Summer’s Gone: Late Style and Popular Music

Abstract The Beach Boys’ 2012 album That’s Why God Made the Radio is typically nostalgic, filled with seemingly sunny reminiscences and retreads that hark back to 1960s. And yet other parts of look in a more critical fashion, exploring unresolved melancholy through rich musical language. What makes this even complicated fact it possible hear these two ‘sides’ differently, for feel like eerie simulations align earlier, similarly Boys music. This ambivalence embodies album’s dual relationship what I describe as primary strains late style: Goethean serenity Adornian intransigence. In contention applying style examples popular music, notably David Bowie’s 2016 Blackstar , argue late-style lens helps shed new light on music’s increasingly knots nostalgia, ageing death.