Dancing Till the World Ends: The Lost Future of Global Poptimism

Like most other college students in DC, my freshman year experience is synonymous with Decades, the biggest hotspot for first semester kids who don't know any better. The multi-floor maze was across the street from the Dupont Metro, played almost exclusively 2010's hip-hop, and best of all, was 18+ — no fake ID needed. Every weekend, my friends and I would crowd into a too-small dorm, downing lethal concoctions—Pink Whitney, Pineapple New Amsterdam, and Lemon-Lime Gatorade. We'd shiver outside waiting for Ubers and file into the venue proudly sporting Sharpied x's on each hand. The lenient age limit, while thought to be advantageous for us, proved much more so for older men, who were the only other regulars at the club. For that first semester of college, Decades became a weekly affair. Every Thursday night, (or Friday morning...) we'd stumble out the door, high off nothing but Drake songs and vodka crans.

Growing up in the late 2000's, the club was something I couldn't escape — in TV and movies, with my favorite celebrities, and most memorably, on the radio. I was absolutely fascinated by the elusive parties all my favorite pop stars raved about. I longed to "shut down the club" and "hit the floor" and perform whatever other senseless commands cropped up in the music of my childhood. I wasn't exactly sure what the club even was, but I knew I wanted to be there.

What I found in college wasn't exactly the Kumbaya experience I was hoping for. There were nights I'd go, either far too drunk, or not drunk enough, where the club would transform before my eyes into its true form—a sweaty, grimy, room filled with business majors who looked at girls like sport hunters did game. Yet every weekend, I'd return, somehow hoping to reignite the wonder I felt towards clubbing as a child. 

To me, the whole ordeal evokes hauntology, a term coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, and popularized by the late Mark Fisher. Derrida's hauntology entails the mourning of a time just out of grasp: a future that has not happened, and never will. It feeds on society's expectations for the future, and the subsequent desolation and disappointment when such a fate is never delivered. It's a bizarre little theory, but I think it is more relevant than ever in today's nostalgia-dominated culture. How many times have you heard someone lament that they were not old enough to go clubbing in the 2000's, at the height of Britney, Beyoncé, and Lady Gaga? The rare moments I find myself clubbing these days, the songs that get the best dance floor reception are typically the ones that were released when I, and most other patrons, were children. This is not a phenomenon, as far as I know, that populated previous iterations of club culture. 

Moreover, it's impossible to navigate the current music scene without being bombarded by hauntologists trying to replicate the buzzy 808's and over the top maximalism of late-aughts pop. Yet, none of these modern adaptations seem to have the holding power of a Black Eyed Peas song. Consider the music today that mimics late-aughts pop, and suspend nostalgia for a moment. Not only is it sonically subpar, but it fails to uphold the cultural significance of its predecessors, as we are the first generation to lack a single, unifying party culture like that of the 2000's.¹ Perhaps at fault for this discrepancy is the fast assimilation of advanced technology in society. Social media, once a means to enhance the preexisting social egos of users, has shifted into a necessary appendage of the youth, far more than a simple accessory. Nowadays, social media is an antisocial tool—a way for people to mimic identity and community rather than truly engage with it. It has become inseparable from the way we socialize—no longer complementary but essential. As the culture becomes increasingly dominated by solitary leisure, those who don't participate in over-the-top party culture—in these days, the overwhelming majority— have a greater say in the matter. As a result, our generation cannot be tied to a single party culture like 2000's maximalism, 80's punk or 90's rave. Instead we are populated by hauntologists, mourning a past they never experienced.

Beyond nostalgia, we look towards this music because of its carefree hedonism, and try to strike gold with modern replications. Yet, our generation carries a sense of cynicism that makes it difficult to ever create art like this today. Instead of finding new ways to healthily dabble in hedonism, we give into the ultimate temptation —to settle in the past. As a generation, we tend to avoid innovation for fear of judgment. Because social media has placed us within the walls of a social panopticon, we have grown accustomed to the threat of scrutiny, and it's hindering our ability to create. The general sense of self-consciousness that has always accompanied artistic pursuit has been amplified in the past decade. While this is a necessary and often beneficial aspect of social progression, it accounts for the lackluster imitations of late-aughts pop. Fear of judgment did not hold the same power over artists of the past. They were able to create with abandon, unconcerned with the constant objectification that has permeated culture with the rise of social media. This is, in part, why so many people today choose to engage so heavily in music from the past; It has been largely established as acceptable, its excesses and offenses pardoned as products of their time. In other words, it's comfortable.

At the same time, I think its unclear whether late-aughts pop can be seen as definitively virtuous or not. While far too unabashed to be politically correct, pop music did tend to dip into the greater sense of global optimism in the zeitgeist.² I think the best example of this is that one subgenre of pop à la Britney and Shakira that featured a lot of oooohs and ohhhhhs and woahhhs as though they were meant to be chanted by an arena of people. Songs called for listeners to forget their troubles and venture to the club, which took an ambrosial, almost mythological form. Even the lyrics of this time were untethered from reality, offering vague ideations of a world that worships the club.

“See the sunlight, we ain’t stopping

Keep on dancin’ till the world ends

If you feel it, let it happen

Keep on dancin’ till the world ends”

There was a great sense of cross-cultural, cross-political unity that had not yet been touched by the self-conscious cynicism of late 2010's culture. It was a movement largely driven by optimism, the belief that the world is one big dance floor, where we can dismiss our odds with one another. 

It's essential to remember that this notion is rooted in falsehoods, as they are the reason why we remain transfixed by the hauntology of late-aughts pop. It's more than the music, it's the political and social dynamics that the music was born out of. In engaging with these songs, we are able to return to a time when pandemics and political insurgence were not at the forefront of everybody's minds. It's not exactly that there was no political dysfunction in the late aughts, there was. The recession, the rise of global terrorism, and climate change were all inescapable concerns. It was more so that we had an infallible sense of optimism — POP-timism— that these issues could be resolved via mood lighting and 100 decibels.³ Even in 2012, among widespread terror that the world would literally end, people opted to party. As we continue to exist in a world that is impossible to ignore, we are electing to falsely experience the euphoria of a night out unplagued with constant self-objectification. What's worse is we never truly reached the paradise promised to us by late-aughts pop. It's a future that remains out of reach, never actually meant to be claimed. And by keeping this fate unattainable, the industry can continue to sell us on a false reality, luring us with bait of a never-ending dance party. We can never reach the future promised to us, because we're too busy fixating on the past. 

Always ahead of the game, Augustine noted this phenomenon in his 11th century manuscript, Confessions. Augustine chronicles his sinful youth in Carthage, rebuking his egregious forays into theater. His disapproval of the stage reads as somewhat ridiculous, but his point bears relevance even today. Theater, according to Augustine, allows oneself to sublimate intense feelings — sadness, anger, joy — into media unrelated to the individual. In doing this we are unable to truly confront the source of our feelings, instead indulging in them over and over, with no intent to reflect on our own issues.

“But what kind of empathy is it at the end of the day, where made-up events on the stage are concerned? The listener isn’t hearing a call to come help, but is only being invited to feel pain, and the more pain he feels, the more he applauds the one who acts out those apparitions.” 

Despite the centuries between them, Augustine, Derrida, and Fisher maintain one truth: constant indulgence in the past is not cathartic but avoidant, a means to reside in the comforts of what is already dead. The question naturally remains: can we replicate this attitude today? Moreover, should we? Knowing what we know now, are we too burdened with cynicism and squeaky clean branding to go back? It's been established that we can't find the answer in the past, but the future is still largely untouched.

In 2015, singer, producer, and visual artist Hannah Diamond released one of her first singles, aptly titled, "Hi." The art for the single features Diamond shying away from the camera, her face coyly turned towards the viewer. She seems to exist in a vacuum of lights and microphones, like an AI generated party scene. The song itself sounds exactly like its cover art, gathering the sonic scraps of nearly dilapidated late-aughts pop. Diamond's voice is naive and earnest, yet she sounds entirely mechanical, as though a robot was doing karaoke. It's disorienting to a degree, yet equally compelling. The lyrical content of the song is perhaps the most ironic detail. Diamond, in a delivery as artificial as an android, mourns a life pre-internet, wishing for true human connection. In a way, Diamond herself is a hauntologist — someone living in the future, yet yearning for the past. Unlike the late-aughts' lost futures, however, Diamond is not championing an unattainable goal. While not as optimistic as pop from the past, Diamond's robotic realism is far more promising. 

"I don't wanna be alone in my bedroom,

writing messages you won't read

I don't wanna be alone in my bedroom,

on the internet, wasting time."

Diamond, along with a number of other artists, were the guinea pigs of PC Music, a label founded in 2013 by futuristic producer A.G. Cook.⁴ PC Music, now considered somewhat passè after hyperpop exploded on the scene in 2020, was revolutionary for its adoption of digital culture in a realistic sense. Wholly embracing the sound of the future, PC Music was just as experimental, fresh, and provocative as late-aughts pop—minus the hauntology. "Deconstructed Club" is a term I've heard used to describe this kind of music, for its excesses and detours compared to traditional pop. Is deconstructing the club the key to making pop anew? Just this past summer, A.G. Cook worked on Beyoncé's Renaissance, earning a credit on the song, "ALL UP IN YOUR MIND." The track is undoubtably reminiscent of Beyoncé's hip-hop influenced past, yet marries elements of the aughts with Cook's futuristic sounds. To me, the full-circle moment is exemplary for where pop ought to go from here. Cook and Beyoncé's collaboration proves that music does not need to be entrenched within an era to be significant. Their ambivalence towards such rigid dichotomies resulted in genuine futurism, not hauntology. 

I think this approach extends beyond the realm of creation and into our own lives too. By obsessing over the past, we effectively sever the ties connecting us to the future. There was one cold night at the end of our first semester, when my friends and I stood shivering outside Decades, awaiting our x'd hands. When we finally skipped in, it was empty, save for a gaggle of 40 year olds at what appeared to be a corporate party. It seemed as though Decades fell out of favor as quickly as it had come into our lives, and we had missed the memo. We left early that night, sobered by the lack of action we'd come to expect. It occurred to me then that the future I was reaching for, the eternal dance party, would never truly come. The only patrons at the club were those who sought to replicate its short-lived reign. Now, on nights when we can't decide what to do, I'll throw out a sarcastic, "What about Decades?" It's a bit presumptuous, considering how eagerly I flocked to the venue just a year and a half prior. Of course, I could lament about the $20 cover, creepy men, and subpar music, but in doing so, I'd once again be residing in the past. And I can tell you firsthand, mourning history doesn't work when you're the only one on the dance floor. As Britney Spears' ultimatum goes, There's only two kinds of people in the world, the ones that entertain and the ones that observe. As a society, it's time we moved past the latter.

♪ ♪ ♪

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Footnotes, because apparently that's something I do now:

1. Of course, not everybody was a part of 2000's party culture, but media wasn't democratized yet, so those who participated held a monopoly over sorts over the zeitgeist.

2. Think: Shakira performing at three (!) separate World Cups in this span of time—2006, 2010, and 2014.

3. Forgive me for the pun. I couldn't help it.

4. While not really my thing anymore, I still am partial to some of A.G. Cook's work. My favs are as follows: "Silver," "Tears," "Fade Away," and "girl on my throne."  

P.S. A special shoutout must be given to Mel, who endured a number of calls as we worked out my ideas and reminisced on our wretched Decades days...