This was a prediction about the "music of the future" that I wrote back in 1996. It holds up better than I might have thought.
Future Listening may be a rather presumptuous title, but Towa Tei deserves it. The 1995 solo debut by the former Deee-Lite DJ is a virtual roadmap to the music of the near future. The album’s cover art has an airline theme, which is especially fitting because Future Listening is a convenient point of departure for meditations on the music of the future. If you aren’t familiar with Future Listening — which is quite likely, as its well-deserved airplay was pre-empted by a few billion spins through “You Ought to Know” — some summary is in order.
Towa Tei mixes the sounds of cheesy 1960s mood music with contemporary club tunes. He is shamelessly pancultural, picking what he pleases from the U.S., Europe, South America, and Asia. With one foot in the recent past and one in the immediate future, Future Listening is intelligent dance music that one can actually listen to.
Significantly, Tei is both everywhere and nowhere to be found on the album. He composed or co-composed all but one song, and wrote many of the lyrics. He programmed most of the computers, and played most of the keyboards. But he takes no blazing solos and sings hardly a word — only background vocals, on just two songs. Yet his musical sensibility permeates the music. Like Gustave Flaubert, Tei expresses himself through careful self-effacement.
The commercial rise of punk and grunge is a manifestation of egocentric, self-important Romanticism. Though lyrics cover a wide range — from Nirvana’s “I hate myself and I want to die” and Green Day’s “I’m fucking lazy” to the pompous banality of Pearl Jam’s “I’m still alive” — the childlike message is the same: “Look at me! I’m special! Look at me!”
In the coming years, grunge Romanticism will give way to a sort of detached neo-classicism, just as the pseudo-Dionysian energies of the 1960s burned out, making room for the cool Apollonian polish of 1970s music. Though the 70s are known as the “Me Decade” the music of the time was actually quite depersonalized.
So shall it be in the near future — for better and for worse. Prefab heart-throbs like Keith Partridge and the Bay City Rollers will find their 21st-century equivalents, but there will also be relatively faceless, private auteurs along the lines of Georgio Moroder or Brian Eno. (Actually, the Eno of the 21st century will be Eno himself, continuing to reform and deform pop paradigms.)
This trend, in which the cult of pure form will often triumph over the cult of personality, is comparable to the so-called “death of the author” in postmodern fiction. It has already manifested itself in celebrity DJs and one-hit techno acts.
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