The Slow Cancellation of the (White) Future in Popular Culture

Alongside Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life stands as his defining attempt to theorise what he perceived to be the cultural malaise permeating British society ever since the end of the 1970s. Published in 2014, 5 years after Capitalist Realism, Ghosts of My Life argues that we are currently living through a “slow cancellation of the future” in which, for a variety of reasons, older generations are more likely to be “startled by the sheer persistence of recognisable [cultural] forms” than they are to recoil from the “new” in “fear and incomprehension”. In other words, Fisher argues that culture in the 21st Century is stuck in a perpetual “nostalgia mode”, a term coined by literary theorist Frederick Jameson to describe “a formal attachment to the techniques and formulas of the past, a consequence of a retreat from the modernist challenge of innovating cultural forms”. A “modernist challenge” which in the late 19th and early 20th century pushed artists to experiment in their fields and create art which better crystallised not only the present moment but their hopes for the future in a rapidly changing society.

In particular, Fisher identifies the state of popular music culture in the 2000s and 2010s as the clearest embodiment of this cultural stagnation. He identifies the innovations made in popular music in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s as a reference point for the “passage of cultural time”. Innovations such as the blues-heavy sounds and bell-bottom jeans of the 70s, for example, gave way to the synths and over-sized shoulder pads of the 80s, allowing “cultural time” to be simplified, compartmentalised, and understood in hindsight. Compared to music from these eras, Fisher laments, the 21st century’s output is conspicuously lacking in “this very sense of future shock”, the exhilarating disorientation felt when presented with a radically new cultural and technological form. “Imagine any record released in the past couple of years being beamed back in time to, say, 1995 and played on the radio”, he continues, “It’s hard to think that it will produce any jolt in the listeners”. Alternatively, Fisher argues, a jungle record from 1993 would have challenged an audience from 1989 to “rethink what music was, or could be”.

Fisher offers two concrete examples to encapsulate his critique. The first of these is the band Arctic Monkeys, specifically their music video for the song I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor which Fisher observes to resemble “some lost artefact from circa 1980” down to the lighting, the haircuts, the clothes, and indeed the music itself, which Fisher remarks “could quite easily have been [made by] a postpunk group from the early 1980s”. The second example he uses to ground his ideas is Amy Winehouse’s version of Valerie, which simulates a ‘60s old sound’ over 40 years after the period in question, prompting Fisher to wonder whether the track was not a cover of the Zutons’ original version but an even older arrangement the band had covered originally.

Reading back Fisher’s writings in 2026, almost a decade after his tragic death by suicide, it appears that his thesis has almost become the consensus position, shared by critics, journalists, policymakers, and even the artists themselves. In a 2018 piece for Rolling Stone titled Things That Make You Go Hmmm: Why 2018 Was A Year of Nineties Obsessions, American cultural critic Rob Sheffield recounts examples of 90s nostalgia which permeated cultural output in 2018, from film to music to fashion, suggesting it speaks to a perceived lack of enthusiasm for the present moment. “Maybe we look back to the 1990s”, he suggests "because we’ll never get nostalgic for 2018…we’re already planning to forget this year and the decade it rode in on”. In support of his point, Sheffield references Mark McGrath of Sugar Ray fame, not exactly a modern-day Jaques Derrida. “There was no Nirvana in the 2000s”, McGrath laments, adding that since there was “no band to come along and usher in the new decade…nothing replaced the Nineties, even though the decade was over”. 

In the same piece, Sheffield cites a similar interview with Vanilla Ice, another worthy disciple of world philosophy’s greatest minds, in which the rapper argues that the time between 2000 to 2017 amounts to a “lost generation”. “Nothing really defines that whole generation in pop culture” he declares, “there’s no music there, there’s no pop culture, there’s no fashion that defines that generation…I look at the Nineties like it’s the last truly great decade”. Writing in 2026 for the Financial Times, opinion columnist Jemima Kelly similarly remarked that culture since the 2000s has “stalled”, arguing it is now dominated by “the dearth of new music genres”. Sam Freedman noted a similar sense of cultural stagnation in his 2024 book Failed State.

These are startling observations, precisely because they contain an uncomfortable measure of truth to them. Mainstream film releases in the last decades, for example, have been dominated by reboots, franchises, sequels, and adaptations, with the majority of original screenplays being green-lit by studios explicitly geared towards injecting creativity back into Hollywood. Has culture truly stagnated as Fisher & co lament? Where is our David Bowie, our Stevie Wonder, our Beatles? When approaching such vague questions and their even more ambiguous premises, it is difficult to know where to begin. 

However, given the above writers’ emphasis on mainstream music culture as the barometer of cultural progress, it seems like the perfect context within which to critique their ideas. In this context, I believe Fisher and his ideological descendants are wrong to argue that modern music culture has stagnated. Not only are they wrong to support such a proposition, but the arguments they put forward in defence of their position are telling of a systematic ignorance and, perhaps subconscious, disdain towards a sector and demographic of cultural production without which there would be no glorious past to be nostalgic for. Here, I am referring to music and musical forms born of the black community which, in the 21st century, reached its artistic zenith in rap.

Notably absent from the writers’ depressing chronology of 2000/10s pop culture, for instance, are Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar. Leaving aside the recent antics of the former, both artists have dominated popular music culture in the past decades in a way which deserves to be compared to the great musical visionaries of the 20th century. Kanye West, for example, has been hailed as one of the most influential rap artists of all time, with albums like 808s and Heartbreak, Yeezus, and The College Dropout having expanded the musical and technical vocabulary of a generation via innovations in sampling and the use of auto-tune as a tool of emotional expression. His College Trilogy of albums, released in the early 2000s between 2004 and 2007, helped redefine the possible when it came to the themes discussed in mainstream rap, helping to usher in a new era of sensitive and vulnerable introspection alongside contemporaries and collaborators like Kid Cudi. Adding to his already legendary status, Kendrick Lamar similarly introduced himself officially as a member of the musical pantheon in 2015 with his album To Pimp A Butterfly, an undisputed masterpiece which since its release has enjoyed a constant presence in debates for the greatest album of all time for its ambitious blend of genres, narrative experimentation, and improvisation-heavy instrumentation. 

I single out West and Lamar here as they are arguably the most evident case studies in support of my argument, but I would be doing rap a disservice if I did not mention other acts which have and continue to face “the modernist challenge of innovating cultural forms” head on. A founding father of experimental rap, MFDOOM’s 2004 album Madvillainy has equally been considered one of the greatest and most innovative rap albums of all time as it continues to inspire and inform the musical output of rappers intent on pushing the limits of what music can be. Moving on to the 2010s and 2020s, rappers influenced by previous generations are now starting to build musical movements of their own. Chief Keef’s work, now slightly past its commercial peak, continues to serve as inspiration for young rappers as Drill music’s primary originator, a musical sub-genre which, since its genesis in the early 2010s, has dominated the musical mainstream. Equally, Playboi Carti’s particular style of unintelligible lyrics, minimalistic beats, and repetitive bars, combined with his immaculate taste for boundary-pushing trap beats and subversive visual codes has turned him into one of the most exciting and divisive musical figures in music today. Nikki Minaj is another incredibly influential figure deserving of a mention, for her contributions to rap at least, for her role in opening up the rap mainstream to female voices and paving the way for rappers such as Doechii to experiment with the genre’s gender codes in subtle and mature ways.

Given all the evidence to suggest that black artists continue to innovate in their musical output, why do critics like Mark Fisher insist that modern culture is experiencing “stagnation”? There are a variety of potential answers to this question, so I will start with some of the least suspect. First, it is important to mention that Fisher’s writings tend to be centred in a specifically British sense of cultural malaise. He speaks, for example, of Margaret Thatcher’s economic reforms as one of the reasons why the bands of today are less innovative than those of the past. Specifically, Fisher notes the way that “neoliberal capitalism has gradually but systematically deprived artists of the resources necessary to produce the new” by removing the spaces where artists could be sheltered from the need to produce something commercially successful quickly. 

The cultural references Fisher uses to make his points are also distinctly British, such as the 80s television series Sapphire and Steel, which Fisher uses to introduce the concept of lost futures in Ghosts of My Life. It is possible, therefore, that Fisher simply didn’t have predominantly American art forms such as rap in mind when developing his theories in the 2010s. However, despite the location of its origins across the Atlantic, it did not take long for rap to cross over to the British Isles, finding new innovative forms of expression in Grime around the time of Fisher’s writings. It seems unlikely that Fisher, a music critic, would simply have been unaware of the musical revolution occurring right underneath his nose. 

As for the other writers I have thus far quoted, I also find it hard to believe they were unaware of rap as a genre when they wrote their pieces at a later date, given its worldwide commercial success by that time. In Rob Sheffield’s case, I am certain he has engaged with rap at least to some level, particularly since he interviews rappers, albeit white, for his piece. This disjoint between rap’s brilliance and such writers’ inability to seriously consider or celebrate it leads me to believe a more perverse factor is at play: racism. Specifically, it is the kind of racism that is unwilling to take black art seriously as a form of ‘high’ art worthy of commemorating in the same breath as the, ironically black-inspired, Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or King Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King. 

This is not to say all the writers I have mentioned in this article are racists, but their inability to grasp one of the most important musical movements in the last several centuries at least speaks to a general disposition which, subconsciously or consciously, deems people of colour and their work as less deserving. Rap songs are not analysed and picked apart as works of poetry as Bob Dylan’s lyrics have been, for example, but are more likely to be associated with a particularly demeaning image of criminal gangs and antisocial youths, despite the lyrical mastery exhibited by a Nas or a Kendrick Lamar. Indeed, when one takes a closer look at the individuals lamenting over the “lost generation” of the early 20th century, racism as an explanatory factor for their position becomes much more plausible.

In particular, Vanilla Ice’s dismissal of the 2000s and its cultural output cited above takes on a sinister tone after the artist defended his decision to perform at Donald Trump’s Freedom 250 Concert after several other artists publicly refused to be associated with the President’s politics. Vanilla Ice’s conviction that there was no music or pop culture in the 2000s is made even more egregious by his controversial history within the broader culture of hip-hop, and specifically its rejection of him. It was Vanilla Ice’s inability, or unwillingness, to engage with and respect the culture of rap, especially his popularity as a white man within it, which made many a rap fan view him as a corporate leech; a modern, albeit far less talented, Elvis Presley whose only objective was to cash in on the immense popularity of a black art form. Decades later, it is clear he has not become any more appreciative or self-aware.

Together, such cultural and music criticism’s failure to even address rap music and its contribution to culture over the past half-century is difficult to reckon with. Mark Fisher at least acknowledges the musical innovations of Disco and Jungle, both also predominantly black musical forms, but his ignorance of Grime music and its cultural impact is unconscionable. I take no pleasure in accusing the writers referenced above of racism, but the repeated dismissal of rap music in this way is reminiscent of a broader cultural theme, one that diminishes the artistic worth of people of colour in the moment and only appreciates it decades later when it has become commercialised or appropriated by white artists. Perhaps cultural theorists in the 2040s and 50s will lament their generation’s lack of musical innovation with respect to the MFDOOMs and the Kanye Wests of the previous generation. For now, at least, the future of black musical pop culture is alive and well.

Image: Flickr/Super 45 l Música Independiente (Rodrigo Ferrari)

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