Listening for the Future: Popular Music for Europe

By Charlie Bertsch

When it comes to music journalism, Charlie Bertsch has few peers. An authority on everything from German punk to Moroccan Gnawa, Bertsch is at home in nearly every conceivable genre. 

Not all critics are like that. Not by a long shot. Chalk it up to three decades of writing about music for publications such as Alternet, Punk Planet and Tikkun and various American newspapers.

One of the many critics to come of age during the 1990s alt.culture era, Charlie Bertsch has persisted where many other critics have given up, developing a global repertoire in which the local is everywhere. 

Listening for the Future is that book. In 36 essays, written between March 2019 and January 2021 for Belgium's The Battleground, Bertsch paints an unparalleled portrait of European music culture.

What makes Listening for the Future so special is that it's not just about sound. It's about an entire continent, without borders, using music as a jumping off point to talk about politics and art, at home and abroad.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Battleground
• Release date: Sep 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9791220845786

Book preview

Introduction

What do we ask of popular music? It gives us pleasure. It provides a diversion from pressing concerns. It makes tedious routines more tolerable. It motivates us to push our bodies harder. It can help us to sustain a mood, whether it be calm or excited.

For most consumers, that’s enough. They do not ask more and are confused by those who do. And they are not likely to wonder what popular music asks of them. So long as it serves the functions spelt out above, they are satisfied.

But that satisfaction is a problem, one which the artists I write about in this collection are all keen to address. If you believe that the culture we consume matters, not just intrinsically, but as a key component of society more generally, confronting this problem is of critical importance.

The reduction of popular music to the status of painkiller is not new. As soon as it became possible for a great many people to experience the same culture, businesses sprang up to make a profit from its distribution. For all that has changed in the nearly two centuries since, this has remained a constant throughout most of the developed world.

Sometimes governments would intervene in this culture industry, most notably in communist societies like the former Soviet Union. But even if the profits they realised were of a more figurative nature, the same principle applied. People wanted a way to make their lives more bearable and turned to culture as a remedy.

This is oversimplifying matters, of course. Even if the majority of individuals use mass culture for anaesthetic purposes, there have always been those who regard it as a source of motivation.

In the case of popular music, the role rock played in the late 1960s or rap at the end of the Cold War are often cited as examples. But the closer we look at any era, the more likely we are to perceive a tension between those who use music as a way of deadening the impulse to seek social and political change and those who use it as a way of amplifying their dissatisfaction with the status quo.

Although this remains true – I could not have written the pieces in this collection if it were not – the percentage of people who are content to reduce music to a painkiller seems to have grown over the past two decades.

Popular music has lost a lot of ground relative to other forms of mass culture. The trajectory from Napster to MySpace to Spotify to TikTok suggests that downloading and streaming have contributed greatly to the devaluing of music.

This may seem counterintuitive. If more people are paying for access to a large quantity of music than ever before; if more people are able to bring their favourite music with them, wherever they go, how could that music also be less important than it was to previous generations?

Part of the reason is that access to music costs far less than it used to. To be sure, vinyl is not cheap. And new CDs, though increasingly marginalised by the remaining places that sell physical media, remain as overpriced as ever. But the percentage of people who actually purchase music in hard copy form has declined so precipitously as to become a niche market. Statements that were true of jazz or classical music aficionados during the heyday of rock and roll are now true for all genres.

The situation is even more extreme on the listening end. Few people own the kind of audio equipment that used to be ubiquitous in middle-class households.

For the vast majority of people who listen to music, the primary mode of listening is private, through headphones connected to a mobile phone.

When people do listen to music with others, it tends to be through Bluetooth devices that allow streaming services to be shared. Often these don’t even qualify as true stereos, since all the sound comes from a single cube or cylinder.

Sometimes people’s preferred streaming service is provided free of charge, like YouTube. Sometimes it comes bundled with other services through one’s provider. Most commonly, it is something they pay for with a subscription, paid automatically on a monthly basis.

While listeners are still paying for access to music in general, with their phone bill and the various services they subscribe to, the amount they are theoretically paying for access to any particular record is so small that it seems absurd to even calculate.

The music bill starts to feel like the electric and water bill, an abstract flow purchased in qualitatively undifferentiated units. And the music itself, whatever its provenance, functions more and more like the Muzak that used to be played over the public address system in stores and shopping malls.

Although the pieces collected here vary in topic and tone, I composed all of them with the conviction that music needs to be rescued from this depressing fate and that criticism still has a crucial role to play in its rescuing.

As I wrote, I tried to keep a few questions in mind: Why are billions of people willing to settle for music that plays the role of anaesthesia, deadening the impulse to demand more from their world and themselves? How can their feeling for music’s transformative power be revived? What steps may be taken to redeem the aesthetic possibilities latent in the anaesthetic?

* * *

Many of these pieces date from the period after the COVID-19 coronavirus had turned the world upside down. But even before social distancing, masks, and lockdowns were commonplace, I was experiencing the claustrophobia and isolation they came to represent. While I had felt the walls slowly closing in on me for years, 2019 was when I really started to panic.

Every night I visited my father, who had been confined to a hospital bed at a nursing home for nearly two years, the result of his recovery from minor surgery being derailed by negligence.

My daughter, who had been looking forward to a semester in Europe long before she began her university studies, was heartbroken to discover that she would have to wait until the following year.

Her mother, who had suffered a nervous breakdown the previous year in the wake of her mother’s death, was sinking deeper into a despair that seemed to overwhelm everyone who spent time with her.

All of them were depressed, in different ways. The pressure I felt to help them feel better was making it hard for me to plan for the future. And the news was making things worse, with President Donald Trump’s weekly outrages increasingly mirrored by the behaviour of authoritarian politicians throughout the developed world.

Although I am not a pessimist by nature, I was struggling to see a way out of my predicament.

That’s when The Battleground came to the rescue. As I settled into a routine, with a deadline every two weeks, I came to regard my work as a refuge, a way to tune out my troubles for a spell by tuning into that fortnight’s selection.

Most of the records I ended up writing about convey the anxiety of living in precarious times, when previously stable institutions are suddenly plunged into crisis and hope seems like a foolish luxury. But the task of thinking about them inevitably boosted my spirits.

Although I have always tried to give whatever I’m reviewing the benefit of the doubt, my claustrophobic circumstances made me even more diligent.

With the help of my car stereo and my inexpensive sport style Bluetooth headphones, I could listen to the music I was writing about whether I was running errands, doing the dishes, bicycling, or hiking. So that’s what I did, hour after hour, day after day.

For variety, I would listen to other records by the artist I was writing about or the virtual radio station on Spotify that used their work as a midpoint. Still, I never strayed far from the task at hand.

By the time I submitted my piece, I had practically memorised the record. It was time for something else. Conveniently, my next assignment was already waiting for me.

So I dove right in. No matter how bad the news, no matter how hard things were for my family, I could at least count on this one distraction.

At first, I would focus my attention on the sound of the music itself. The more I listened to a particular record, however, the more my mind would start to use it as a starting point for broader reflections.

I thought about the demands it made on listeners. I asked myself how it responded to the time and place of its creation. I tried to situate it in relation to the history of popular music. And I contemplated my own reactions, doing my best to be mindful of the distinction between what anybody listening to the record could hear and what I had zeroed in on only because of my background and inclinations.

This last step is particularly important to me. Sometimes it remains a private experience, providing me with guidance about how to correct for bias. Most of the pieces here are well under 1500 words, making it difficult to do justice to a record while also devoting time to my own subjective experience of listening to it.

If it seems as though my biases are more generic and therefore impersonal – like an antipathy towards the classic rock exalted by Baby Boomers or a generational preference for the slower, more sharply delineated flow of 1990s rappers – I tend to edit them out.

On the other hand, if I am attracted or repulsed by something because of specific events in my life, particularly when I now perceive those events as part of a consequential trajectory, I try very hard to leave traces of them in the finished product. This usually takes the form of a few sentences in the first-person singular.

Writers will often use I to move a piece along – I will now turn my attention to the problem of technology – without providing enough detail to sense the person behind it. This first-person singular is rhetorical, existentially vacant.

I use that I frequently. In fact, I just did. But when it feels important to acknowledge the specificity of an experience in my life and the impact it has had on my perception, I need to flesh out the first-person singular. Ideally, somebody who knows me well should be able to identify me after reading a few sentences, even if they haven’t seen my by-line.

This is not how I was taught to write criticism. On the contrary, from grade-school through my undergraduate years, teacher after teacher impressed upon me how important it was to strive for the appearance of objectivity. They told me that revealing too much of myself would weaken the points I was making and therefore undermine my authority.

And I suppose that’s true, in a way. If my goal were simply to convince readers that first-generation punk bands got more interesting when they added synthesizers to their repertoire or persuade them that country-rock of The Eagles was a pox on humanity, then it would be unwise to let them know too much about how my personal taste preferences came into being.

But that is not my goal. Nor was it ever. Even as a teenager, I was put off by the way critics use the third-person to cloak themselves in the mantle of authority. Although I would often doubt my own reactions to culture after reading their pronouncements, I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that I was being duped.

Although I was aware that professional critics knew a lot more than I did, I didn’t see why that necessarily made their response to a work of art superior to mine. I wanted a sense of how and why they arrived at their conclusions, rather than being asked to take it for granted that they were correct. I wasn’t hostile to expertise; I just wanted to know something about how critics had acquired it.

That is one reason why, when I started writing criticism of my own, I tried to avoid cut-and-dried aesthetic judgments.

Sometimes this meant incorporating counterarguments into a review written entirely in the third person. More often than not, however, I would also include sentences in the first-person singular that communicated autobiographical details, so my readers would know where I was coming from.

* * *

I’ve had the good fortune to write for a series of publications that gave me permission to experiment with this approach to criticism: Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life, Punk Planet, Tikkun, ZEEK, and Souciant.

Despite the many differences between them, these print and early online magazines shared a commitment to go against the grain, recognizing how important it is to provide an alternative to the mainstream media.

So does The Battleground. At the same time, although it has much in common with these other publications, the fact that it is a self-consciously European publication makes a big difference.

The sort of writing I’ve been doing for the past three decades is much less common in Europe, even now. This is part of what makes The Battlground’s coverage so valuable.

The political commentary that makes up the majority of the magazine’s content would be impressive anywhere, drawing attention to perspectives that the mainstream media is either unable or unwilling to inhabit meaningfully.

But The Battleground stands out even more within a European context. There simply isn’t much like it. Even the sort of cultural analysis I do is unusual there.

It’s worth taking time to consider the history behind this state of affairs. The almost-anything-goes approach that American free weeklies promoted in the 1980s and 1990s had few equivalents in Europe. The Brussels weekly Bruzz is the only equivalent, albeit a contemporary one.

In the United States, a sizable percentage of the people who have devoted themselves to preserving and amplifying self-consciously alternative perspectives on the Internet used to work for free weeklies, in some capacity. And a great many more had been devoted readers of those publications.

While it is dangerous to generalise about the media in Europe, given lingering national differences and the lack of a truly common language, its lack of free weeklies meant that mainstream newspapers and state broadcasters themselves had to play a bigger role in promoting diversity of content during the early days of the web.

This significantly widened the divide between those alternative perspectives that were supported through official channels and those that had to survive within a hostile media ecology that kept underscoring their lack of legitimacy.

It was hard to be taken seriously in Europe unless you were doing something that had the imprimatur of the establishment, whether directly or by way of financial support from organizations and individuals who strongly identified with it.

Although there were advantages to this arrangement from the standpoint of electoral politics, initially making it more difficult for extremists to take power, the long-term impact was far less salutary.

The marginalisation of radical voices went hand in hand with the marginalisation of those commentators who were paying close attention to the sectors of society in which radicalism was finding a receptive audience.

This resulted in a false sense of security, with political leaders and the bureaucrats who serve them failing to recognise that extremists’ lack of mainstream legitimacy would eventually help to legitimate them across Europe because of their opposition to the EU and Brussels-friendly politicians.

By the time this trend was widely acknowledged in the continent’s centres of power, it had developed too much momentum to stop. Something similar happened in the United States during Barack Obama’s presidency.

Donald Trump’s shocking rise within the Republican Party leading up to the 2016 election was as dependent upon this reverse legitimacy as the numerous authoritarian populist movements that had been surging across Europe.

Perhaps it would have been impossible to stop either, in the end, given the rapidly expanding chasm between those who felt that they had at least some access to the levers of political and economic power and those who perceived themselves as have-nots.

But the fact that Europe had largely failed to generate an equivalent to the American free weekly and its Internet-based successors made it more difficult to register these unsettling changes at a cultural level. While many American critics took it for granted that the relationship between popular culture and politics