by As a wise band once said, Modern Life Is Rubbish.
That statement feels more burningly relevant than ever in the year 2025. How can it not when the term ‘enshittification’ has entered the cultural lexicon due to basically everything getting worse at the hands of a handful of billionaire cunts trying and mostly succeeding in bleeding us dry of a few more bucks.
The very fabric of our lives isn’t falling apart, it’s being torn apart by forces bigger than ourselves, and there’s basically nothing anyone can do to stop it save for radical, direct, organised action, which we all seem too divided, paranoid and hate-filled to unite for.
With that in mind, it’s quite adorable that the term Modern Life is Rubbish was coined in the comparatively luxurious times of the early 1990s. A time when, lest we forget, extremely smart people were asking whether the fall of the Berlin Wall meant “the end of history” due to everyone being able to basically get along in perpetuity. What a lovely prospect. No, when Blur titled their breakout album Modern Life is Rubbish, they were more or less talking about how American everything was getting in their home country, which, credit to them, they weren’t wrong about.
They also weren’t wrong about hating it all. Imagine the worst, most crass, most exploitative reality television imaginable, and you still probably won’t be able to predict the depths that lowest common denominator TV was plumbing in the mid-1990s. An entire industry running on putting someone different on display for all the normal people to point and laugh at. Tapping into everyday human cruelty and laughing all the way to the bank because of it.
Did Incubus predict the future with ‘Talk Shows on Mute’?
Incubus – Talk Shows On Mute – (Credits: Dangerous Minds / Record Sleeve)
Does this song by Incubus predict our cultural future?
You can tell it was bad because even the Americans were through with it eventually. By the mid-2000s, there were several bands that made music criticising this so-called culture, but few with the sheer venom that Calabasas, California’s alt-rock heroes Incubus did on their classic track ‘Talk Shows On Mute’. A song that cast the withering eye of singer Brandon Boyd on not only the brain-rotting content of those TV shows but the way they kept people pacified, and how, eventually, that could be used as a weapon against the people.
In a quote that I was unable to find a source for, Boyd said that the song came to him when a talk show was played on the TVs of a flight he was on. So, for those too young to remember, rather than flights having a designated screen for everyone, it used to be that a few screens would be placed every couple of rows or so, the content would play, and you could plug in headphones if you wanted to watch along. In Boyd’s case, a talk show was playing, and rather than tuning in, he began narrating along, giving these people voices instead of hearing them.
However, amongst all the yuks, he had a truly depressing realisation. “I realized a time will probably come when television will watch us if we’re watching it, if that hasn’t already happened, figuratively or literally. It sounded like some sort of pseudo-Big Brother nightmare, so I wrote it down.” In that way, he was bang on the money. Modern culture is built on surveillance. Algorithmically generated content built to pacify us into staring at our phones while also keeping track of precisely what it is that grabs our attention, alerting people if anything too genuinely radical comes along.
That is one way of looking at it. However, there’s actually a way of looking at it that makes it one of the vanishingly few ways that modern culture might be a little bit better than it was back then. Not because modern culture won’t rot your brain at its worst, heavens no, that’s what it’s trying to do. No, just that today, it’s at least a little bit easier to avoid it all. The death of the monoculture is a strange thing. On the one hand, none of us can relate to each other any more. On the other hand, we really don’t have to take anything in that we don’t want to.
In the words of Kendrick Lamar, we can finally turn the TV off.
