Renouncing “digital love” in favour of analogue production and “real” musicianship (human drumming!), they staged a homage to the lost golden age of record-making that had resulted in blockbusters such as Rumours and Off the Wall. Like Canute defying the tide of history, Daft Punk attempted a kind of monoculture reenactment on their 2013 album Random Access Memories. Slowly but surely, streaming is killing the idea of a mainstream. Instead of inviting consumers to tune into a shared cultural experience at a designated time, they encourage individualised trajectories through teeming repositories of art and entertainment. Rather than simply usurping the place of the old mass-media monoculture, these gigantic platforms have a curious effect of simultaneously unifying and fracturing. This dizzying power of total and instant recall went into hyperdrive during the 2010s, thanks to streamers such as Spotify, Netflix and Amazon.
28 MOST PAUSED MOVIE MOMENTS OF ALL TIME ARCHIVE
That process had already begun in the first decade of the 21st century, with file-sharing and YouTube creating a vast, disordered open-access archive of past pop culture, that mingled promiscuously with current releases to create an effect of atemporality. While the clock and the calendar continue to plod forward in their steadfast and remorseless way, what you could call “culture-time” feels like it’s become unmoored and meandering. This memory-erosion effect is one reason why it feels like something’s gone awry with our sense of time. Each cultural landmark got instantly effaced by the onrush of the next, and the next. The reason that it feels like nothing happened in the 2010s is that too much happened.
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