By Rory Bennett

As the US election throws doubt on the existence of the American dream and its unrealised promise I am reminded of a particular artist that seems to encapsulate the idea of a ‘lost’ American future. Nero’s Day at Disneyland’s work carries themes of childhood naivety, nostalgia, and an unravelling future.

Key to this analysis is the work of Mark Fisher and his writing on Hauntology, Capitalist Realism, and the Weird and the Eerie which gives context to the themes of liminality, broken dreams and zombified capitalism that are present in a lot of the artist’s work. I would highly recommend having a look at her work if you haven’t heard of her before. Her music can be intense at times, perfect for getting energised during a run, playing high octane videogames or simply as a surrogate for coffee in the morning.

Nero’s Day at Disneyland is a frenetic, frantic, energetic breakcore project created by Lauren Bousfield. The music produced as part of this project is stocked full of heavily edited vocal instrumentation and videogame soundtrack-style motifs. It is aggressive and overwhelming at times. It’s the sort of music you would smash your bedroom up to in a frenzy of overstimulated bliss. Bousfield throws her listener into the immediate deep end of aural experiences, carrying with it a childishly fevered feel to the structure of many of the songs. ‘In the Hollow Mountain of Generic Consumer Goods’ for instance, assaults your eardrums with heavy drum lines, incredibly high beats per minute and enormous amounts of distortion. Mirroring a child’s tantrum or play, it flits between calm sections which allow the listener to catch their breath before ramping up the intensity once again. The middle eight of ‘In the Hollow Mountain of Generic Consumer Goods’ is a reminiscent rendition of a tune that might be found at a fairground or in an early videogame soundtrack. The whole experience is like being spun on a carousel at 500mph only for it to slow down to remind you are still alive.

This is no accident and speaks to one of the most fascinating aspects of Nero’s Day at Disneyland discography. It contains within it what can only be described as a degenerative memory of corrupt childhood nostalgia. As the music unspools with its blinding pace the phonaesthetic profile is expressed both textually (in the song’s titling) and sub-textually within the vocal samples or musical motifs. Songs such as ‘Song for Dead Malls and Their Surrounding Communities’, ‘Lost In Bonerland’, ‘Child Protective Services Theme Song’ and ‘Probably End Up Dead In a Ditch Somewhere,’ just to name a few, all share a similar frantic carnivalesque melodic quality. This is juxtaposed especially in ‘Song for Dead Malls and Their Surrounding Communities’ with a sense of pathos. There is an acute sense of sadness, distress, frustration and fear that runs through a lot of her discography alongside the more jovial and funky melodies. It is an adrenaline ride, but just as the body responds to something it is excited by, the same response would occur if it were in a state of fear. Nero’s Day at Disneyland offers you both options, you could either be running for your life down chaotic corridors from some unseen danger or be filled with the joy of a hunt. It is this videogame style simulation of adventure that Nero’s Day at Disneyland achieves so well. The music carries you forward without a voluntary response from the listener. It is as though you are a passenger on a theme park ride as the project’s name aptly implies.

There are two things that can be interpreted from the childish and nostalgic references to 8-bit video games and theme parks, both have a certain level of truth to them. One is that the project reflects the unknowable, confusing and conflicted memory of a traumatic early childhood. There is certainly signs that this could be the case as songs like ‘Happy Meal’ and ‘Child Protective Services Theme Song’ give both musical and titular contexts for this. ‘Happy Meal’ starts with a foreboding piano line that cautiously but abruptly bursts into customary intense drumlines. ‘Child Protective Services Theme Song’ uses heavily edited and chopped up vocal samples to achieve a screeching sound giving the song a very edgy and phantasmagorical sound. These songs, amongst others, contrast the ideas of euphoria, confusion and fear all with the backdrop of hyperactivity and overstimulation. This would seem to mirror feelings felt by a child discovering the world for the first time while hyperactivity is often seen as an attribute of childish behaviour. It seems as though a large portion of Nero’s Day at Disneyland is inspired by childish mentality, or at least the memory of childhood.

However, her work could also be interpreted as lamenting of childhood’s transition into adulthood. A nostalgic glance back to a world that seemed bright and exciting, full of promise and hope. A world where there was no time to think and all the consumption or spatial existence of childhood was an absorbing formative experience. But life changes and while emerging into adulthood the degenerative and negative qualities of childhood existence are retrospectively broken down. This idea holds water when interpreting ‘Songs for Dead Mall and Their Surrounding Communities’. The bleak reality of a contemporary world collides with the pleasure of the past. This is implied in the song with a flitting and sporadic hopping between quiet echoing passages and 8-bit fairground music. It seems to imply both a pleasure in degradation and an inherent emptiness of meaning to nostalgic memories. It is as if trying to find pleasure in the old institutions of childhood glee only brings about a quiet contempt and eventual realisation of falsehood. The song gives a sense that nostalgia for a world that no longer exists is both lamentable and inherently infantile. This realisation as an adult retrospectively makes memories of childhood a traumatic experience. This is how both interpretations work together to an extent. The title ‘Lost in Bonerland’ is itself evidence of how both are true. The title is a mixture of the immature and the pubescent. However, within it there is still confusion, the movement away from childhood is an adventure on its own, but it is directionless and scary. A lot of the titling feels as though it is deliberately written from a child’s perspective. ‘Happy Screaming Night Businessman’ and ‘Thomas Kinkade Puking it All Back Up’ are examples of infantile language mixed with more adolescent or grown-up concepts.

However, all of this runs alongside a traumatic undercurrent to the music and titling. There are two stories being told, both traumatic, that intersect and cross over. The album ‘From Rotting Fantasylands’ came out in 2009 and the phrase seems to summarise the mood of a large part of Nero’s Day at Disneyland’s discography. Memory from one point in time, from a child’s perspective, rots as it emerges as nostalgia in the present. It is like loving SeaWorld as a child and then realising as an adult that the creatures are badly treated, or loving McDonald’s when you’re younger, but then later becoming aware that it causes obesity and destruction of rainforests.

The hauntological nature of Nero’s Day at Disneyland also gives rise to another aspect of her discography and it is an important one. The degenerative state of consumer capitalism. ‘From Rotting Fantasylands’ 2009 release does not appear to be an accident in the context of the 2008 financial crisis – an event that heavily influenced the work of many academics including Mark Fisher.

Fisher has described hauntology as the ‘nostalgia for lost futures’. Although largely using this definition when considering media but synthesising the idea of Hauntology with his critiques of Capitalism Realism it is clear that Nero’s Day at Disneyland embodies both. The famous quotation used by Fisher in his book Capitalist Realism is “It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism”. In many ways, the financial crash in many ways signalled this to be true. Businesses collapsed, homes were lost, and rich and poor alike were left in financial ruin. Lauren Bousfield was of the generation that was reaching maturation at this time, the generation that likely remembers a pre-digitised world of Blockbuster Video, dial-up internet and, of course, malls. The motif of malls in particular forms not just part of the musical and textual themes of the project but also the visuals. Her debut album ‘Grievances and Dead Malls’ from 2005 already indicates the preoccupation she has with these cathedrals of capitalism turning into its gravestones. While capitalism has survived and transcended these physical monuments for Bousfield, their deaths and liminality compound her own sense of loss of childhood innocence, creating necrotic memories that exist between life and death, the dead malls ushering in a nostalgia for what could have been.  

Nero’s Day at Disneyland by reincorporating childish musical motifs into songs like ‘In the Hollow Mountain of Generic Consumer Goods’  is giving the future as perceived in the past as part of a present understanding. It feels that through childish motifs Bousfield isn’t simply attempting to return to the place of the lost future (malls, theme parks, etc), but also the perspective of innocence that allowed for that future to seem possible. These places seem to promise an exciting future, full of joy, colour, objects of desire, and presumably, ease. That is why songs like ‘Happy Screaming Night Businessman’ combine mournful violin strings at the beginning of the track the hyperactive drum lines of childish glee. There is an attempt to understand consumer capitalism’s degeneration over time, by visiting its first influence on a child’s mind. It presents capitalism as a great and convoluted circus. In the song ‘No Money Down, Low Monthly Repayments’ the song’s core is a juvenile glockenspiel melody which seems to hint at the innocence of those emerging into adulthood in a capitalist society. That modern capitalist promises leave you disarmed, bewildered and naive as a child. No money down and low monthly repayments sound like a good promise to consumers but when contrasted with ‘Song For Dead Malls and Their Surrounding Communities’ there is an evident undercurrent of trauma that Nero’s Day at Disneyland is trying to evoke from a child’s first real introduction to capitalism. Just as SeaWorld begins to rot when moving through a prism of a less naive nostalgia, so does capitalism start to crumble. When as a child, money is to buy things you like, trips to the fairground and happy meals, in adulthood it becomes more part of a degenerating system of consumption, too good to be true promises and disorientation.

Just as the malls in her work have been abandoned Lauren Bousfield has too abandoned her moniker Nero’s Day at Disneyland. She now produces similar music under her real name. Her blend of professional and bedroom production style, makes her music feel personal and polished. There is also a huge range of themes covered in her music that I haven’t discussed most notably: gender, feminism, and human development. Her work proves that electronic music can have a voice of its own without having much lyrical content. Her solo work is also outstanding. I would recommend ‘No More Worlds Like This, No More Days Like That’, ‘Amethyst Payment Plan’ and ‘Unreleased #2’ for starters.

Sources

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Winchester,  Zero Books (2009)

Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, Zero Books (2014)