Reading Memory Part II: Erasure
Erasure in pop and experimental music; Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
A cassette can be erased, or simply decay—the static rising up to swallow the signal. A photograph can be cut up, blacked out, scribbled on, edited. We turn over memories in our minds and find parts are missing.
Erasure lends memory part of its potency. Memory and storytelling function at a deep level by excluding some facts to frame the story in a particular way. In turn, the remaining details are heightened and gain potency. Sometimes this selective storytelling is used in cynical or harmful ways. In politics, we need look no further than “Make America Great Again” to see a cynical erasure in action.
In music, pop beats in the past decade often seem to be served up vacuum-packed, all traces of air sucked out. No politics, no original thoughts. With the trend of “songwriting by committee,” real instruments, space, acoustics, personality, texture, and individuality are being stripped out of top-40 tracks in a race to reach the lowest common denominator of listeners.
There is a counter-reaction, though—maximalist stars incorporating history, politics, personality, experimental aesthetics, and raw truth-telling into mesmerizing rebuttals of the predictable mainstream. In my lifetime, I think of Lady Gaga, Bjork, Kendrick Lamar, and Charli XCX, among others. We are badly in need of these types of figures in our culture, and for pop stars in the present moment to engage with the full richness of society, warts and all.
There are also experimentalists who have turned the concept of erasure inside out — using the raw material of static, degraded signals, and resonant space to construct haunted and glitched out transmissions that both evoke and critique our understanding of memory and nostalgia. William Basinski’s breathtaking Disintegration Loops and the cryptic beats of Burial’s Untrue are canonical examples, deeply tapped into the instability of memory and technology. There’s a negative space left when a signal is impossible to reconstruct, the hiss and crackle yielding an unstable pathos and sense of temporal displacement. We become aware of memory as a plastic space that can be manipulated, even as the peril of doing so is ever-present.
The Memory Police, written in 1994 by Yoko Ogawa, and translated into English in 2019, takes place on an isolated island where everyday objects are disappearing, not only from the island, but from the memories of its inhabitants. A fascistic military group called the “Memory Police” rules the island and hunts down the rare individuals capable of remembering what has been lost. Surreal and allegorical, the novel unfolds in a plainspoken, matter-of-fact style that gradually descends into devastation.
We closely follow the main character, a novelist, through her feelings of anger and powerlessness. She struggles to hold onto a sense of self as her everyday life is slowly blotted out. Ogawa poses the provocative existential question: what is left when our memories are lost? Is there a sliver of the human spirit that can hold on no matter what memories are taken away?
But the book also takes the theme of erasure to a broader scale with chilling parallels to the environment and politics in the modern world. We live in a world where the ice sheets are melting. It’s a century of mass extinctions, ecosystem collapse, ocean acidification, coral bleaching. The natural world erased before our eyes. Meanwhile, political leaders are actively engaged in warping truth, attempting to rewrite the collective memory of our national history and their own misdeeds.
“Men who start by burning books end by burning other men” - Yoko Ogawa
For July 4th, I’ve been meditating on the grave challenges facing the U.S. We are on the wrong side of history in so many ways. Rampant inequality, runaway climate change, political paralysis, and the enormous influence of massive corporations and private equity create a dispiriting landscape where real change can feel impossible.
But we can’t give up the fight. Unlike the denizens of Ogawa’s fictional island, we do have the power to gather, to speak up, to write, to remember, to reaffirm our common humanity and the urgency of this moment. We can’t run from these challenges. Not only society’s most vulnerable members, but all of our lives, rights, livelihoods, and even the air we breathe are at stake. We should all be fighting for representatives up and down the ticket in November with respect for truth, respect for nature, and respect for human beings.
Until next time,
Harrison