On Sloppy Jane’s 2021 album Madison, there is a track called The Constable. At around the six-minute mark, a murmur of voices begins to fade in beneath the jauntily melancholic piano, just before Haley Dahl sings the final verse: ‘The world is ending, the planet is shaking, overtaken by the big blue screens.’ she sings. She paints us a few pictures of people dying in collapsing caves, or with ‘grace and dignity’ in front of their TVs, and even gives a mention to those who could afford to take off in a rocket ship ‘to fight a war between heaven and space.’ As for her: ‘I just ignored it, I sat on the doorstep of the house where you used to live.’
After this verse she stops singing. The piano carries on for a little while as the voices beneath the music come into increasing focus, and we hear them counting down from ten. At the end of their count, they yell ‘Happy new year!’ and then, without pause, begin another countdown from ten, and another ‘Happy new year!’ The piano fades out and leaves us with only these voices, as they repeat the countdown over and over again. Presumably, it is the band who we can hear, and the cavernous reverb in which their voices swim can be explained by the fact that this album was indeed recorded in a cave.
In the context of the song we have just heard, the voices are like a choir of ghosts. And what’s a year to a ghost? Ten seconds? Well, why not? With nobody left alive to separate the days from the months from the years, we are left with what feels like the very voice of time forgetting itself slowly as the song fades out. A lament – an ode from time to the creatures who once lived through it. The dying echoes of a song with no singer as the curtain finally descends on the world. Haley Dahl begins the song with a verse whose melody strongly resembles Nick Cave’s ‘Where Do We Go Now But Nowhere?’ – whether an intentional reference or not, it’s a question that could not be more prescient as The Constable finally secedes into silence.
There is a special kind of irony in this repeating countdown which I believe resonates with the malaise of the modern soul. We are so sensitive to time, and this is particularly apparent when we are given reminders of its passing. How many tweets have you seen screenshotted and shared in mournful disbelief that it’s been twenty years since the release of Shrek? Thirty years since The Lion King? Or sorrowful callbacks to childhoods spent outside, or in play-areas, Wacky Warehouses, community swimming pools; a world that felt accommodating – a world that you were supposed to be in.
Not to suggest that there are no swimming pools or play-areas left – but something has changed, or at least, that’s what the generation who have entered the 2020s wrestling with their own adulthood believe. Just look at the memetic trend of ‘liminal spaces’ so popular with young adults – and what do you see? The world emptied of people. Not the natural world, there’s nothing uncanny in an unpeopled landscape – but empty corridors, empty stairways, arcades, airports, restaurants, hotels… places built for the accommodation of physical bodies, abandoned. Haunted now by us, by our remembering… we have cast ourselves as ghosts. Often these images are also paired with distant or muffled music that sounds like it’s coming from another room, and (due to the intentionally nostalgic song choices) another time.
But has something changed? Is this just the inevitable ennui of nostalgia that every generation faces simply becoming more apparent due to the increased ease of video and image creation? I would argue that this increased ease is a crucial part of a very real change. Time has become condensed in the digital age in more ways than one. Not only does the constant stimulation of technology and the barrage of information it feeds us keep us superficially attentive enough that time seems to pass by very quickly, and often with fewer handholds in the ‘real’ world to mark its passing than we might have had in another time, but the near-unlimited access we have to historical records; the canon of preserved literature, music, painting – all of it is brought together into a kind of conglomerate, spaceless present in the digital realm. The significance of time has been lessened. It has become much easier to assemble the artefacts of different ages side by side, and to consume them in as orderly or disorderly a fashion as takes our fancy. We are living in a kind of pleasure museum, in which near-enough the entire history of our culture is offered up for our amusement.
Consumerism is nothing new, but there was once upon a time a more communal milieu in which the things we consumed were discussed. For most of us, gone are the days when we would tune in week-by-week for another episode of a show that it felt like the whole world was watching. Gone is the comfort of watching at the same time, the same pace, as millions of others (the comfort that global events such as the World Cup and the Olympics still provide, reminding us of what we have lost outside of those charmed islands in time). Gone – for the most part – are the obsessive, scheduled dissections in the workplace or the schoolyard of each episode, the excitable overanalaysis, the wild predictions. Things tend these days to be given to us whole. And increasingly, we are having to go online to commune with those who have watched our favourite shows or seen our favourite movies. Our attention is yet again being redirected to the digital.
There are some shows who have remained serial and have reaped the benefits: Game of Thrones and Euphoria to name two (at least until both kneecapped themselves with terrible writing)… but the damage has already been done by now. We have too much at our fingertips. When all things are available all of the time the value is siphoned from each and every one of them into a vortex of indecision. Scroll through Netflix for an hour. Settle on something to watch. Watch it while thinking about everything else you could be watching.
The same has happened with music streaming. Music has not only lost much of its value economically (in terms of artists being able to comfortably make a living), but it has lost its value to listeners also in the sea of options. Option paralysis starves us of wholly committing to the enjoyment of anything. There is always more. There is no end to the choices.
Inevitably, this means more and more of our time is being committed to at least trying to work through those choices. Striving to reach some final point of satiety. Consuming has come to feel like an obligation. So much so that I have just used the word ‘striving’ to describe sitting down in front of the TV. Marvel fans must know exactly what I mean… and oh don’t Marvel Studios know it too? When an audience feels obligated to watch, there is no need to work hard for their attention. Why bother with the effort of making great films when mediocre, and even worse than that will do?
Work, come home, cook, eat, wash the dishes, catch up on your shows… what a life we are being invited to live. But god knows it doesn’t feel like there’s much better for us out there, away from our screens (or at least that’s what those screens would have you believe), so why not get cosy and settle in for a night of Netflix?
I fear that we’re becoming something of a lost generation. We are barely even living our lives. How much more life experience does the modern 35-year-old really have over the modern 25-year-old? I’d be far from the first to accuse modern culture of being infantilising – just look at what we hold dear. Not enough of us are being taught – by role models or by art – to self-reflect, and so we are stagnating. Memory has become a boastful currency in lieu of anything else with which to champion yourself. 35-year-olds have at least had time to watch more. They remember more. They’ve lost more time. You’re mourning the 20th anniversary of Shrek? I’m mourning The Lion King’s 30th. Somebody else is mourning The Goonies’ 40th. These are our landmarks in time now. Ironic, maybe, given all of the political, natural and cultural crises that only seem to proliferate with every passing year – but what can you expect from a generation who have grown up receiving war updates one scroll of the thumb away from the new Spiderman trailer?
I am well aware that I have written this piece in the grip of some quite probably excessive pessimism. To remedy that a little, I’d be remiss not to say that there are rays of hope: I see the attention monopoly of Disney and all of its acquisitions waning even among its committed fanbases. I see more people opting out of social media, or turning their smart phones into ‘dumb phones’. Sometimes it feels as if the whole world is reaching a crisis point, and with regards to this issue as much as any. We’re becoming tired of quantity over quality. We want our precious time back.
And this is why hearing a group of people stuck in a loop of endless new year’s countdowns strikes such a raw nerve right now. The mourning of time is becoming a much more conscious sorrow. Where are the years going? We ask ourselves that question whenever a new one arrives, as we look in disbelief at that unfamiliar configuration of numbers that couldn’t possibly represent this time, this now. Each time I hear Sloppy Jane cry out ‘happy new year!’ I feel life rushing to its conclusion far too fast, like a ride I can’t get off. The ending of The Constable is a cry from the soul of the modern human, and like true artists Sloppy Jane present it to us dripping in dramatic irony: happy new year, they say, but in the context in which they have placed them, these words say anything but. They say: What are you doing with your life? They say: Nothing lasts forever. They say: It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. They say: Sing with us, there’s not much time left.