On Hypermodern Music, Musicians & Music Videos

a chapter from my forthcoming book "Hypermodernity & The Return of the Gods"

Introduction

Hypermodernity is not a term which I invented, but it is a concept which I fleshed out back in 2018 or so in an essay published on my blog Cultural Discourse. When I looked around all over the Internet at that time, there was no clear definition of just precisely what this word means and how the reality which it points to differs from that of postmodernity.

In my 2011 book The New Media Invasion, I described this new epoch as having originated in 1995 when the National Science Foundation made the Internet available to the general public. This was followed by a Steve Jobsian explosion of amazing digital gadgets which slowly began to fuse with the Internet as the central hub of a new civilizational phase space. In that book and others which followed it—such as Art After Metaphysics (2013)—I demonstrated how these new mediatic technologies from the mid 90s on began to transform the Laws of Media—as McLuhan termed them—into a whole new horizon powered, not by analogue electronics, but by a new digitized form of modernity which completely melted postmodernity down to an ash heap.

Postmodernity, to be brief, was all about the deconstruction and cancellation of Meaning-making of any sort, and of ridiculing with sarcasm and irony, any form of making sense out of the world. The generation born from about 1990 on, known as the Millenials, thus grew up in a world in which their teachers explained to them firmly that nothing means anything. There is no meaning to the world whatsoever. As the French Deconstructionists have very carefully demonstrated, it is a world of absences, to borrow from the poet Michael Aaron Kamins, that we are now confronted with. In my book Art After Metaphysics, I coined the term “semiotic vacancies” to describe what the contemporary artists of Euro-American civilization—from Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol down to Josef Beuys and Gerhard Richter—were doing in their works of art.

In the following essay—which is an early draft for a chapter that will appear in my forthcoming book Hypermodernity and The Return of the Gods—I will explore the hypermodern landscape by giving concrete examples in the world of pop music.

Bjork’s Hypermodern Isobel Epic

Bjork is the key figure to this entire development in pop music. Her first solo album—after working with The Sugarcubes on four albums between 1988-92—was appropriately entitled Debut (1993) and everything on it is still very postmodern—glib, superficial and trite—with one exception, which we will get to shortly. Her second album Post, as the title indicates, was still mostly postmodern in tone, except for the song “Isobel,” which was created very late in the recording of the songs on that album, somewhere in December 1994-95.

Bjork has stated that the song came to her around Christmas when one day she had a moth attach itself happily to her collar, where it remained for the entire day. She felt that it might be some sort of omen and so she conceived a character named Isobel—an avatar of herself—who grows up alone and very lonely in the woods. One day a moth comes to her and she whispers a message for it to take to the skyscrapers of the big city which have completely lost touch with the forces of what we might term the Gaian Overmind.

Now as Jean Gebser in The Ever-Present Origin has pointed out, winged creatures always symbolize what he terms “the soul’s death pole” (whereas flowing water is always associated with the “the soul’s life pole”). The fact that it is a moth—a signifier that is pregnant with a rich tradition of serious meaning regarding death—which comes to Bjork to announce the transition from a dying postmodern world in which nothing means anything to a new hypermodern quest for meaning is absolutely apropos.

Bjork says that the song is actually the second in a series of five songs—together with their accompanying music videos—and that the first one was “Human Behavior,” which appears on the album Debut. The music video for that song, directed by Michel Gondry, shows an as yet unnamed Isobel sitting at a kitchen table in a small cabin monologuing about how strange she finds human behavior. One minute they’re angry and the next minute they’re happy. Why? She’s befuddled. She has apparently grown up alone—like Tarzan—with the animals as her only companions. As she says:

My name Isobel

Married to myself

My love Isobel

Living by myself

She then gives the message to the moth to carry the Gaian wisdom to the big cities which have erupted out of a Christian paradigm in which all of nature is regarded as fallen, degenerate and corrupt. Nature therefore contains NO wisdom, and the world’s indigenous peoples, again therefore, can be dismissed as “dirt worshippers” and genocidally wiped out. Thus Christian Modernity together with all its colonialization and subsequent planetary industrialization.

The third Isobel song appears on the thoroughly hypermodern album Homogenic (1997) in which an entirely mythological and symbolic world opens up. In the first song, “Hunter,” Bjork identifies herself with Artemis / Diana, the virgin goddess of the wild things. In “Bachelorette,” the third of the Isobel songs, she mystically identifies herself with all of nature and its powerfully beautiful morphogenetic forces:

I’m a tree that grows hearts

One for each that you take

You’re the intruder’s hand

I’m the branch that you break

As Bjork explains:

So on “Bachelorette,” Isobel decides to return to the city. It’s like the sequel to her story. She goes back to the city by train, which is why the beats of the song are like a train, and she prepares to confront all the people that she loves with love. It’s a disarming confrontation.

Now, this character of the lone—usually but not always—female protagonist who finds herself lost in the woods looking for Meaning to descend upon her, or rather to erupt from the ground Daphne-like and completely overtake her, is one of the main characters of hypermodern music (as well as art, as we shall see). Willow Smith, for instance, is a second generation Gen Z hypermodern who, in her first album Ardipithecus (2015) likewise creates an avatar of herself as a woman lost in the forest looking for Meaning, as the following lyrics from the song “dRuGz” illustrate:

And I’m just a girl

Walking through the woods, but I’m mighty

I’ma climb this mountain

And ain’t nobody gonna stop me

Ardipithecus, as both the title and the album cover demonstrate, is no pomo record that mocks meaning or is interested in deconstructing it, but is rather packed with 15 songs crying out for Meaning. Willow Smith’s spirituality is thoroughly New Age, as she is obviously familiar with the Indigo children, Atlantis, the Akashic record and the etheric (i.e. form-making) forces of Nature in general. She takes all of this as her a priori.

This is also the same avatar created by the hypermodern artist Mary Church, which is why I have chosen to illustrate this chapter with her 2010 self-portrait “Lost in the Woods.” The avatar that she creates for herself in her art is very similar to those of both Bjork and Willow Smith. She also created a narrative in seven images, which I have termed “The Qlippoth Series,” which makes essentially the same points as Bjork’s Isobel avatar.

But instead of a human avatar, there are other signifiers such as a lone chair, a ladder and a house in the woods that point to a human presence. The first image is that of a table with three chairs inside of some strange hall in which the fourth one is separated from the others (what Joseph Campbell would call in his three stage hero’s journey “Separation,” in which a disaffected lone protagonist separates from the known world of the Village and descends into the unknown Forest in order to discover the boon that is missing from the contemporary world horizon):

I have termed this series “Qlippoth” because Church, as she explained to me, was inspired by Anselm Kiefer’s use of broken glass which he strews all over the floors of his installations to reference the Kabbalistic myth of the Shevirat ha Kelim, or the “breaking of the vessels,” in which the downpouring radiance of God’s Light is so powerful that the ten vessels of the Sephiroth cannot withstand it and therefore disintegrate into shards (called “qlippoth”) that then transform into the demons of the material world who go to war against the beings of Light.

In Church’s cosmology, these demons-as-shards are identified with industrial society as the Ahrimanic antagonist against her Nature Beings (i.e. Bjork’s Gaian Overmind) which she favors, as Nature for Mary Church was a revelation of spiritual powers that were occluded by both industrial society and Christianity which paved the way for it with basically the same paradigm.

After the next few images in the series we arrive at the last two, Woods and Progress? In Woods, the protagonist is now indicated by a cabin in the woods (cf. Bjork’s Isobel cabin in the videos), but the woods are shown as having been hacked down by deforestation:

The last picture in the series, Progress?, is a rather ambiguous image which shows her house-as-protagonist surrounded and encompassed (Heidegger would say “enframed”) by technology, which is indicated by the highway:

Church has consciously borrowed—from my You Tube videos which she was assiduously watching before we ever met—Heidegger’s concept of technology as “enframing” the earth by storing up its forces to make them available “on demand” for industrial civilization.

So these hypermodern artists, Bjork and Mary Church from its first Millenial generation, and Willow Smith and also Billie Eilish from its Gen Z second generation are essentially inhabiting the same mental phase space and that space most decidedly is not that of postmodernity.

The fourth song in Bjork’s Isobel epic is “Oceania” from Medulla (2004). As Bjork explains, “Basically, the Olympics people asked me to do a kind of ‘Ebony and Ivory’ or ‘We Are the World’ type song,” she says. "Those are smashing tunes and all that, but I thought, ‘Maybe there’s another angle to this.’[…] I think, because the song is all about how the ocean doesn’t see boundaries between countries and thinks everyone is the same.” —The Independent

As her Isobel says in the song:

One breath away from Mother Oceania

Your nimble feet make prints in my sands

You have done good for yourselves

Since you left my wet embrace

and crawled ashore…

…You show me continents

I see islands

You count the centuries

I blink my eyes

Isobel is no longer isolated and lonely, for she has made a cosmic and very mystical identification with the Ocean itself, the earth’s most powerful creative force.

Finally, in the astonishing music video for the last Isobel song, “Wanderlust” from Volta (2007), Isobel has now transformed into a mountain goddess (she wears a yellow mountain-shaped helmet that echoes the peaks of the mountains in the background). She begins by listening to a herd of monstrous buffalo with tusks as they have a conversation, and then, personifying the force of Gaia herself, uses her hands to begin carving out the earth’s rivers. She travels across the earth with her herd of buffalo monsters (the Inuit goddess of the animals, Sedna, in other words) creating all of its water systems until she meets a Chinese dragon with whom she communes. In Chinese mythology, dragons are personifications of the earth’s water systems as they move from snow and rain on mountain tops to then create rivers which pour out into the ocean and evapo-transpire into clouds that bring more rain and so the cycle repeats itself. In Finnegans Wake, the water system is identified with the goddess ALP (mountain goddess: the alps, and also Freud’s alptraum, which is German for “nightmare,” as she creates and projects the nightmare of world history).

Bjork herself, in other words, is relentlessly craving “meaning” as she travels across the topological manifold of the peaks and vales of hypermodernity.

Thus, these hypermodern artists, Bjork and Willow Smith, Mary Church and Billie Eilish, all share in common the rejection of the postmodern cliche that “nothing means anything.” As intuitive artists, they sense that they have been fed a line of BS by their teachers—and by industrial-electronic society in general—and so busy themselves with working on putting the shards of Humpty Dumpty back together again. But this will be no mere reconstruction of the corpse of Christianity—as Jean Gebser, unfortunately, concludes in The Ever-Present Origin—but an entirely new world of gods and goddesses haunting the trees and the woods, the oceans and the rivers, earth and sky, mortals and divinities.

I’ll meet you there.

Billie Eilish b. 2001; currently 24

Black Star as David Bowie’s only hypermodern record

Willow Smith: Ardipithecus is her first album in 2015 and right from the first chords the music is instantly hypermodern, which is to say fresh and original but at the same time familiar though not recycled; it samples hip hop, electro grunge, etc.

her song dRuGz is the exact musical equivalent of Mary Church’s self-portrait “Lost in the Woods”

from “Natives of the Windy Forest” on Ardipithecus

All the natives of the windy forest
Come hither
All the natives of the windy forest
All the natives of the windy forest
Feel the music soaking in your pores
Feel the music soaking in your pores
The forest children are making songs
And trying to get you to sing along

Very much resembles the ending of Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke. 1997

and from “dRuGz”:

And I'm just a girl
Walking through the woods, but I'm mighty
I'ma climb this mountain
And ain't nobody gonna stop me

Compare with Mary Church’s “Lost in the Woods”

Bjork is transitional. Her first album “Debut” came out in 1993 and is thoroughly postmodern, as is most of her second album “Post,” as the title suggests. That album was released in 1995, the year which I have demarcated as the transition into hypermodernity and so it is interesting that one of the last songs she recorded for this album, “Isobel,” is a thoroughly hypermodern song about a young girl growing up in the woods who…

Isobel is a character first invented by Bjork for the song Human Behavior on Debut. But Bjork said that the second to feature her as a character, “Isobel” on Post, was inspired near the end of the recordings for that album by a moth that she had on her shirt collar which seemed happy to just stay there all day. In the song Isobel, she whispers a message to a moth on her collar to take it to the big city which has now encroached upon the woods, destroying their organic interwovenness.

from Human Behavior:

And there is no map
And a compass wouldn't help at all

And in 1993, the same year as Bjork’s Debut, U2 put out their masterpiece Zooropa in which contemporary hypermodernity is so bewildering with its information overload that Bono has no apparatus of semiotic capture with which to contain it. And so he says,

And I have no compass
And I have no map
And I have no reasons
No reasons to get back
And I have no religion
And I don't know what's what
And I don't know the limit
The limit of what we've got

There are no maps and there are no compasses in hypermodernity, only semiotic vacancies where there used to exist transcendental signifieds to anchor meaning and prevent it from sliding around into semiotic chaos. They hypermodern generation feels gypped in other words because it finds itself left with a junkheap of broken signifiers and shards that seem to have no meaning. But a meaningless world is unacceptable to the human psyche because it instinctively knows that EVERYTHING is packed with meaning! There is not one meaningless thing or event on this planet. It is all woven together through that cosmic rhizome which Jean Gebser calls the unitary magical consnciousness structure.

The astonishing fan created music video for Radiohead’s song “Everything in its Right Place” (2000) is a masterpiece of hypermodernity (c. 2021).

Mary Church tells the same narrative with her Qlippoth series and her “Lost in the Woods” self-portrait, which Willow Smith also features in her song dRuGz. All these female artists features themselves in their songs as girls who are lost in the woods looking for a paradigm that will harmoniously integrate the Gaian Overmind with the Hypermodern big cities.

The moth, as Jean Gebser points out, is a symbol of the soul’s death pole (as it always has been) and so it is significant that it is a moth which lands on Bjork’s collar bringing with it a long tradition of Meaning. It is no random signifier but a messenger from the Gaian Overmind to deliver intuition and meaning to the cityscapes of globalization. In the Godzilla movies, there is a giant moth named Mothra, which carries a tiny pair of twin goddesses on its back who deliver nature’s (or Gaia’s brood of monsters from Hesiod) messages to the cities. Same motif.

from Isobel:

In a tower of steel
Nature forges a deal
To raise wonderful hell
Like me, like me

In Bachelorette on Homogenic (which is now a hypermodern album par excellence) Isobel returns back to the city, as Bjork explains:

“So on Bachelorette, Isobel decides to return to the city. It’s like the sequel to her story. She goes back to the city by train, which is why the beats of the song are like a train, and she prepares to confront all the people that she loves with love. It’s a disarming confrontation.”
- Bjork

The fourth song featuring the Isobel avatar is “Oceania” from Medulla (2004). As Bjork explains, Basically, the Olympics people asked me to do a kind of ‘Ebony and Ivory’ or ‘We Are the World’ type song,“ she says. "Those are smashing tunes and all that, but I thought, ‘Maybe there’s another angle to this.’[…] I think, because the song is all about how the ocean doesn’t see boundaries between countries and thinks everyone is the same.” —The Independent

In a 2008 interview with Stereogum, she also included "Oceania" of Medúlla (2004) and "Wanderlust" of Volta (2007) in this narrative cycle.^[8]

One breath away from Mother Oceania
Your nimble feet make prints in my sands
You have done good for yourselves
Since you left my wet embrace
And crawled ashore
Every boy is a snake, is a lily
Every pearl is a lynx, is a girl
Sweet-like harmony made into flesh
You dance by my side
Children sublime

[Verse 2]
You show me continents
I see islands
You count the centuries
I blink my eyes
Hawks and sparrows race in my waters
Stingrays are floating
Across the sky
Little ones, my sons and my daughters
Your sweat is salty
I am why, I am why
I am why
Your sweat is salty
I am why, I am why
I am why, I am why

The fifth Isobel song is “Wanderlust” from Volta:

Björk has described “Wanderlust” as being the heart of Volta, and has said that the song is about “the state of looking for something and almost knowing you’re never going to find it” and that it makes fun of her hunger for “something new”.

The music video for Bjork’s Wanderlust is the crown jewel of all five of the Isobel songs together with their accompanying videos. Isobel has now transformed into a mountain goddess (she wears a mountain shaped helmet that echoes the peaks of the mountains in the background). She begins by listening to a herd of monstrous buffalo with tusks as they have a conversation, and then, personifying the force of Gaia herself, uses her hands to begin carving out the earth’s rivers. She travels across the earth with her herd of buffalo monsters (Sedna, in other words) creating all of its water systems until she meets a Chinese dragon with whom she communes. In Chinese mythology, dragons are personifications of the earth’s water systems as they move from snow and rain on mountain tops to then create rivers which pour out in the ocean and evapotranspire into clouds that bring more rain and so the cycle repeats itself. In Finnegans Wake, it is the goddess ALP (mountain goddess: the alps, and also Freud’s alptraum, which is German for nightmare, as she creates and projects the nightmare of world history). Bjork herself is relentlessly craving “meaning” as she travels across the topological manifold of the peaks and vales of hypermodernity.

Thom Yorke

Hypermodernity

2012-present Gen Alpha

1997-2012 Gen Z

1981-96 Millenials

Postmodernity subphase III

1980-1995

Postmodernity subphase II

1965-80 Gen X

Postmodernity subphase I

1946—64 Boomers

1937-58 Pluto transits through Leo

Modernity subphase III

1928-45 Silent generation

Modernity subphase II

1896—1907 Uranus & Pluto conjunction

Modernity subphase I

1860-1896

Silent generation

1927-28 Jupiter Uranus conjunction

1933-35 Jupiter Uranus conjunction

1940-41 Jupiter Uranus conjunction

Gen X

1960-72 Uranus & Pluto conjunction

Millenials

1985-2001 Uranus & Neptune conjunction