to Elon Musk as a way of roasting him. I just asked Chatgpt to give me some examples of high achieving historical figures with the same score. It replied that most famous people “don’t divulge their IQs if average”.

And even in these essays, I’m still part of the problem: Kornbluh writes about the rise in the autobiographical essay in which personal experience and self-abjection, which doesn’t require much research or intellectual rigour, takes precedence. She has my number. And of course it doesn’t get much more immediate than being a musician who writes pop tunes. Pop music has always been immediate by design, particularly suited to brain rot capitalist culture. Kornbluh rightly points out that streaming culture, the preference for singles, sped up versions and TikTok ‘sound’ snippets is another sign of an immediacy culture. But I do also feel that part of the pleasure of pop music is in its impatience, convenience, instant gratification. It’s one of the few true artistic levellers, in that it can be enjoyed by both a child and an academic. So it’s good to balance Kornbluh’s worries about a lack of mediation, about dumb sensory immersion, with Sontag’s worries about the opposite:

“The effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art…To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings.'“

Though Sontag did admit that she was talking about her particular era- an era in which main stream culture was objectively a lot less dumb and infantalised.

a curtis yarvin passage publishing title

The confusing thing about music is that, unlike storytelling forms, there’s a kind of abstraction baked in. It’s both. Lyrics, especially in pop, tend to be immediate. But a listener can still value a song for its abstract qualities: the chord changes, the tone of the voice, the atmospheric elements. A listener might value a song despite the lyrics being too immediate. Or they might like it despite the lyrics being entirely abstract. Oasis is an example of the latter- the abstract lyrics, which Noel admits make no sense, don’t affect people’s willingness to belt them. The songs work lyrically because they’re abstract but not clever. Very much a ‘first rhyme, best rhyme’ approach which does produce howlers occasionally but also spares the listener of signposted meaning.

It’s a hard balance to strike for the songwriter. Immediate lyrics can ruin the abstraction inherent in a melody. But cryptic, poetic lyrics can be quite nerdy and irritating, and they never scan well if you’re trying to use them in a hook. They also seem to accompany that jazz-prog-virtuoso indie stuff which I think is a result of too many middle class parents sending their kids to orchestra club and BRIT school.

It’s trickier still if you want to write political music. Unlike immediate lyrics about love- which we understand as cliche but enjoy as genre homage- immediate political lyrics tend to feel incongruous. (Unless there’s an element of camp militarism.) It’s always hard to get right. If the song itself is good, people might just ignore the lyrics. But if the stars align, it can be thrilling. Think Nina Simone. But in those cases, lyrical immediacy has to capture the energy of a political movement at a particular point in time. Nina Simone was using her talent to express the vitality of the civil rights movement, and so her political immediacy was earned. Something on a smaller scale, say riot grrrl or queercore, also relied on a sort of friction- the unexamined hetero-male centricity of punk- to justify immediacy. When you remove that friction and you’re in 2025 where immediacy is everywhere, everything is politicised, the right is weaponizing abstraction and everyone’s very familiar with your point of view, you’re left with a husk. It ends up coming across as what Nuar Alsadir, in her book Animal Joy, terms ‘ego material’. Using Winnicott's idea of the False Self- the version of ourselves we want to present to the world- Alsadir argues that this art fails to move us because it's a sort of false immediacy- a shortcut to how the artist thinks they ought to feel.

The essential distinction for me is between literalism and immediacy. Obviously they often come hand in hand. But literalism is only passable in some ‘low forms’ like pop music and melodrama, where something pleasurable and abstract is operating in tandem. Literalist political work is, as I say, less able than ever to move us. If anything, it’ll probably harm the cause. It’s irritating, then, to see a certain type of ‘political’ band from the last decade still doing the rounds. How could that guy from IDLES singing ‘my blood brother is an immigrant’ possibly change anyone’s mind? Why are The Lambrini Girls from Brighton writing songs about police brutality ? What was their worst experience with the police? Getting told to stop playing fire poi on The Level? Even if something bad or relevant did happen to them, writing songs like that just adds to a kind of immediacy malaise in which everything is ‘urgent’ and ‘political’ and therefore nothing is. Which isn’t to say bands shouldn’t be political - they should just lead by their actions. Allow your listeners to simply associate you with a cause rather than letting it taint your music. Let them do a bit of mediation, otherwise they’ll just end up exhausted and maybe more attracted to the Abstract Right. Practice immediacy without literalism. And if you’re going to allow politics into the content, realise the war is being fought in the shadows.