I checked out Jockstrap on YouTube
And as I enjoyed their artful, very visual videos
Something about not only their warped and distorted electropop
But their makeup, the outfits

Took my thoughts back to my youth
to Fischerspooner

And the hypothesis I wish to present here

Is that there is a throughline that connects
Jockstrap
To Christine and the Queens
To Empire of the Sun
To Lady Gaga
To Scissor Sisters
To CSS
To Fischerspooner

The American duo of Warren Fischer and Casey Spooner
formed in 1998 and active
on and off
until their breakup in 2018

it’s a trait as you get older
To hang everything new on the past
Specifically your past

Every generation blames the one before

I suppose it’s A coping mechanism
An effort to find ballast in a world that has no patience
No interest in anyone’s history

But I think what I want to say here
Is more about giving Fischerspooner their due

They are best remembered for one song
2001’s emerge

emerge was the Big Bang that gave us
Art pop
and all the electro that followed
Yes, that includes the fiction of nu-rave
electroclash
The rise of choreographed dance
The face paint
The costumes
The queer aesthetics
The dystopian disco
That all emerged from Emerge

Every generation claims the one before

One might claim I am overstating Fischerspooner’s originality
Poor sods born before 1982
Could cite
Frankie Goes To Hollywood
Erasure
even The KLF

But Fischerspooner were born of a Millenial wasteland

At the turn of the Millennium
Britpop in post-fag-end doldrums
Nu-metal reigns
Music needs a palate cleanser

And That came from New York
the black and white stylings
Of The Strokes offered an antidote to rock that had become overproduced and bloated
The anti-folk of the Moldy Peaches created space for lo-fi bedroom freaks
And Fischerspooner gave licence to pop

Back then you see, pop could be enjoyed
not on its own terms
But only as a ‘guilty pleasure’
Britney’s ‘Baby One More Time’
Had to be translated as an acoustic cover by
Travis
to be acknowledged by repressed men
As a good song

The launch of Fischerspooner
Was a perfectly orchestrated campaign
Whispers
Mystery
One-off gigs in warehouse spaces
A perfect marketing campaign
that had the perfect song to back it up

Steely, cynical, ecstatic
The opening line of ‘Emerge’ is
Hyper-mediocrity
A term that prophesised the content-demented
Decades to come
of which this screed is an example

Fischerspooner arrived with an air of scarcity
Exclusivity, mystery
Qualities hard
Arguably impossible
To retain
Should you wish to achieve pop superstardom
When eventually they did appear on Top of the Pops
It was
One of those happy and rare occasions when something transgressive
Enters the mainstream
performance art on primetime BBC One
I remembered at the end
The ambush of Casey Spooner

And so I wonder if all this
The song and the marketing and the aesthetics and the dance
Left glitter traces across
Those songwriters, choreographers, costume designers and promoters
Who would shape the coming decades

For instance
The facepaint
The hefty costumes
That’s Empire of the Sun

The alien frontperson and their dance troupe arsenal
Christine and the Queens

When Christine and the Queens first arrived
It felt completely natural to include
dance as part of a performance
But for so long
dance was something a bit naff
Inauthentic
At a time when authenticity was key

This could all be sounding like an overreach
Weren’t Fischerspooner really just a one-hit wonder

Every generation shames the one before

I don’t believe in the term one-hit wonder
Most of us should wish
To have one hit that reaches people
And to mock those that don’t replicate this success
Is to conform to some capitalistic growth infatuation

after I watched the Jockstrap videos
I looked up that Top of the Pops performance
Of Fischerspooner

The upload was
Pixelated and intermittently muted
a copy of a copy
most of their online content was similarly degraded

It’s weird
as YouTube gets older
to see those bylines
“14 years ago”
If one’s digital catalogue is not maintained
Then it begins to take on the stink of decay and failure

There were more songs, albums from Fischerspooner
Some of which were very good
I saw them in 2007 at Amsterdam Paradiso
The show was chaotic and joyful
A party
But it was one of those gigs
Where the audience is holding its breath
For that one song

Replicating any kind of success is difficult
It is also deforming to the artistic process

For instance, The Strokes set down a blueprint
That the Killers and Kings of Leon
Took to the enormo domes

By smoothing the edges
Being more professional
Which is to say

Hyper-mediocrity