“Town’s Dead”: Contemporary Irish Popular Music and Dublin City

ABSTRACT

The increasing “common sense” hegemony of neoliberalism in the west and to the emergence of the internet as a dominant cultural influence have been linked to a “cultural slowdown.” For Mark Fisher and others, contemporary popular culture has lost track of the unfolding conditions of contemporary capitalism and the ability to produce anything new. Instead, it recycles old tropes and forms and is stuck in nostalgia for unlived eras. This article weighs this contention against the surge of contemporary popular music coming from Dublin, Ireland, focusing on the work of Fontaines DC, Kojaque, Pillow Queens, and For Those I Love.

KEYWORDS:

• Dublin
• Fontaines DC
• For Those I Love
• Kojaque
• Mark Fisher
• Pillow Queens

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Further to this, Fisher identifies two sub-modes of hauntological popular modernism: one which refers to something which is “no longer, but which remains effective as a virtuality,” and one which “(in actuality) has not happened, but which is already effective in the virtual” (Ghosts 19).

2. Clannad, Altan, Ronnie Drew, and the Dubliners all released new music into and beyond the late nineties, while the Chieftains released The Long Black Veil in 1995, featuring numerous famous collaborators such as the Rolling Stones and Sting.

3. Stiff Little Fingers, The Undertones, The Outcasts, and so on.

4. Music bloggers such as Nialler9, The Last Mixed Tape, XS Noise, and Nameless Faceless magazine – and more mainstream journalists such as Una Mullaly of the Irish Times – have been highlighting the groundswell of Irish music in recent years.

5. The for-profit, privately outsourced system in which asylum seekers in Ireland are kept, often for many years.

6. “The Dole” refers to unemployment benefit.

7. RTÉ (Radio Telefís Éireann) is the state broadcaster.

8. Former Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) and current Tánaiste (Deputy Prime Minister).

9. A pub on Francis St. in Dublin city center.

10. Meaning it was registered in Dublin in 1979.

11. There is a passing resemblance, too, between this car and the two cars used in U2ʹs 1992 music video for “One” (dir. Anton Corbijn), which takes place in a newly united Berlin.

12. Bunreacht nah Éireann, the Irish Constitution, which effectively instituted the republic, was published in 1937, although the Republic was not officially declared until after the war, in 1949.

13. “Knacker” is a pejorative and offensive colloquial term for a person of low social class.

14. Translating to “Old Style,” this is a type of singing which tends toward a flat, nasal timbre with little dynamic or articulative variation.

15. Balfe has been part of various groups including Mothers and Fathers with Pamela Connolly of Pillow Queens and Burnt Out with the late Paul Curran. This latter project was described by Vice as “one of most thrilling short-lived projects in Irish music history, whose gnashing, hyper-melodic post-punk centred both the everyday anxieties and romantic contours of working-class life” (Gannon).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Irish Research Council [16574].