Hauntology Then
Outlining my origin story as a music journalist to explain what Hauntology Now! is all about.
Hauntology Now! is the Substack of interdisciplinary artist, designer, musician, academic writer, and cultural critic J. Simpson, where he writes about all things hauntological, atemporal, philosophical, as well as sharing thoughts, reflections, and musings on music, movies, books, and life.
To understand why this newsletter is called Hauntology Now!, it's helpful to understand both the concept of hauntology and my relation to it. Returning to a cheap, painfully slow coffee shop on Folsom Street in Boulder, Colorado will help make the connections between philosophical enquiry, armchair sociology, and memoir more obvious.
In July 2007, i got sober for the fourth and final time. I'd recently found myself back in Indiana after having been out for almost a year, first living in New Orleans and then Forest Grove, Oregon, a rural suburb about half-an-hour outside of Portland. While living in Forest Grove, i went on my final bender while seeing the Yellow Swans and Old Time Relijun at Holocene, resulting in my losing my job and being sent back to Indiana, a place that I despised.
I was only in Indiana for around a week, sleeping on a bare mattress beneath a bare 60 W light bulb in a room without walls, when i resolved to quit drinking for real and for good. The revelation was largely quiet and undramatic compared to some of my previous dryouts. I just had the quiet notion "if i don't quit drinking, i'm going to die." The idea of dying before i'd really made anything was more than i could bear. I'd often thought of myself as a tragic genius, at that time. Simply being tragic seemed like such a waste. I chose to live.
I had a friend who was living in Boulder, Colorado while attending Naropa University who said i could live in the back of her van while i was getting my shit together. I took a Greyhound to Colorado, moved into a van at the top of a steep-ass hill, got a bike and a job at Safeway and proceeded to piece my life back together.
After a few months of working and saving, I was able to get my own apartment on Folsom Street in Boulder - the only time in my life i've had my own place. It was right next door to my favorite coffee shop, Folsom Street Coffee Company, and a laundromat. I didn't have internet at home, so much of my free time was spent on my slow-ass laptop drinking very strong coffee while waiting for hours for Can bootlegs to download.
During the 9 months i'd been away from the Midwest, i discovered what would later come to be known as "the blogosphere" - unofficial file-sharing music blogs usually hosted on blogspot. I'd discovered the space while living in New Orleans, when i had first become fanatically obsessed with old blues, folk, and country music. While looking up info on some obscure blues musician or 'nother, i discovered a teeming ecosystem of music fanatics who seemed to be racing to upload, share, and comment on every piece of media ever recorded. It was a heady time, if tumultuous time. The rise of hipsterdom, expanded awareness of music history, and the first wave of millennials coming of age were genuinely thrilling, even while the future of music, as a whole, was uncertain, with the bottom falling out of album sales, mega-corporate mergers further homogenizing music.
With nothing better to do and my sanity fairly in shambles, i took the opportunity of living in Boulder, getting sober, and the general hunger and enthusiasm for blogging to launch my first music blog, J's Heaven, and to finally begin my music journalism/criticism career in earnest. I'm almost embarrassed to admit it, but i'd first started trying to write about music in the early 2000s, in my early 20s, as a way to get free records. This was before you could hear any and everything with one click. By the time 2007 rolled around, i could get my hands on very nearly anything. Instead of a bid for free records, my blogging became my way to give back to the scenes and cultures that have literally saved my life many times over.
It was around this time that i was first introduced to the term Critical Theory. It's also where i first started spending any sort of significant time with millennials, as the oldest cohort was entering college age. This would be my first interaction with people who'd had access to virtually all music since early adolescence, if not earlier. These facts, taken together, created the foundation that would become Hauntology Now! as well as the work that would define the next two decades of my life.
As a child of the 90s, i grew up talking about, discussing, and even arguing about music, movies, and books. We all had (and have) pretty definitive ideas of what we liked and what we didn't. Following that were the very snobby early 2000s, where people definitely had ideas of what was good and could be fairly vicious about it. This was the beginning of the Peak Hipster era, where Pitchfork reigned supreme, who would savage records they didn't think were good enough (like the infamous monkey peeing in its own mouth review of Jet's Shine On . This would be taste-setting and king-making would set the stage for coming conversations about rockism vs. poptimism, which cuts very close to one the core principals of *Hauntology Now!* as well as its sister publication, Postpostmodernism.
Up through the mid-2000s or so, there seemed to be at least a lingering sense of monoculture. Among people i knew, at least, many of us were watching a lot of the same tv, movies and hearing lots of the same music. This lent itself to a feeling that some things were "in" and others were "out," and lord help you if you got it wrong. If you made the mistake of championing a downtempo record when electronic music was having a house moment, God help you. This is one of the fundamental shifts that has occurred as a result of digital evolution. It's had a profound effect on how we make, think, talk about, and consume art. It's even had profound implications on how we think, talk to one another, and socialize. In this new state, there is no monoculture. There is no stable state to invoke or reference. Every single thing is colored by your own tastes and experiences, which is one of the core principals of postmodernism (and thus postpostmodernism.)
All of which speaks to what this is project is and is aiming for, which i will elaborate upon in further volumes. It's one part exploration of the concept of hauntology, as put forth by Jacques Derrida in his influential Spectres of Marx. It's one part archive, beginning as an exploration of the hauntology canon as laid out in 2007 by authors like Simon Reynolds and K-Punk and then later fleshed out in fabulous blogs like the incredible A Year In The Country. It's also an exploration of forgotten art and social movements, in an attempt to reclaim some of the wild, utopian passion and innocence of the blogosphere. Then, last but not least, *Hauntology Now!* will explore stuff that i'm thinking about and digging, with all of its implicit biases.
In future volumes, i'll dig more into critical theory and the way it shapes music and arts journalism, criticism, and academic writing. In the meanwhile, does anyone have any experiences in the transition from alternative to indie culture in the 2000s? On the blogosphere? On hanging out with millennials? Have any albums, movies, or books you discovered from that era? Let me know in the comments!
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