Pop Music and Hip Ennui

In Pop Music and Hip Ennui: A Sonic Fiction of Capitalist Realism, Macon Holt provides the imaginative and analytical resources to think with contemporary pop music to investigate the ambivalences of contemporary culture and the potentials in it for change. Drawing on Kodwo Eshun's practice of Sonic Fiction and Mark Fisher's analytical framework of capitalist realism, Holt explores the multiplicities contained in contemporary pop from sensation to abstraction and from the personal to the political. Pop Music and Hip Ennui unravels the assumptions embedded in the cultural and critical analysis of popular music. In doing so, it provides new ways to understand the experience of listening to pop music and living in the sonic atmosphere it produces. This book neither excuses pop's oppressive tendencies nor dismisses the pleasures of its sensations.

Macon Holt completed his PhD at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, in 2017. He is a contributing editor at the music magazine Passive/Aggressive, and his writing has appeared in Atlas Magasin, Blacklisted Copenhagen, The Ark Review, and Full Stop. He has taught at Lund University, Sweden, The Royal Danish Academy of Art, Denmark, and the Leeds College of Music, UK.

Preface Acknowledgments Part 1 Pop Music and Hip Ennui 1. Kodwo Eshun: Sonic Fiction at Century's End 2. Mark Fisher: Capitalist Realism after the Crash 3. Sounds Like the Future Will Never Arrive Part 2 A Sonic Fiction of Capitalist Realism Vignette: Jessie J at the Closing Ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics 4. Attention Vignette: Busking on the London Underground 5. Complicity Vignette: On "Bored in the USA" on Letterman on YouTube (Now Removed) 6. Catharsis Vignette: The Stones 7. Home Vignette: One of Two: Carly Simon's New Boyfriend 8. Conjunction Vignette: Two of Two: On Xiu Xiu and Mixing Notes References Index