Fisher points to other musical examples of hauntology, like the Caretaker project and the Ghost Box label. Spearheaded by Leyland James Kirby, the Caretaker captured “the sense of yearning for a future that we feel cheated out of” (Fisher, 2012) in the album title: Sadly, The Future is No Longer What It Was. The album “subjects 1930s tearoom pop to degradation (delay, distortion), rendering it as a series of sweet traces that are veiled by one of sonic hauntology’s signature traits, the conspicuous use of crackle, which renders time as an audible materiality” (Fisher, 2012). Meanwhile, the Ghost Box label incorporated “a canon of audiovisual culture from the near past — alluded to stylistically and in sleevenotes” (Fisher, 2012).
Riffing on past sounds, this hauntological music doesn’t actually tap into nostalgia for an earlier era: it exhibits nostalgia for a previous form and for a view of the future as open-ended.
A more recent example of hauntology in music is Dua Lipa’s 2020 album Future Nostalgia. The title invokes a yearning for the future while the album embraces a range of retro sounds spanning the 1980s and 2000s from disco to R&B. Dua Lipa described the album as feeling like “a dancercise class” (Savage, 2019). In its title and throwback sound (and visuals), she aimed to invoke “a future of infinite possibilities while tapping into the sound and mood of some older music she loved” (Tucker, 2020).
Reading the album through a hauntological lens, the results are more cynical. Although Dua Lipa sings on the title track, “You want a timeless song. I want to change the game” (2020), the game is fixed. Her album, while enjoyable, is representative of twenty-first century music, filled with pastiche and recycled sounds from before Dua Lipa was born. The game hasn’t changed in quite some time; Fisher might even argue it hasn’t changed in Dua Lipa’s lifetime. Rather than gesturing toward “a future of infinite possibilities” still ahead of us, Future Nostalgia actually taps into nostalgia for a time when the future still seemed infinite, before it was lost.
Hauntology in film: The Shining
Based on Stephen King’s classic horror novel, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) is a film that lends itself to critical interpretation, including through the lens of hauntology. In fact, the Caretaker project, one of Fisher’s examples of sonic hauntology, is named after the position Jack Nicholson’s character takes on at The Overlook hotel in The Shining.
Like most ghost stories, The Shining is about a place stained by another time. The present is forced to encounter, and re-enact, the past. Fisher reads The Shining as anticipating the preoccupations of twenty-first century hauntology: “The film refers to hauntology in the most general sense — the quality of (dis)possession that is proper to human existence as such, the way in which the past has a way of using us to repeat itself” (2012). Following Jameson, Fisher argues that the film also stages the crisis of history itself at the end of the twentieth century — the rise of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, the dominance of “immaterial” forms of labor, the standardized homogeneity of space and time represented by the non-place of a bland corporate office. Alongside these specters of the impending future are haunting references to America’s barely-repressed past — organized crime, patriarchal violence, genocide of indigenous peoples.
While the music of Adele blurs anachronism, existing in a timeless past, The Shining stages and draws attention to it. Fisher argues that “anachronism, this experience of a time that is out of joint, is in fact the very subject of the film”:
