Forebears by Platitude Queen

This album is called Forebears. Ostensibly it’s a contemplation on cultural heritage, which snugly fits the album title as well the wider traditions of folk music. However, I hope I have pushed this rumination further, into the world of hauntology.

The form of hauntology which besieges this collection of songs is one that lurches from the depths of the past, but also recognises the (lack of) future. The traditional view of hauntology (as per Jacques Derrida) is that the present is haunted by persistent recurrence of concepts and ideas from the past. The discomfort lies in the fact that these concepts, these ghosts, do not properly belong to the past, and the observer who connects with these ghosts is therefore also removed from a common sense view of time. We are therefore forced to remove our expectations of causality and the origins on these concepts, before they "returned" as ghosts.

Derrida applied this originally to concepts such as Marxism, but its lens has since been applied to countless ideas. This is particularly interesting in the field of cultural theory, for example in the writings of Mark Fisher. He focussed on a concept whereby hauntology is impacted by lost futures, the pining for what was promised or expected, but never came to be.

With Forebears, my aim has been to take the traditional folk fixation with regional idiosyncrasies, and apply to them this specific form of hauntology. A lot of psychological, sociological, and philosophical concepts can be scaled down past their wider initial implications. In this case, I have tried to apply the ideas of hauntology to my personal relationship with being born in, growing up in, moving away from, and revisiting, my home in Teesside, in North East England.

There's a lot to be said for ghosts in North East England, and for Fisher’s "lost futures". The downfall of a lot of regional communities, often built on industry, left a lot of sadness and destruction on their wake. For a lot of families at the time, this led to understandable anger and resentment. As the immediate pain of these wounds began to fade away, the underlying animosity fed into what became the cultural rebirth of these communities; identity markers, and little more than this, at least in the here and now. But again, these markers appear only as ghosts from a timeless void. Their applications change as the infrastructure they impact is lost, reshaped, reborn, but where the outcomes of their applications change is up for debate. This debate is central to the themes on Forebears.

This album was written at a time when, having lived away from my hometown for over a decade, I oddly find myself psychologically connected to the North East more than ever, whilst simultaneously feeling more a need to reject a national identity. These contradictions can again be analysed through hauntology. Even when the concept of hauntology was in its infancy, Derrida and those that followed asserted that any attempt to locate the origin of identity will fall into the traps of the always-already; that which exists outside of perception and time. It might not justify the inconsistency, but it might help go some way to explaining it. This internal dialogue is the beating heart of Forebears.

Otherwise, at least, hopefully some of the riffs fuckin' rip.

Platitude Queen is a folk project by Teesside based musician and certified daft apeth J. S. Gordon (formerly based in Leeds).

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