By Dan Xiberras
Hauntology is a term originally coined by Jacques Derrida. It concerns the notion that the present is haunted by both the past and ‘lost futures’. This concept was developed by Mark Fisher in relation to art, who employed the idea to argue that culture in the 21st century is characterised by a sterile, recycled tonality on account of neoliberalism – ‘What it is to live in the 21st century is living 20th century culture on higher definition screens.’ This, he posits, has resulted in ‘the slow cancellation of the future’ and an endemic depression among young people. In this essay I intend to apply Fisher’s analysis of a modern hauntological culture to the lyrics of Isaac Wood, former frontman of the British band Black Country, New Road (BCNR). Wood’s bleak yet witty lyricism takes the shape of an abstracted, cryptic life writing. It is at once deeply personal, even confessional, and at the same time, entirely indecipherable – its imagery able to wholly absorb the projections of any listener / reader. Nonetheless, within Wood’s lyrics the centrality of Mark Fisher’s conception of hauntology (and its relation to their depressive tone / a national endemic depression) is evident.
Isaac Wood is a hauntological figure himself. Following the release of BCNR’s second, most critically acclaimed, album Ants From up There (AFUT), he took a permanent step back from the band stating, ‘Hello everyone, I have bad news which is that I have been feeling sad and afraid too…it is the kind of sad and afraid feeling that makes it hard to play guitar and sing at the same time.’ His departure would plague BCNR’s subsequent releases, with many fans mourning the band’s ‘lost future’ in Wood’s absence. AFUT is an album characterised by the notion of lost futures, its cover featuring an ‘airfix’ style Concorde sealed inside a plastic bag. The Concorde itself features as an extended metaphor in the album’s lyrical content, solely written by Wood. The aircraft, once considered the future of civil aviation and now defunct, acts as the centermost hauntological object in Wood’s writing here – itself pertaining metaphorically to a former relationship of Wood’s characterised by the idea of the ‘Concorde / sunk cost fallacy’. Fisher’s analysis of Burial’s album ‘Untrue’ can also be applied here – AFUT‘s lyrical content similarly ‘seems to have less to do with a near future than with the tantalising ache of a future just out of reach.’ This evident in the album’s eighth track ‘The Place Where He Inserted the Blade’:
So, clean your soup maker and breathe in
Your chicken, broccoli, and everything
The tug that’s between us
That long string
Concorde, Bound 2
And my evening
The good hunter’s guide to a bad night
Darling, I’ll spoil it myself
Thanks, you’re leaving
Well, I tried just to stroke your dreams better
But darling, I see that you’re not really sleeping
Here we see a slow disintegration of Wood’s fractured relationship induce a depression which is presented in an entirely hauntological light. The lyricist depicts, in Fisher’s words, not ‘apathy’ nor ‘cynicism’, but ‘reflexive impotence’:
‘They know things are bad, but more than that, they know they can’t do anything about it. But that ‘knowledge’, that reflexivity, is not a passive observation of an already existing state of affairs. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Reflexive impotence amounts to an unstated worldview amongst the British young, and it has its correlation in widespread pathologies.’
Wood’s deterministic spoiling of an evening which he introduces not as a shared moment but as his own, ‘my evening’, is an entirely reflexive action, and one which seems to be in response to a similarly disparate, distant and oppositional relationship – ‘The tug that’s between us / That long string’. The observation that his partner is ‘not really sleeping’, furthers this, and touches on the centrality of depression, the bed and libido in Wood’s lyrical life writing, wherein ‘reflexive impotence’ takes on a newfound sexual capacity. For instance, in the track ‘Athens, France’ Wood writes the lines, ‘She flies to Paris, France / I come down in her childhood bed / And write the words I’ll one day wish that I had never said’. We may observe here a similarly sexual ‘reflexive impotence’- it is with a climax in his partner’s ‘childhood bed’ where the seemingly inescapable ill-fated future relationship is conceived. The song ends ‘Won’t give up / Too soft to touch / And how hard could it really be?’, the humorous opposition of ‘too soft’ and ‘how hard’ implying a painful awareness of the ‘reflexive impotence’ at play. This awareness is foregrounded crudely in ‘Sunglasses’, where Wood’s partner is granted a voice rife with impatient distain ordering him to ‘Leave your Sertraline in the cabinet / And fuck me like you mean it this time, Isaac’. Here, the SSRI ‘Sertraline’ is depicted as an early material token of his impotence.
The relationship’s inevitable terminus is outlined on the very last track of AFUT, ‘Basketball Shoes’, in the lines ‘In my bed sheets now wet / Of Charlie I pray to forget / All I’ve been forms the drone / We sing the rest’. They detail a wet dream, the stain of which serves as the final lasting symbol of this sexual ‘reflexive impotence’, a liminal metaphorical emblem of the space between mourning and melancholia, terms which Fisher describes as such:
‘Both mourning and melancholia are about loss. But whereas mourning is the slow, painful withdrawal of libido from the lost object, in melancholia, libido remains attached to what has disappeared.’
In understanding Wood’s impotence as both mournful and melancholic, we may observe the hauntological undertones of this lyrical depiction of a sexual relationship defined by depression. Following the tradition of literary associations between food and sexuality, ‘Bread Song’ outlines a libido which is simultaneously withdrawn ‘from the lost object’ and ‘attached to what has disappeared’:
So show me the land you acquire
And slip into something beside
The holes you tried to hide
And lay out your rules for the night
Oh, don’t eat your toast in my bed
Oh darling, I
I never felt the crumbs until you said
“This place is not for any man
Nor particles of bread”
Yet again, the bed forms the stage for another ‘passive observation of an already existing state of affairs’, and the crumbs on it induce another deterministic profession of the relationship’s trajectory. The bed is not the place for ‘any man’ and the crumbs of toast, analogous to Wood’s inconsumable sexual appetite, amount to an uncomfortable reminder of this. We see this device elsewhere in Wood’s lyrics such as in the line ‘darling I’m starving myself’ and ‘every time I try to make lunch / For anyone else, in my head / I end up dreaming of you’. The extended metaphor echoes ‘The Place Where He Inserted the Blade’, where Wood’s retrospectivity of ‘I tried just to’ enhances the seemingly unavoidable ‘slow cancellation’ of the relationship’s ‘future’- it’s future at once being an ‘already existing’ declination of ‘affairs’, a mourned potential (idealistic) ‘lost future’ and a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’. These three manifestations of ‘future’ are evident in the album’s fifth track ‘Good Will Hunting’:
It’s just been a weekend
But in my mind
We summer in France
With our genius daughters now
And you teach me to play the piano
You call
I’ll be there
Once more
I’m scared of
The phone
Don’t ring it
Please know
That I’m just trying to find
Some way to keep me in your mind
And later on
Everyone will say it was cool
She had Billie Eilish style
Moving to Berlin for a little while
I’m tryna find something to hold on to
Never text me nothing
But she wants to tell me
She’s not that hard to find
And message me if you change your mind
Darling, I’ll keep fine
Here we can observe these concurrent hauntological futures – the anxiety Wood feels towards a separated future (‘Please know / That I’m just trying to find / Some way to keep me in your mind’), the mourned idealised future (But in my mind / We summer in France / With our genius daughters now / And you teach me to play the piano), and the notion of a self-fulfilling prophecy (‘I’m tryna find something to hold on to / Never text me nothing / But she wants to’). More pertinently, we learn that he is fearful of every single one of them. He is ‘scared of / the phone’, of the inevitable conversation and subsequent termination of the relationship. Wood discussed the centrality of anxiety in his lyrics in an interview titled ‘Making Good Their Escape’:
“I wouldn’t consider anxiety a conscious influence of mine at all really – but it is often felt at times of great importance and times of great importance are naturally things we might choose to write or sing about.’
Despite his statement, a depressive anxiety pervades a great deal of Wood’s lyrical content, and it is expressed in a manner equivalent to that of Mark Fisher insofar as that its source appears external, a symptom of the surrounding hauntological culture. As Fisher puts it:
‘it’s no accident that my (so far successful) escape from depression coincided with a certain externalisation of negativity: the problem wasn’t (just) me but the culture around me.’
In Wood’s writing on AFUT, criticism of an external, sterile and recycled neoliberal culture is evident – in ‘Good Will Hunting’ the line ‘She had Billie Eilish style /Moving to Berlin for a little while’ carries a particularly mocking tone. However, in the lyrical content of the previous album, For the First Time (FTFT), it is far more overt, Wood’s tone appearing to be influenced by Jarvis Cocker of the band Pulp. More specifically the mood of the opening track ‘The Fear’ from their 1995 album This is Hardcore, which conveys an overtly British sense of class-based hauntological dread. This is particularly noticeable in BCNR’s ‘Sunglasses’:
Mother is juicing watermelons on the breakfast island
And with frail hands she grips the NutriBullet
And the bite of its blades reminds me of a future
That I am in no way part of
And in a wall of photographs
In the downstairs second living room’s TV area
I become her father
And complain of mediocre theatre in the daytime
And ice in single malt whiskey at night
Of rising skirt hems, lowering IQs
And things just aren’t built like they used to be
The absolute pinnacle of British engineering
Here, Wood’s alienation in a culture witnessing ‘the slow cancellation of the future’, one that he is ‘in no way part of’, is not merely anxiety inducing, it is painful – likened to the ‘bite’ of the NutriBullet’s ‘blades’. In the future’s absence, all that remains prospectively for him is to become his partner’s ‘father’, and rehash the same postcolonial complaint that ‘things just aren’t built like they used to be’, himself becoming ‘the absolute pinnacle of British engineering’- a reproduction of history being the ‘pinnacle’ of attainment and the only recourse for a young man existing in a hauntological culture: ‘20th century culture on higher definition screens’. Moreover, Wood’s anxiety is inherently tied to class, as evidenced by the particularly British cultural capital associated with the words ‘theatre’ and ‘whiskey’. The same sentiment is evident in ‘Science Fair’:
References, references, references
What are you on tonight?
I love this city
Despite the burden of preferences
What a time to be alive
Oh, I know where I’m going
It’s Black Country out there
I saw you undressing
It was at the Cirque Du Soleil
And it was such an intimate performance
I swear to god you looked right at me
And let a silk red ribbon fall between your hands
But as I slowly sobered
I felt the rubbing of shoulders
I smelt the sweat and the children crying
I was just one among crowded stands
And still with sticky hands
I bolted through the gallery
With Cola stains on my best white shirt
And nothing to lose
Oh, I was born to run
It’s Black Country out there
It’s Black Country out there
It’s Black Country out there
Here the band’s nomenclature takes on new meaning. Wood realises his own absolute absence of individuality within neoliberal hauntological culture at the Cirque Du Soleil, which marrs his ‘best white shirt’ with ‘Cola stains’. This is especially apt when considering Slavoj Zizek’s argument that Coca Cola is the perfect commodity, representative of ‘the mysterious something more. The indescribable excess which is the object cause of my desire’. As such, we might read this sugared staining as the very symbol of late-stage capitalism and consumer desire staining the oppositional ‘white’ clean slate for an alternate future. This is an especially effective reading of the lyrics when you extend the idea to the refrain of ‘It’s Black Country out there’, which could pertain to the consequential staining of the entire nation. ‘Out there’ becomes juxtaposed with an implied ‘in here’. ‘Out there’ it is ‘Black’, there is nothing- only absence. ‘In here’, at the Cirque Du Soleil, all that remains is the reproduction of an 18th century form of entertainment, one in which the individual is ‘just one among crowded stands’, surrounded by ‘References, references, references’- there is nothing new. The sentiment bears resounding similarity to that of Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life- Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures:
‘…our zeitgeist is essentially hauntological. The power of Derrida’s concept lay in its idea of being haunted by events that had not actually happened, futures that failed to materialise and remained spectra’
It is no wonder, therefore, that a culture witnessing ‘the slow cancellation of the future’ would possess an ‘endemic’ depression. In ‘Track X (The Guest)’, Wood encapsulates such a bleak ‘zeitgeist’ artfully, positioning himself among the ‘spectra’:
Oh, and I guess in some way
I’ve always been the guest
Oh, and I guess in some way
I’ve always been the guest
Dancing to Jerskin, I got down on my knees
I told you I loved you in front of Black Midi
I told my friend Jack that it could havе been you
I know it was funny, but I was struggling, too
I left my drink on the eighteenth floor
I thought about jumping in your facе when you saw
I thought of my father and proving him wrong
But mostly of Molly and Dylan and my mum
The ‘zeitgeist’ is portrayed as one which is entirely alienating. Wood is not merely now a ‘guest’ in his own culture, he has ‘always been’ such, a fate which causes him to consider leaving his ‘drink’ (referencing the ‘slow sobering’ from the surrounding culture in ‘Science Fair’) and initiating the cessation of his own life in front of a loved one. This pervading sense of alienation is consolidated in the final track of FTFT, ‘Opus’, which ends with the repeated refrain, ‘Everybody’s coming up / Oh, I guess I’m a little bit late to the party’. The lines imply a hauntological reproduction of 90s MDMA addled British rave culture and, in fact, earlier live versions of the song support this, with a dropped verse reading ‘As he talks of his travels, with so much fucking grace / Planning their revenge in basements / Planning their next DIY free party in basements’. The repetition of ‘basements’ mirrors the ‘References, references, references / What are you on tonight?’ of ‘Science Fair’, laying bare a frustration of contemporary British drug and rave culture, which exists in an inebriated splendid isolation, confined to ‘basements’ and matching the ‘passivity’ of Fisher’s cultural diagnosis of a ‘reflexive impotence’. It is not only Wood who is ‘late to the party’, but the party goers themselves. The track’s title ‘Opus’, meaning ‘(as a result of) work’ / ‘labour’ in Latin, embodies this sentiment. The word is most frequently used to refer to the ‘Opus number’, chronological order, of a composer’s work. This is typically presented in the format ‘Opus 21’, for example. Wood’s ‘Opus’ is, however, one without a temporal signifier – it is a suspended eternal ‘labour’, one without past and future, which Fisher terms a ‘(collective) desolation of melancholia’. The very absence of a chronological marker represents the utter emptiness of a society wherein the most one can do is enact a ‘passive observation of an already existing state of affairs’. This disenfranchisement causes, Fisher states, a ‘malign spectre’ of depression. In Wood’s writing, this is neatly summed up by three lines of an Untitled track from his solo project ‘The Guest’- ‘But I was almost something / Yeah, I was almost something / And now I’m almost nothing’.
To conclude, the abstracted life writing of Isaac Wood’s lyrics is entirely enmeshed with the notion that the present is haunted by both the past and ‘lost futures’. This is shown not only to induce an inhospitable cultural reality, but a depressive state of being which seeps both into personal relationships and self-perception. Consequently, Wood’s creative output is limited to a kind of ‘observation’ devoid of agency, the futility and staticity of which lends, in hindsight, an almost inevitable sense to the termination of his publicly written work. What remains, therefore, is that the act of actively listening to, rather than hearing, Wood’s lyrical expression has a profound capacity to induce an implicit acknowledgement of one’s own hauntological reality.
Image credit: the-artifice.com