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mars2k 's review for:
Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts
by Grafton Tanner
challenging
reflective
medium-paced
Yeesh... Where to begin?
Babbling Corpse seemed like a book that would be right up my alley. Vaporwave? Anticapitalism? Metaphorical ghosts? It seemed to tick all the boxes. At first, my feelings about the book were generally positive. It was nothing groundbreaking and it didn’t really offer me any new perspectives or insights, but it was fine enough... Until it wasn’t. The final chapter (“Sick and Tired”) is pretty awful, and I’ll try to unpack it here.
Like in Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, ADHD is stated to be “one symptom of our manic, plugged-in, social-media-obsessed culture,” supposedly caused by “the datascape.” Both titles were published by Zer0 Books; I do have one or two books published by them that I’ve yet to read, but I don’t know if I’ll buy another because being confronted by this vaccines-cause-autism-esque speculation about ADHD two times out of two does not bode well.
Tanner goes on to talk about pop culture, specifically superhero movies and pop music. This starts off as some unoriginal bellyaching about blockbusters and chart-toppers being meaningless trash, but gradually it gives way to something more insidious – an utterly unhinged tirade about the “cultural regression” and “cultural collapse” of the West, which sounds uncannily similar to fascist cries of “degeneracy” if I’m being honest. A discussion about the MCU includes the frankly hilarious claim that “Rome went down like this.”
Taylor Swift is singled out as the epitome of everything wrong with contemporary pop music, and from here on out she’s used as a scapegoat. She is dramatically declared to “signal the end of history” and is implied to be worse than terrorism. You just can’t make this up.
There’s this ongoing grievance against people sincerely enjoying popular media. Escapism is framed as complacency with capitalism – or, rather, “unfettered capitalism” since Tanner seems to be too much of a coward to criticise capitalism outright. Snide sidenote aside (try saying that three times fast), this is such a toxic mindset to have. It’s not healthy or sustainable to constantly be in activism mode, “resisting the powers that be” 24/7, with no room for rest and leisure. It’s okay to take breaks, and it’s okay to indulge from time to time.
Tanner claims “the reigning opinions of the mainstream music press dictate the tastes that we buy into” and I can kind of see what he’s trying to say, but at the end of the day he could just listen to music he enjoys instead of hate-listening to the top 100. The baseless drivel about critics being silenced if they fail to be “childishly optimistic” and being “excommunicated to the valley of the haters” for not praising Taylor Swift enough made me feel nauseous. That section rose to a crescendo with “one critic refusing to jump on the critical bandwagon” being presented as some kind of musical martyr. Thankfully, the book ended soon after that.
After reading Babbling Corpse, I just feel frustrated and let down. Most of the book had nothing to do with vaporwave and there was no real critique or investigation into how capitalism promotes the use of nostalgia as a marketing tool. Instead, I was presented with a general “nostalgia bad” attitude and a miserable, cynical tone which bordered on far-right rhetoric at times. This is not a good book.