PATIENTLY HATING #3: Fred again..
On the inescapable blandness of dance's newest star
A spectre is haunting criticism – the spectre of Poptimism. Whether or not poptimism as it’s currently understood is responsible for the decline of popular culture into a sort of soulless, algorithmically-generated slop is incidental to the fact that it has become the default critical posture during the exact moment that all culture became pop and all nearly pop became bland and uninspiring. The once-radical instinct to identify, uplift, and take seriously strains of the outré or the transcendent in pop culture has morphed into a sort of widespread knee-bend of the critical class at the sword of PR firms. If you can’t ignore event albums, at least you can gawk at them. Where “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” is a fundamentally true insight that has also enabled hedonistic solipsism, so too has poptimism’s mantra: “let people enjoy things.”
There is spiritual and critical value in hating. Haters are often tarred as misanthropes, philistines, snobs; there is some truth in every smear. But haters also provide a certain public service: they are friction, cynical or not, in a world dedicated to becoming frictionless. Still, a toxicity and stigma overpowers hating in the moment. Criticism, whether serious or reflexive, threatens to be interpreted as close-mindedness or contrarianism. It’s safer to hold on to your hate. To let it mature, ferment. PATIENTLY HATING is a space dedicated to this kind of hate: the hate that, with time, has taken on a life of its own.
The dance music world has crowned its new it-kid: Fred again.. You need not follow — or even much care for — dance music to intuit this undeniable fact. All you need to do is go to a pregame.
Essentially since widespread pandemic restrictions were lifted and social life (such that it is) has returned, the aspirant hypnotism of Fred again.. has become inescapable. I first learned of Fred from a friend hyper-attuned to the dance music scene, from whom I was put onto his music less as a recommendation and more an exercise in due diligence. Fred, my friend advised me, was the “newest face of dance music,” a direct mentee of Brian Eno and U.K. pop hitmaker who had recently focused his attention full-time on his own compositions. He was, I was told, already a third-liner on the Coachella lineup.
Out of admiration for my friend and an interest in staying abreast of What’s Happening in Music, I lent Fred again.. as generous an ear as I could. Listening to what I take to be his breakout record, 2021’s Actual Life (April 14 - December 17 2020), I encountered a sonic palette that was relentlessly downtempo, nominally elegiac, and distressingly lulling — qualities I theoretically admire in ambient recordings or white noise machines. I heard music that approximated the qualities of certain British dance music greats, but I did not feel the slightest temptation to dance.
Despite, or perhaps precisely because of, Fred’s aversion to anything but the aesthetics of dance, his music has become inescapable in specific social settings —namely, pregames and parties full of people with diverse, unknowable taste, for whom the safest bet is music boiled down to pure affect. Music, in other words, with neither emotional resonance nor technical ambition; music as wallpaper, music as vibe. His name itself captures his inevitability.
I have wondered, in my more conspiratorial moments, whether the rise in Fred again..’s popularity is not something of a music industry psy-op, conditioning would-be revelers to accept lazily looping horns, swooshing synths, forgettable drum patterns, and scattered vocal samples as the cool and good. My head is now more level, made possible in no small part by finally living in a city in which musical creativity and risk-taking is the norm, where aesthetic pretenses take a backseat to actually trying something. Nor, for that matter, do I discount what must have been the initial emotional appeal and resonance of Fred’s music in its time and place — music that nonspecifically fetishes and pretends to overcome loss in a time when people were tepidly and shakily reclaiming their suspended social lives. When you have not been on a dance floor or in a crowded room for two years, there are worse things to hear than easy-listening music.
By now, though, Fred again..’s music inspires in me the same level of raw discomfort and depression as early post-lockdown small talk — mulling on how good it is to be back, reflecting on the irregularity of the years behind us, attempting to re-learn, in real time, how to socialize. Fred again..’s music is music as lowest-common-denominator, as inoffensive backdrop. It is music so fleeting as to not elicit a reaction — which, of course, is a safer bet than music that threatens to elicit a bad reaction.
What renders Fred again..’s ubiquity particularly frustrating is the way in which he trades in the tropes of his predecessors without any of their resonance or risk. Fred again.., according to his glowing New York Times profilers, “Turns Digital Bricolage Into Dance-Floor Weepers.” They are half right. Fred’s music is entirely pastiche, approximating the great tradition of dance-floor weepers with songs that neither make you cry nor belong on a dance-floor. His music is unfit to be mentioned in the same breath as Burial’s, his obvious theoretical progenitor, whose music is so meticulously crafted, emotionally resonant, and considered as to be borderline unlistenable in public. Despite his high-profile cosign, he fails to come within arms length of a Four Tet, who possesses a nearly unparalleled instinct with which he identifies the yearning hiding plainly in pop music and renders it imminently danceable and spiritually devastating.1 Even 100 gecs, widely considered as ephemeral memesters and laughed out of any serious dance music conversation, snuck an ID into their recent Boiler Room set that dwarfs by magnitudes any Fred again.. track in its ability to identify the pangs of tenderness and felt vulnerability that make dance-floor weepers worthwhile. Fred again..’s music is music for a generation that fetishizes sadness as an aesthetic end rather than a state of being, forgetting that heartbreak only follows intense love and sincere desire. Fred’s music sounds, at the end of the day, like listening to a podcast of two famous friends reminiscing.
It is likely because Fred again..’s music does not require anything of its listener, least of all their attention, that it has become so popular.2 In the age of algorithms, the best thing music can be is a vibe — malleable enough to rear its head everywhere, insipid enough to not risk someone pressing fast forward. At least when you next hear his music (and trust me, you will) you won't have to force yourself to dance to it, because nobody around you will be dancing either. That, in itself, is a silver lining — in the world of Fred again.., there is no greater faux pas than actual vulnerability.
I’m reminded fondly of watching a reveler next to me cry, at 3am, when Four Tet isolated the acapella of Ariana Grande’s “Into You” in its entirety before launching into his excellent “Only Human.” Moments later, my anonymous crowd-mate was escorted out of the venue for quite openly doing ketamine at a time in the night where, due to the crowd thinning out, venue personnel had reached something of a 1:5 ratio with dancers. I wish that person, wherever they may be, well.
There’s a perfect irony to a Fred again.. song soundtracking the final scene of Triangle of Sadness, a movie that everyone convinced themselves they liked for its own shallow, inscrutable draping in another in-vogue aesthetic: pseudo-structural critique.