Kitsch and the Past: M83’s Divisive New Album

In an interview with Pitchfork, M83’s Anthony Gonzalez said, “Nowadays, everything has already been done before. I truly believe that. It’s impossible to come up with something new.”

It’s weird to hear an artist say something like that—on the eve of their first release (that isn’t a movie score) in five years. It almost sounds like Gonzalez is throwing in the towel. The part of me that wants to believe in the artist as one who taps into something oracular feels slighted, in a way, but then the part of me that tapes over my laptop camera knows that’s just not fair. I’ll bite, Gonzalez: everything has already been done before—but isn’t this true in all times? Isn’t all art culled from the past, and hasn’t it been that way forever? What does this bitter, if not all too familiar, mindset change about the way we make art?

Whatever—I’m not here to draw the guy’s muse a warm bath. I think there’s a lot to talk about with what a load of reviewers are lamenting as Gonzalez’s slip into ‘disillusionment’ and even ‘cynicism’ with M83’s new album, Junk. What’s being kinda acted out by Gonzales and the critics, and what seems to be at stake in this release is the odd, embarrassing faith we have in music and the musician: while we laud ‘critical thinking’ as a keystone of a basic education, and while we’re all proud to call ourselves skeptical, can it be we still somehow feel entitled to expect a different outlook from our artists?

Maybe it’s just M83. 2011’s Grammy-nominated Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, hailed across the board as victorious as it was ambitious, submerged the listener into the ranging dreamscape of a child.

The double album was dense, dark in spots, and cinematic; above all, however, it was hopeful: the ethereal uncertainty of “When Will You Come Home?” is answered by the more grounded, structured “Soon, My friend;” the somewhat jumpy “Klaus I Love You” trickles into the vast, awe-inspiring “Outro.” There was the smokey and strobe-lit “Claudia Lewis” and the sprawling “New Map.” All in all, the record’s an odyssey that was (and is) always weird to come back from. It leaves the banal charged with some sense of eternality; it somehow speaks to the mysteries we once loved for their own sake.

Basically, eat your heart out, Wordsworth.

And then “Outro” was pasted into like every movie trailer for a year, and then M83 famously scored Oblivion, and then some other movie, and by the time I saw the band in 2013 they just kinda walked through a dead-eyed (albeit deftly precise) “Midnight City.” The crowd reeled in elation (“oh—that’s this band!”); the saxophonist came out at the end and jived around in a sweet white suit, the whole nine yards. Throughout the song, you could almost see M83 actively trying to wrap their heads around the shadow cast by one kinda kitschy outlier over twenty-one other tracks.

In order to take a look at Junk, it’s kitsch we have to talk about. By kitsch, I mean the idea that despite its lacking, there’s maybe still something to appreciate here. The word nostalgia’s getting tossed around a lot in discussion of the album (part of me wants to look more into Fuller House). Lurking behind all this, however, is nostalgia’s dolled up and slack-jawed caricature.

Both albums, in true kitsch fashion, distort certain tropes and sentiments of the age they draw from; therefore, we get the tentacular hyperbole of “Do It, Try It,” the manic guitar solo on “Go!,” the big soft wink, smile, and thumbs up that is “Moon Crystal,” and even (or maybe thus) the doting progression of “Sunday Night 1987.” They all function in or as their respective songs, but allow themselves some distance as cheeky allusions to the past. In that way, the album walks a fine (if not dotted) line between imitation and parody we can also see in its title and cover art.

And I think it’s all this kitsch and irony that has critics feeling somewhat betrayed, to return to my original point. M83 was supposed to be a stronghold of the earnest guard—the champion of the epic narrative and concept album. They weren’t supposed to fall into Deadpoolapalooza. But, as we see Gonzalez’s anxiety of influence (i.e. “everything has already been done before”), we can observe a similar anxiety with what is going on with pop music and culture at present.

In a recent press release, Gonzalez said, “nowadays everything goes so fast and everybody is kind of throwing away art in a certain manner. People will listen to an album for instance and just pick a track they like to put on a playlist. They’re not going to take the time to listen to an album anymore because they have to jump on the next thing.” Everything has been done, and everything is being done and no one really gives.

All (borderline contemptuous) generalizations aside, let’s compare this to a passage from Carl Wilson’s 2007 book Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End Of Taste: “The critic Joshua Clover has argued that loving novelty is perfectly appropriate, because the material conditions of mass culture make it ever-renewable: if you wear out one pop song, there will always be another. Ranking lastingness above novelty is a holdover from an aesthetic of scarcity, predating the age of mechanical, or digital, reproduction. So today we can love a song for being one of many, part of the crowd, rather than just as an intimate partner.”

Pop, in other words, and in both of these views, kinda works as one homogeneous and regenerative body; when we engage with pop music, we engage with this body, essentially–not (just) the individual artists. And with Gonzalez’s very conspicuous and conscious decenteredness on the record, Junk is, if nothing else, a notable departure into self-annihilation.

When Gonzalez throws out a statement like “everything has already been done before,” he’s playing into this notion of the artist as just one of however many dinged up pipelines for this entity of music to sludge through. He’s also constructing a past in which this wasn’t the case–in which things were better (than both the present and, debatably, the past as it actually was).

If there is an earnest nostalgia surrounding the release and not just a general ‘music-these-days-is-just-plain-bullpucky’ vibe, that’s where it lies. Junk does boast a weird sort of gallows humor that might disappoint a romantic, but it reminds us how romantic we’re prepared to be when it comes to our music. And so maybe the old silver lining’s that it’s always been this way, and that to think we’re the only generation fallen prey to our own inability to appreciate pop or art or whatever is just to throw a vain little pity party, when really there’s this huge, cosmic pity festival to attend if you can swing it, and they get up to like six different acts playing at once, and if you get bored, you can just hit the next stage.

Scott Erdiakoff is a KCPR content contributor and Cal Poly english graduate student.