The Future in Pop: Ready or Not, Here Come the Late '00s

Thirty years ago, David Bowie told the New Musical Express that in The Human League, a group whose sound was a cacophany of electronic noise, stark beats, and low concepts, he had seen "the future of pop." At the time, Bowie was as credible as any soothsayer in the business. But when The Human League finally fulfilled his foresight, they did so with sleight of hand, changing without warning from the art-damaged sci-fi enthusiasts Bowie honored into a self-proclaimed ABBA of the '80s. In 1981, the synth pop group hit it big with "Don't You Want Me" and helped usher in the New Romantic minute. Though his own "Ashes to Ashes" video seemed to legitimize the fashion movement's bland synthesis of Bowie's pasts, powdering Glam Rock's hi-gloss camp with hip futurism, this was likely not the future Bowie had in mind.

In pop music, futurism has two distinct meanings: one for both the performer and the critic. For the performer it's a stylistic option — a source of presumptive inspiration. As with The Human League, the performer might seek to embody the shape of things to come in their sound, image, and even their name (before settling on the name they rode to infamy, The Human League recorded a demo as "The Future"). For pop stars, futurism often boils down to the vaguely futuristic, like a pavilion at the World's Fair or a layout in the magazine Popular Science, circa 1955.

For the critic, the future has a different meaning. Futurism is a sort of passenger's pastime, a makeshift travel game. On pop's ever-winding road, critics try to interpret the traffic signs that the car passes too quickly for us to read. This game is usually played in our heads, with the persistence of the signs passed and miles logged enough to keep it going. But as we enter the last years of the '00s, and approach something like a destination, you can count on the most restless and road weary of us to speak up. But this time around, after years of reality not measuring up to our dreams — of forcing you to heed to thousands of Human Leagues and other shitty rest stops — our predictions will have lost their vigor. In fact, I'll take my own shot at a prophecy and bet that in the Time-Life coffeetable books gracing our grandchildrens' suburban homes by mid-century, the chapter defining our contemporary pop culture won't concern itself so plainly with the retro-futurism that, in recent years, has defined this present in the charts and on the runways, but more precisely, how this futurism, both the performers' stylization and the critic's habit of mind, entirely lacked conviction.

To understand how pop's relationship to the future has weakened, please locate the most thoroughly preserved Human League sound and image still lurking in your supple brain (for the uninitiated, please click here). Suspend this image for a moment and trace back through it to the last year-and-a-half's most dominant trend, The FutureLoveSound, also known as the Timbaland-effect. As with all things pop, this is more than a sound. It doubles as a randy, coked-up Jetsons episode, as rendered through the music videos and album art for Justin Timberlake, Gwen Stefani and Mary J. Blige' latest releases. You can credit or blame the slick electronic propulsion that dominates these records on The FutureLoveSound, applied directly by Timbaland or indirectly thorough his influence, but the truth is that this moment in pop has had a gestation period — one that began with the Dallas Austin-produced 1998 hit, Brandy and Monica's "The Boy is Mine," a record that itself owes much to disorienting productions like Ginuwine's "Pony" and Aaliya's "Are You That Somebody," both #1 hits from the mid-90s. "The Boy is Mine" was the first hit to use a stuttering loop out of phase with the tune as its hook — technology used to gorgeous effect. Two years later, Destiny's Child brought synths to this strategy. The result was "Independent Women Pt.1," the Alpha and Omega of a futuristic species of pop that has since been overrun by likable, though less imaginative Gamma — Justin Timberlake's "My Love," another Timbaland production, notwithstanding.

It's an evolution that has carried plenty of sonic lifeforce, but signs that this "future" isn't what it used to be showed up on Kanye West's Graduation, released last September. From the metallic jumper and Max Headroom glasses worn in the publicity photos to the music's Euro Disco fixation, it wasn't so much that the package seemed contrived but, as Dave Heaton put it in an otherwise favorable review for PopMatters, "To Kanye, 'the future' mostly translates into having synthesizers on nearly every track, as if the future for him is 1983."

This was the crux behind The FutureLoveSound all along. In contrast to the inherently progressive qualities capital "F" Futurists forcibly promoted in a manifesto published almost a century ago — fourth principle: "a clean-sweep should be made of all stale and threadbare subject-matter in order to express the vortex of modern life" — the small "f" futurists we're downloading to our iPods are notably static. It's as if we've reached the end of a phonograph disc's second side and are stuck in the eternal lock-groove loop of a Theremin's drone.

But if I've misread the situation, it may be due to unreasonable expectations. At my neighborhood bookstore, Alex Ross, New Yorker critic and author of The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, recently spoke about the chore dealt to the latest generation of artists in the wake of the early 20th century's creative explosion. He's convinced contemporary artists aren't merely looting the great achievements of the modernists, as conventional wisdom has it, but thoughtfully untangling the consequences. So for an artist, the Belle Epoque never ended. It's an alluring thesis and it may be true. But my mind wanders to the audience, being, as I am, one of its members. When considered at that level, the level of patrons and consumers, we're worse off. Eight years past the millennial mark, futurism is a cell carrying the code that truly informs this moment — a persistent fear of dehumanization, not through industry and technology (as in the iconic image of Charlie Chaplin reduced to a machine's cog in Modern Times), but through a disaffecting sense of time past, events piled up and decisions already made (as in Harold Lloyd dangling from a city clock in Safety Last!).

With no avant-garde to appropriate, pop can't offer any other place to go but deeper into this vision of a future that will never exist. The danger of a benumbed escape is obvious and argued with impressive variety in the leftist reaches of the media but my favorite version comes, without irony, from fashion iconoclast Miuccia Prada. When asked in the New York Times about fashion's recent lurch towards a bizarrely hollow futurism, the political science student-turned-designer responded: "If you really want beauty in your life, do something with your ideas, but in a real way. Don't hide in some luxury fantasy, some idea of fashion. Live with some sense that there is a larger world around."

Prada's words are instructive as we round out the decade because a future stitched with fantasy is designed to disappoint. It's the generations upon generations of futurist fantasy which I suspect have weakened belief in the future — the Popular Science fantasy restricted our vision, which, in turn, lowered our aim. If asked in the spring of 1981, when his future finally arrived with The Human League's debut on Top of the Pops, David Bowie would have undoubtedly agreed.