Science Fiction, Satire and Postmodern Nostalgia: Arctic Monkeys’ Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino

Abstract

This dissertation will analyse an album titled ‘Tranquillity Base Hotel & Casino’, released in 2018 by the British band Arctic Monkeys as a postmodernism cultural manifestation. The lyrics, imagery, topics and making of this LP exhibit some features normally identified as postmodernist. The album is a satire of contemporary society, and that was generically articulated as a work of science fiction. It has been labelled as concept album whose action is located in a hotel with a casino on the moon. In order to carry out a postmodernist reading of the work, I will have recourse to theoretician of postmodernism such a Zygmunt Bauman and Fredric Jameson, among others. Common postmodernist topics such as the fluidity of the truth, globalization, technological advances, the power of media, the blurring lines between the private and the public, or the real and the fake, are to be found in this record. Alex Turner, the band’s singer and songwriter, composed Tranquillity Base Hotel & Casino while he was living in California, with the more or less implicit intention of criticizing contemporary society at the times Donald Trump was elected for Office. He criticizes the fact that people’s lives, along with politics, seemed to have become, in a way, similar to a show. Reality seems distorted and individuals tend to isolate themselves. In Tranquillity Base Hotel & Casino, we come across with recognizable postmodernist concepts, such as hyperreality (J. Baudrillard), mcdonaldization (G. Ritzer) and ‘non-place’ (Marc Augé). One of the most recurrent themes of this record is nostalgia, which is another postmodernist concern. Linked to temporality, the album revisits the past with nostalgic tone and presents the present in a way that looks more like a dystopian future. It contains many literary and cinematographic references (such as 1984, by G. Orwell), which also makes it interesting from the point of view of intertextuality