In 2011, pop music scholar Simon Reynolds was already observing pop culture’s fascination with its own past, noting that “we live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for memorial.”
For Reynolds, this obsession with the past has the potential to bring about the end of pop music culture: “Could it,” he asks, “the greatest danger to the future of our music culture is … its past?”
The situation has not improved in recent years since Reynolds raised his concerns. Our fixation on the popular music of previous decades threatens our future by stifling originality.
Thanks to recording technology and now the latest advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, we increasingly find ourselves in a spectral present, haunted by the ghosts of pop music’s past.
Fantastic presence
This type of haunting can cause anxiety. Hauntology, a theoretical concept derived from the work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, was later applied to musicology by the critic Mark Fisher. Hauntology deals with memory, nostalgia and the nature of existence. The present is never just “present” and remnants of our cultural past always remain or return.
Read more: Are you haunted by ghosts from your past and ghosts from your future? Welcome to the spooky realm of hauntology
A ghost, in literature, folklore and popular culture, is a presence from someone’s past or someone who no longer lives. So is it a ghost from the past or the present? As hauntology would insist, a ghost is paradoxically both at the same time.
In November 2023, pop phenomenon The Beatles released a “new” song titled “Now and Then.” It was enthusiastically received by fans and critics and soon topped the charts in the United States and the United Kingdom, becoming the fastest-selling single of 2023.
The song features a lead vocal track by the late John Lennon, salvaged from a demo recording he made at home in the late 1970s, just a few years before his murder in 1980. It also features archival guitar tracks from the late George Harrison .
The two surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, contributed new bass, drums, vocals and guitar parts (McCartney even played a guitar solo that mimics Harrison’s sound and style), and producer Giles Martin (son by legendary Beatles producer George Martin) provided a string arrangement and a tapestry of backing vocals taken from other iconic Beatles songs.
Now and then was also celebrated for the technological sophistication of its production and specifically its use Artificial Intelligence. Using software that could tell the difference between a human voice and other sounds in a recording, Lennon’s voice was isolated and revived, allowing McCartney and Starr to play alongside their long-deceased partner.
Last masterpiece
“Now and then,” in addition to being a “new” Beatles song, is probably the group’s last: there are no other old recordings to resurrect, and McCartney and Starr are both octogenarians.
Indeed, according to music critics such as The guardian“Now and then” by Alexis Petridis is an emotionally satisfying “closing act”. It stands on its own as a genuine addition to the Beatles catalogue, completing the band’s career and “never stooping to obviously mean Beatles-y development.”
Music journalist Jem Aswad, writing at Varietycharacterizes “Now and then” as “bittersweet finale.” While Aswad slightly criticizes the song as an “unfinished sketch”, he simultaneously insists that any further criticism is simply unwarranted sour grapes, concluding that it is “an unexpected pleasure that marks the completion of the group’s latest unfinished piece. business.”
Haunted, eerie
Some critics, however, echoing Reynolds’ concerns, found “Now and Then” decidedly less laudable. Josiah Gogarty’s brutal review, published in UnHerdargues that the song serves as “a sign of us loop of cultural destruction“, and likened it to a “meeting, which calls forth the strife and tumult of the dead.”
The recording features McCartney’s count-in at the beginning and some studio talk from Starr at the end, as if to reassure listeners that the song is the product of live musicians.
At the same time, the song is chillingly out of place or ahistorical, caught somewhere between past and present: a haunting, otherworldly thing, evidence of a pop culture that has long since ceased to evolve.
Limiting the future
The problem is the way songs like “Now and Then” are steeped in nostalgia: they threaten the future and limit the possibility of new ideas emerging.
Fisher feared the result of this kind of nostalgia that produced “a canceled future.” We can easily imagine such a future, because we already inhabit it: a future of endless touring by impossibly impoverished rock bands, countless reboots of old movies and TV shows, fetishization of all things vintage.
Even the most astonishingly progressive technological developments—like the artificial intelligence that made “Now and Then” possible—turn out to serve a regressive purpose, namely the resurrection of the Beatles.
A generous view of “Now and then” would be to consider its arrangement and production as capturing and amplifying the meaning of the song’s lyrics: “Now and then I miss you… I want you back.” These lyrics suggest the presence and absence that hauntology considers, which is cleverly reflected in the haunting soundscape of the song.
Less generously, “Now and Then,” rather than a closing act, simply continues an ongoing trend of looking backward in pop music. It shows that our insecurities about our future ensure that we remain forever entangled with its ghosts.
