Session 1: Imaginaries of Place
Ekaterina Ganskaya
Retromania, retrotopia, ostalgia. Sovietwave: reassembling the non-existent past
During the early 2010s, among the artists from the ex-Soviet republics, there was a resurgence of interest in electronic music produced in the USSR. This renewed attention—along with the appearance of genres such as vaporwave, synthwave, chillwave, etc.—gave rise to a subgenre that came to be known as “sovietwave.” Rather than a distinct musical trend, sovietwave should be understood as a particular “mood” that frames a broader social phenomenon of nostalgia for the Soviet Union, a sentimentalised revisitation of Soviet aesthetics and cultural artefacts by people on both sides of the Iron Curtain, reflecting a newfound appreciation for the Soviet past. This phenomenon can be seen as a particular manifestation of Ostalgia, a nostalgic longing for the former Eastern bloc.
Following the Ostalgic pattern, sovietwave artists—most of whom have never lived in the USSR— disregard the ideology and politics associated with the Soviet Union and instead focus solely on the retro-utopian aesthetics, the restoration of imagined cultural memory, stereotyped joyous childhood, scientific and artistic achievements of that epoch. Consequently, the historical past turns out to be strongly reorganised and romanticised. At the same time, the USSR acquires the features of a utopian, high-tech state almost wholly focused on intellectual and spiritual experience.
Despite the articulated belonging to the (post-)Soviet, the “actual Soviet” is removed from the sovietwave both in terms of sound and aesthetics, constituting an alternative universe. The narrative that unites musicians and listeners is perceived not as an ideal or an action guide but more as a space for reflection, a creative play in accordance with ersatz nostalgia. By examining creative audio-visual strategies employed by musicians, my paper seeks to shed light on the mechanisms that form this soundtrack for the compensatory nostalgia for a country that in fact never existed.
Walter Stedman
Crossing the Language Barrier: Musical Elements of the City Pop Revival
Japan has repeatedly been the target of international idealizing nostalgia with the only issue being that everything is in Japanese. The 1980s genre City Pop reemerged as a gateway to this utopic Japan in the 2010s, but much of its lyrical content is stifled by the language barrier. I argue that as the music gathered an international non-Japanese speaking audience, its success was dependent on its musical qualities. Little scholarly work has been produced on City Pop, most of which has given minimal attention to specific musical elements. This paper centers around multiple case studies of popular City Pop songs. Larger elements such as genre and orchestration are considered alongside specific elements such as groove. The nostalgic associations of the musical elements of each song and how they relate to the genre’s current popularity are addressed as well. City Pop bears many Western musical influences, but presents them in novel combinations, such as by using elements of genres that had little interaction in Western culture. This reformulation of musical elements provided enough familiarity to reach beyond the language barrier while creating enough differences to attract international listeners. This paper concludes that the international origin of the musical elements was instrumental in City Pop’s international revival.
Travis Stimeling
Country Music, TikTok, and NASCARcore
An aesthetic drawing freely upon the visual and sonic iconography of 1990s hard country music and NASCAR Winston Cup auto racing emerged during the rise of TikTok in mid-2020. This aesthetic, which I describe as “NASCARcore,” nostalgizes a white working-class heterosexuality defined prior to the birth of most of its leading practitioners and followers. Returning to a pre-9/11 “golden age,” NASCARcore’s evocation of country music “hat acts” and Winston Cup stars Davey Allison and Dale Earnhardt (both of whom died under tragic circumstances) seems to stand for a rejection of the influx of rock, pop, and hip hop in twenty-first-century country music; the commercialization and nationalization of NASCAR; and contemporary politics that have amplified anxieties around working-class white heterosexuality. Informed by Nadine Hubbs’s notion of the “narrating class” (2014), this paper not only traces the origins and deployments of NASCARcore but suggests that, within the eclectic scrolling ecosystem of TikTok, NASCARcore might be read as resistance to the vilification of white working-class men (particularly those from the U.S. South) in an era of state-sponsored violence against marginalized people done in their name.
Session 2: Cinematic Retrofuturism
Nick Anderson
Miyazaki in the Time of Cherries: Retrospective Resonances in Two Diegetic Songs from Porco Rosso (1992) and The Wind Rises (2013)
Hayao Miyazaki’s two films set in the interwar era, Porco Rosso and The Wind Rises, are remarkably similar aside from their temporal setting: both are suffused with pacifist sentiment, their protagonists are perhaps the two Miyazaki characters that most closely resemble the director himself, and—of the entire Studio Ghibli catalog—they present the most indulgent celebrations of Miyazaki’s obsession with aircraft. In this paper, I discuss the role of diegetic song as a vital mechanism in the formation of these films’ shared symbolic network. I focus on two scenes that, I argue, function as hauntological expressions of pacifism, Miyazaki’s foundational political stance.
In Porco, the chanteuse Gina performs “Le Temps des Cerises,” a tune from 1866 often associated with the Paris Commune; in The Wind Rises we hear a rousing chorus from “Das Gibt’s Nur Einmal,” made famous in Der Kongreß Tanzt (1931). These melancholic melodies operate as a resonant nexus, exemplifying and affording us access to a web of thematic interconnections that span multiple dimensions. I identify retrospection as a complex and fundamental thread here, as these deployments of song move beyond merely indexing a nostalgic atmosphere and point toward a retrofuturist sensibility. As I unravel the associative networks that Miyazaki has sonically developed, I demonstrate that this pair of scenes strikingly illustrates how music can serve to produce cinematic hauntologies.
Karin Fleck
The holographic jukebox in retrofuturist Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
In November 1988, President Ronald Reagan proclaimed “National Jukebox Week”, drawing a glorious, nostalgic Hollywood image of jukeboxes in America. In contrast to Reagan’s naïve celebration of jukeboxes that are often found in Hollywood cinema, I am interested in a specific cinematic configuration: the holographic jukebox in retrofuturist Blade Runner 2049. Following hauntological concepts, I define the holographic jukebox as a ghostly medium that carries both spectres from the past and the future that culminate in the “disjointed image”. This image is closely tied to the secret, architecturally crumbling space of jukeboxes in the diegesis. Based on Derrida’s elaboration of Hamlet’s line (“the time is out of joint”), “disjointed images” are musical images that move in and out of time. They are not simply a “jukebox aesthetic to recreate the look and feel of a period” (Le Sueur) in film but invite spectators to reflect upon the past, the authenticity of memories and the role of “prosthetic memories” (Landsberg) in times of “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff). The film conjures up the dystopian scenario of a lost future, wherein the digital archive of records is so dysfunctional that a return to anachronistic devices such as jukeboxes is inevitable. Apart from Hollywood cinema, the holographic jukebox technology corresponds to recent trends in music videos and concerts to feed fans’ nostalgic desire and keep musical legends alive.
Session 3: Hauntology
Leah Amarosa
“The Kids Are All Dying:” Exploring Hauntology and the Uncanny in Pop Songs Depicting Gun Violence
Mark Fisher’s 2014 monograph applied Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology to 2000’s British electronic music, arguing that the ghostly archaism of the music, characterized by crackle, distortion, and samples, was influenced by a nostalgia for the past and a future that never materialized. Fisher distinguished between two directions in hauntology – the first refers to what is “no longer,” but still has profound impact, and the second refers to what has “not yet happened,” but already impacts the present. This paper uses hauntology as a lens through which to view three recent popular music tracks: “Pumped Up Kicks” by Foster the People, “The Kids Are All Dying” by Finneas, and “Guns” by Coldplay, which all comment on the tragedies of mass shootings. However, unlike Fisher’s examples, which center nostalgic and gothic themes, this recent popular music instead hides behind a façade, as the mood espoused by the instrumental track is incongruous to the disturbing lyrics. Thus, these songs convey haunting in a distinctly different way than UK dance music– they uncannily draw attention to the normalization of violence in America. Through narrative tension, they evoke Francis Fukuyama’s concept of the “end of history” in mourning the impossibility of a better world.
Nathan Fleshner
Julien Baker, Go Home, and Religious Hauntology in Popular Music
Julien Baker’s music is inundated with the intertwined themes of religion, identity, and mental health. ‘Go Home’ from her debut album Sprained Ankle (2015) addresses chemical addictions, but it takes a curious turn at the end. A fleeting, final cry in the last line—‘God, I wanna go home’—abruptly turns the song toward a broadcast sermon from a Christian radio station superimposed over Baker playing the praise and worship song, ‘In Christ Alone.’ The unexpected turn feels like an apparition from Baker’s past, emerging from the recesses of her mind.
This paper explores ‘Go Home’ as a dialogic, liminal space between Baker’s past and future selves. It demonstrates a nostalgic, hauntological reference to a religious cultural spirit, extant both outside and within her psyche, with whom she is both in dialogue and in conflict. ‘Go Home’ and other songs across Baker’s three albums represent out-of-body experiences, much like therapeutic retellings, in which Baker Others her different identities, seeing past and future simultaneously in a timeless present. Baker’s music is framed with other musical, hauntological references to religious pasts, such as ‘Icicle’ (1994) by Tori Amos with an extended piano introduction centered on the hymn, ‘O, For a Thousand Tongues to Sing.’
Aria Greene
Hauntology, Queer Futurity, Online Fandom, and the Specters of Youth in Cacola’s Ruby Rose (2022)
Using Cacola’s 2022 mashup album Ruby Rose as a case study, I showcase how mashup (‘shup’) music connects to a greater network of fan-created media and processes of identity formation within queer and transgender subcultures: fan fiction, shipping, and clothing exchange. Heteronormative media cultures exclude trans and queer expressions of identity or use them as a concept and symbol for capitalistic gain. Shedding light on online queer subcultures gives them a larger voice while allowing for deeper examinations of creative borrowing as a form of cultural formation. Stitching together samples from over 300 years of musical history, emphasizing popular music from the mid-2000s and 2010s, Ruby Rose’s recombinative play juxtaposes the lyrical and aesthetic content of music, a form of “shupping” that queers the imposed heteronormative themes of many mainstream artists and challenging the listener to reconsider their own prejudices and preconceptions of their own experience (or lack thereof) with these sources and their own gender. Drawing from Muñoz’s queer futurity and Ahmed’s queer phenomenology I argue nostalgia in this instance, pragmatically looks to the ambiguities of the musical past to enact a more utopian future.
Session 4: Ludic Retrofuturism
Jordan Good
Looks Like Reality if You Cross Your Eyes: Animal Crossing’s New Horizons, Nostalgia, and Temporal Simulacra
Animal Crossing: New Horizon’s (ACNH) eerily well-timed March 2020 release spurred it to outsell not only any other game that year but all other games in its franchise combined. I argue that this was not merely due to people’s increased free time to play video games, but because ACNH tapped into many facets of the public consciousness and issues which lockdown forced us to confront. Inability to interact with friends, dissatisfaction with modern capitalism and ecological worries, popularity of ‘aesthetics’ such as cottagecore/fairycore/kidcore, a strong desire for escapism, and a general increase in consumption of hyperreal media are all concepts which predate Covid-19 but were suddenly brought into sharp relief. ACNH provided either solutions to these issues, or at least ways to soothe frustrations by presenting safe and utopian simulacra of them.
I argue that the game accomplishes this primarily via nostalgia, of a sort that is not limited to people who played Animal Crossing games as children. Svetlana Boym theorizes that nostalgia masquerades as a longing for place while it is really a longing for time, and this holds true for ACNH’s appeal. The game presents not only spacial simulacra of a deserted island where you can virtually interact with your friends, but temporal simulacra – of a childhood innocence where capitalism has no consequences and friends are always cute and kind, or of the musically idealized hourly worldstates, with players often “time traveling” (changing their device’s clocks) to purposely experience “5 am” play, therefore abstracting the game from its signature selling point of moving in synchrony with real world time. The appeal of the game in these ways relates to Baudrillard’s observation that we prefer the simulated to the real not because it is ‘close to reality’ but precisely because it is ‘better than reality’. In this presentation I posit that ACNH provides a shockingly apt lens through which to view concepts plaguing our postmodern society, and that its success was not merely due to being in the right place at the right time.
Nicole Powlison
The Utopian Promise of Retrofuturism. Lost Futures and the New in Mark Fisher, Fredric Jameson and Theodor Adorno
Sound, and especially music, plays a significant role in transmitting aesthetic information essential to world-building in video games, particularly for open-world games such as Cyberpunk 2077 (CD Projekt Red, 2021), an action role-playing game set in Night City, an independent megacity on the west coast of an alternate-history North America. Game designers were faced with a critical challenge when designing the sounds of their gameworld: how is it possible to create the music of the future when we are limited to knowledge of the genres and styles of our real-world past and present?
While the symbolic implications of real-world music present on in-game radio stations has been examined by other ludomusicologists such as Kiri Miller and Will Cheng, Cyberpunk 2077 stands out from their examinations of Grand Theft Auto and Fallout 3 (respectively) because Cyberpunk 2077’s radio is full of hundreds of unique pop songs composed specifically for the game. Applying literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope crystalizes how this original music is incredibly effective at creating a realistic and narratively essential sonic layer of an imagined future by intentionally deploying generic references to our real-world musical past and present.
Session 5: News from Nowhere
Rodrigo Diogo & Paula Guerra
The emotion that (never) was: The subculture of ambience, nostalgia and the Internet’s aesthetic landscape
The Internet, as a digital space and factor for the shortening of spacetime, is a stage for the creation, negotiation, and reconfiguration of many cultures. Cultures that, in line with the nature of scenes, band and disband themselves quickly, mutating constantly. An Internet “pocket” that has been in ever growing expansion pertains to the nostalgia for the thematic landscape of the 80s and 90s, when technological optimism ruled. It’s the search for the non-spaces that tell a story amidst their emptiness. Lastly, it’s also a nostalgia for the future: a gone future and that’ll never come, laid in VHS players, palm trees and DeLoreans cruising in neon lit highways. Countless playlists on YouTube and an equal number of comments reveals to us a picture of reverence for a cognitive past, the shared desire for different places in the face of real life that, apparently, grows less interesting by the day. For this article, our proposal is to explain the elements that compose some of these genres, like vaporwave, synthwave and cyberpunk and the motives behind this collective, almost intuitive, nostalgia as felt by the enjoyers of said genres.
Andrew Ankersen
Apocalypse Then and Now: The Always-Becoming-Never-Being End of the World
At first blush, it may seem that Jewish Apocalypticism, 80s nostalgia, and climate change anxiety are entirely disconnected, not only by a 2000-year-long time difference but also by radically different formats, content, and rhetorical goals. I argue that despite these superficial differences, they are similar and that on a fundamental level, apocalypticism is necessarily hauntological, and likewise hauntology is essentially apocalyptic.
This topic is not only relevant due to the explosion of popular media concerned with the end of the world that has appeared since the mid-90s,[1] and the impacts this media can have on politics and the broader society,[2] but also because of the need to theorize and narrativize the very real existential threats that are climate change and late-stage capitalism. Borrowing heavily from Mark Fisher’s concept of lost futures[3] I will examine the conditions that give rise to the cyclical emergence of Apocalyptic thinking. This argument is informed by a close study of Jewish Apocalyptic literature from the turn of the common era, contemporary thinking on hauntology and from a close examination of the social and cultural upheavals and anxieties that plague both periods. As well as positing an answer to one of the biggest questions in the study of Apocalyptic literature, namely, why is that interest in the end of the world seems to peak when things are more or less stable and disappear almost entirely in times of acute crisis.[4] Finally I suggest that Jewish Apocalyptic writing with its blend of concern for the future with the aesthetic of a by-gone age is the earliest example of Retrofuturism
[1] DiTommaso, Lorenzo. “Apocalypticism and Popular Culture.” In The Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature, by Lorenzo DiTommaso, 472–510. edited by John J. Collins. Oxford University Press, 2014.
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199856497.013.028.
[2] Frykholm, Amy Johnson. Rapture Culture: Left behind in Evangelical America. Oxford, England ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
[3] Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester, UK Washington, USA: Zero books, 2014.
[4] Hanson, Paul D. TheDawnofApocalyptic:TheHistoricalandSociologicalRootsofJewishApocalyptic Eschatology. Rev. ed. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979.
Session 6: Internet Aesthetics
Sarah Palfey Files
‘We all lived in the same house. You just forgot.’: Weirdcore’s Reflective Nostalgia
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns led to dramatic increases in digital communication and online self-expression. During that time, forms of digitized nostalgia appeared across social media, and the Internet aesthetic known as “Weirdcore” emerged. Weirdcore involves digital and surrealist visual art, a variety of electronic and hypnagogic pop music, and nostalgic experiences. Music is perhaps the most important aspect of Weirdcore as it fuels the nostalgia that followers face.
In this paper, I examine the kinds of nostalgia that Weirdcore elicits through its music and visual art. Drawing from my ethnographic research, I explore how followers associate Weirdcore with memories of their childhoods. Svetlana Boym’s typology of “reflective nostalgia,” which romanticizes fragmented moments of the past, helps to understand how those childhood memories relate to Weirdcore. Through my analysis of the popular Weirdcore song “I’d Rather Sleep” by Kero Kero Bonito, I argue that Weirdcore’s reflective nostalgia serves a purpose: it helps followers to relive moments of their past that they’ve missed so they may feel in control of the hardships of their present. I address how Weirdcore’s reflective nostalgia provides a way to understand how Internet users contextualize their lives through music related to Weirdcore.
Clutch Anderson
Hexd music in Relation to Vaporwave: Reconstructed Nostalgia, Internet Music, and Accelerationism
Why would we intentionally listen to music at a lower quality? Hexd music is characterized by the extensive use of the bitcrusher effect, pitched-up vocals, sped-up tracks, as well as visual references to internet culture, resulting in a mysterious and alluring aesthetic. Soundcloud user tomoe_✧theundy1ng’s 2019 “Rare RCB hexD.mp3” mix serves as the original basis for the hexd music aesthetic; this paper studies this overall aesthetic by analyzing a playlist of three hexd tracks. Formally, the tracks are compared by studying the differences in the specificity to the hexd aesthetic, both sonically and non-sonically. An investigation into the affective content follows, borrowing from previous scholarship on vaporwave, reconstructed nostalgia, and internet music. This study provides a cultural backdrop for better understanding the hexd genre beyond formal elements like sound quality, timbre, and associated imagery. While this cultural study is revealing in situating hexd music within concepts like reconstructed nostalgia, digital degeneration, and accelerationism, further interdisciplinary research is required to consider the intricacies of these dense, contemporary digital aesthetics.
Kate Galloway
“Haiku, Can You Sing?”: Retro Sounds for Posthuman Sonic Expression and the Synthesized Animals of Internet Media
As I scrolled through my social media feed and recommendations one late fall evening, I encountered a series of internet audiovisual objects that employed novel sonorities and nostalgic reverberations to imagine posthuman expressive sonic possibilities through micro-genre platform digital media. On Instagram I listened to the autotuned timbral manipulations of Haiku the Husky’s vocalizations followed by a recommended reel featuring the choreomusicalities of a tardigrade, a phylum of eight-legged segmented micro-animals, its movement synched to a pulsing and wobbly synthesizer soundtrack. TikTok video trends, Instagram reels, and memes are fascinating places of musical play and recall. The use of sound and music in these internet videos is not simply a novelty, rather they are intentionally exploring ideas of musicality, vocality, performance, and internet utopia to imagine posthuman expressive sonic possibilities using retrofuturist sonoric combinations. These internet cultural objects, like Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s video installation The Substitute (2019), interrogate humanity’s “preoccupation with creating new life forms, while neglecting existing ones” (Ginsberg 2019). These creative and participatory digital environments where musicking animals are curated and digitally dwell call into question the human desire to connect with, perform, and even control the nonhuman animal across digital spaces of reality and representation.
Retrofuturism Symposium 2.0 