Faith in the Future by Louis Tomlinson | Album Review
No, I don’t have “Faith in the Future” of music.
Music should be about music, but the times when the music we listen to came from just one person, the one artist that devotes themself entirely to their music, have long been forgotten. Peter Schmitt, in his book “Medienkritik” (Media Criticism), writes something comparable in relation to Adorno’s philosophy of music. Schmitt notes that Adorno recognized the movement of today’s popular music early on, which has developed in the direction of a “preformation of Gleichschaltung and commercialization” (Schmitt 2020, 29).
Music is so interesting for the critique of ideology precisely because many artists contribute to a work (e.g. an album), thus creating a mixture of different individualities. However, these individualities are themselves never free of ideology, and so ultimately a web of ideologies emerges, which corresponds to the “Verblendungszusammenhang [roughly: context of delusion, author’s note]” that surrounds us all (Adorno & Horkheimer 2010, 48). Schmitt states something similar in relation to Adorno, namely that the work can no longer be analysed with the traditional “idea of the unified-work” (Schmitt 2020, 29). This means that this process already began during Adorno’s lifetime and has continued ever since. Paraphrasing Adorno, Schmitt summarizes this insight as follows: “The whole was no longer the true, but the false” (Schmitt 2020, 29). This direct allusion to and negation of Hegel’s saying that the whole is the true will be of use to us at a later point.
Through the division of the production process, which of course is reminiscent of assembly line production, a new form of music emerges. Music thus becomes more than just music. It is at the same time always a part of our society, whether through the earworm that haunts us all day or through the mere listening to music in everyday life, e.g. while working. It is omnipresent, and along with it, ideology is always present. The various platforms listed on the stock exchange, whose shares are often held by big record companies, thus ensure a proximity to neoliberalism, which also manifests itself in the almost assembly-line-like production of so-called “hits”. Nothing has to last long any more, the zeitgeist is too fast anyway, it’s all about short-lived success. With regard to the mere entertainment listener, Schmitt notes that Adorno sees no “Sinneszusammenhang [roughly: context of meaning, author’s note]” in music, “but [a] mere source of stimulation” (Schmitt 2020, 35). This means that, music, then, doesn’t need to pursue a deeper artistic ambition, but simply needs to appeal to our stimuli in order to ensure that we find the product “worthy” of our consumption.
But what does all this have to do with this album now? Well, it is no secret that this work is a product of the culture industry. This is already evident in the monotonous lyrics that are reeled off one after the other. Nothing stands out because nothing is supposed to stand out. It is remarkable that apparently a sameness can only arise from an immanent dissimilarity (on the one hand, there is not the one artist who creates the work, on the other hand, the differences are so marginal anyway that they are no longer even noticed on superficial listening). In Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit”, there is something comparable: “I distinguish myself from myself, and it is therein immediate for me that this distinguished is not distinguished.” (Hegel 2019, 123). Difference, then, according to Hegel, arises precisely when difference does not distinguish itself from its own form. In our case, this means that the division of the musical working processes creates a monotony that would not be possible at all without a prior division.
As a matter of fact, in our case, hardly any two consecutive tracks are by the same producers, which means that the album itself should not be thought of as an album, but must instead be seen as a loose collection of songs. After all, one of the core characteristics of an album is that it is constructed much like an art exhibition, where several individual works, under a certain framework, also merge into one large work. However, this process can only work if there is a connection between the works, but that is precisely not the case with Faith in the Future. Although it is very much about love (the word ‘love’ occurs 25 times in the entire lyrics) and also about the provisional breakup, the work never abstracts beyond the clichés. Everything remains on the level of absolute obviousness. The words are mostly chosen so unspecific that one could speak of an attempt to create a “connectedness” as devoid of content as possible, which of course only threatens to work on superficial listening. The album thus becomes a shell that could just as well fit anyone. The individuality of the artist disappears in the uniformity of the assembly line production of the modern music industry.
I’m going to get a little provocative here, but I think provocation is a good tool to work out the conditions of today’s music industry. Here’s my provocation: I haven’t listened to a single minute of the album. So I’m writing about something that I don’t actually know.
Why is that provocative? Obviously because a critic who criticizes a work must also have fundamentally engaged with it. But that is not all. On the one hand, this thesis is provocative because it cannot be verified; it could be that I have listened to the album very well and am only making this provocation to point something out. On the other hand, it is also provocative because it doesn’t matter at all whether I have listened to the album or not, what is said here remains valid and does not lose any of its content. On the contrary, the analysis without even knowing the work has something provocative in itself and suggests that Adorno was right with his remarks back then. And thirdly, because it proves my thesis of today’s uniformity. It is already clear that individual songs from this album will run up and down on the various pop music radio stations, no matter what I or anybody else writes. And fourthly, because there is no work at all that I could have dealt with. Moreover, this thesis is relatively easy to prove (just read the following lines as if they were a poem):
[Verse 1]
“Tell you I’m on my way” (The Greatest)
“It just wasn’t meant to be” (Chicago)
“And is your brother doin’ okay?” (Chicago)
“Your face remindin’ me” (The Greatest)
[Verse 2]
“We always used to say” (Saturdays)
“Hey, babe” (Written All Over Your Face)
“Not going to ask you, but we’ll make sure you’re okay” (That’s the Way Love Goes)
“They say, ‘Bitter ends turn sweet in time’” (Chicago)
I think I have made my admittedly provocative point. It is not about building an intimate relationship with the listeners, it is about nothing, an empty quantity. Ideology critique, but also any other form of analysis, often finds itself confronted with the accusation of analysing something that is not there, but in most cases this accusation is unfounded because intention and result are separable. In this case, however, it is the other way round: result and intention are one and the same.
But what is the intention? According to Adorno, the emotional listener hears music “exclusively ‘for the purposes of his own Triebökonomie [roughly: drive economy, author’s note]’” (Adorno, as cited in Schmitt 2020, 34). And what if in this case we are dealing with an inverted position and Louis Tomlinson & Co. have produced this album “exclusively ‘for purposes of [their, author’s note] own Triebökonomie [roughly: drive economy, author’s note]’” (Adorno, cited in Schmitt 2020, 34)? Only that in their case there is a divided intention, on the one hand their own collective intention and on the other hand that of the music label in the background, which wants to make as much money as possible. But that would also mean that Louis Tomlinson & Co. actually enjoy doing what they do, namely producing music, but cannot do it freely because they are part of the culture industry at the same time.
Of course, this cannot be proven, and it doesn’t really matter at all. Because even without a label in the background, music, if you want to make a living from it, has to bow to the algorithms, which is why nowadays we often hear the chorus first in order to pick up the listener right after the first second, the fact that this structure makes little sense from a musical perspective is secondary. The point is to prevent skipping to the next song. As Schmitt suggests, especially now, in times of Big Data and algorithms that constantly surround us, “Adorno’s apologia” is more relevant than ever (see Schmitt 2020, 290). But this shows one thing above all: This state of affairs is nothing new, rather the opposite, its process began a long time ago, but that in no way diminishes its dimensions. We need to realize this, more than ever.
To avoid any misunderstandings: Of course, I listened to the album in its entirety. It is my task as both analyst and critic to give the work the respect it deserves. In this case, we are also by no means dealing with a clearly recognizable and highlightable ideology, but with a whole network of ideologies. Since no song builds directly on the previous ones, one would have to analyse each song individually to be able to uncover all the ideological links. Instead, this time I focused on analysing the apparatus behind it, the music industry, and all their entanglements. And to me, the results are clear: I don’t have any Faith in the Future of music. We only listen, but we haven’t heard for a long time.
Citations:
(*) Adorno, Theodor W.; Horkheimer, Max (2010). Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (E-Book). Frankfurt a.M. [Orig. 1944].
(*) Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (2019). Phänomenologie des Geistes. Hamburg [Orig. 1807].
(*) Schmitt, Peter (2020). Medienkritik zwischen Anthropologie und Gesellschaftstheorie: Zur Aktualität von Günther Anders und Theodor W. Adorno. Paderborn.
* Translated from German by myself.
