POP CULTURE REWIND: Fuck the Haters of Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino

Editor-in-Chief Clara Kristanda talks to Arctic Monkeys listeners, in defence of 2018’s horrible new sound.

I’m not sorry for my words, because if you’re reading this at a time where it’s been at least six years since Arctic Monkeys released Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino (2018), and you still can’t handle the fact that they’re writing about something other than the fucking fish and chip shop (innit) and getting cheated on by your slag girlfriend (innit), get a grip. This album is beautiful, the songwriting is literary, so shut up and listen to me and give it another chance after this. I’m going to convert you.

“But they’re a rock band,” “It’s too slow,” etc. 

I love my punk-esque bangers too, but you do know that a band can have an evolved style over time, right? The fuckers were beyond 30 when they released this, and if you don’t like TBHC on the premise that it’s not Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not (2006), Favourite Worst Nightmare (2007) or AM (2013), the latter of which is a separate conversation, I need you to realise that they were, in fact, beyond 30 when they released this. What made their earlier fast-paced, rock albums great was the fact they were post-high-school-to-university age when making it, and the angst was genuine, and the pentatonic scale was new and exciting. By 2018? Not so new anymore, and I ask you this of your beloved Rawborough-snooker-club attendees – would you rather a watered down, pretend-2000’s-rock, shell-of-the-former-self, has-been album, or would you prefer something genuine that a maturing band would write? 

TBHC was the vintage-sci-fi, loungey concept album whose style seemed to have come from left field, but when you consider the projects that Alex Turner was involved in between AM and TBHC: the albums Everything You’ve Come To Expect (2016) by The Last Shadow Puppets and Belladonna of Sadness (2017) by Alexandra Savior – two great, non-fish-and-chip-shop, softer indie records – it doesn’t seem so left field anymore. I mean, the first verse of “Aviation,” the opening track in Everything You’ve Come To Expect, literally has him crooning, “It’s your decision honey, my planet or yours?”… This man had been wanting to write about cool space shit for a hot minute (more on this soon).

“Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino” music video

Also, briefly and without being able to show you excerpts over printed word, there are so many “sick grooves”, as the kids say, for all four members’ parts, lush throughout the album. I mean, holy shit, the bassline in the title track paired with that guitar tone is something else. The Sick Pocket™ in the rhythm section of “Science Fiction,” and the way the piano and melodic phrases fit together in “Batphone,” are mind-boggling. Honourable mention to the spooky space effects too – a bit of a whoosh here, a bit of R2D2 beep-beeping there – okayyyyyyy, the concept album is concept albuming. It’s good shit.

Their genre evolved with this album, and TBHC not being AM Part Two is still what makes it good shit… and I beg you not to tell me, “But I don’t like the piano here, I prefer the guitar,” because then the conversation becomes something different. You’ve had six years to get used to this guy playing a different instrument. Not that it’s personal, but I am personally telling you, please appreciate more than one genre.

This album is actually literary

Once again, not sorry, I’m going to get a little English-major-ey here, because the lyricism of TBHC is also amazing. Alex Turner is a good, no, a great songwriter. One of our generation’s best, etcetera, we know this already. But I think what’s real left field is the political tone he suddenly took up. His most recent (at the time) songs ranged from his usual cheesy ballads like “It’s love like a tongue in a nostril / Love like an ache in the jaw,” to his also-usual vague, melancholy abstractions, such as, “Talk about Hollywood problems / She’s got ‘em,” to his more questionable lines such as, uh, “My sweet fireball / My sweet rigmarole” (??).

TBHC veers away from all this, instead choosing to lean into the Brave New World-ification of politics and the media. Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is the album’s conceptual venue situated on the moon, and besides its aesthetic coolness, I love, love, love the “vintage sci-fi” world building. It’s the perfect medium through which Arctic Monkeys can reminisce on the past whilst criticising the ridiculous present. Turner leans into his abstract songwriting tendencies to create surreal images that range from overtly satirical digs at media-political culture, to those that yearn for a time well past. 

For instance, “One Point Perspective” starts with “Dance in my underpants / I’m gonna run for government,” and ends with “Bear with me man, I lost my train of thought.” How many politicians, aspiring politicians, come to mind here? Sure, this was mid-Brexit shenanigans, and right before Kanye 2020 (remember that?), but also, all of following happened this year: Megan Thee Stallion threw it back for Kamala Harris, Fatima Payman delivered her “Sigmas of Australia” speech, and a United Nations humanitarian leader resigned, concluding, “I leave this job with a sense of work unfulfilled because the world is a worse place now” [1]. Like, what are we doing here? I’m seeing these teenagers on Instagram claiming to be American President in 2040, and all the comments seem to be taking them seriously. 

“Life became a spectator sport,” muses “Batphone,” along with, “I’ll launch my fragrance called Integrity / I sell the fact that I can’t be bought.” Six years before Donald Trump released his NFT trading cards, the America First Collection.

“The World’s First Ever Monster Truck Front Flip,” setting aside the brilliant song title, also overtly satirises social media. “You push the button and we’ll do the rest” seems like a reference to Kodak’s 1888 camera campaign, “You Press the Button, We do the Rest” [2], but it doesn’t feel out of place in today’s river-of-shit advertorial culture. “The exotic / Sound of data storage / Nothing like it / First thing in the morning,” Turner laments, and correctly so. Similarly, TBHC’s hit single, “Four Out Of Five,” is a concept advertisement that begs for your attention and money.  “Come and stay with us, it’s such an easy flight,” it pleads. “Only time that we stop laughing / Is to breathe or steal a kiss.” “Lunar surface on a Saturday night / Dressed up in silver and white” – it plays on the corporate mantra to advertise the lifestyle, not the product. But really, it’s very Wall-E, and we’re the useless fucks sitting on the moving seats in today’s convenience prizing, AI-brainrot doomscrolling, Temu-haul-ASMR loving society. 

On the consumer side, Turner belts the absurd choruses of “She Looks Like Fun”: “Good morning / Cheeseburger / Snowboarding,” he lists among others, from the perspective of someone mindlessly scrolling. “I’ve got the party plugged right into my skull.” Um, I guess I do, thanks for bringing this to consciousness, Alex Turner, also the man who wants me to think of calling when I’ve had a few. Honourable mention to this song also predicting COVID-19: “No one’s on the streets / We moved it all online, as of March.” What the fuck.

But amidst the flurry of spectacle and farce are a band who also yearn for a simpler time. The final song on the track, “The Ultracheese,” has no cool space sounds, no insane pedalboard effects, it’s just an honest, loving, 3/4, ultra-cheesy piano ballad. After a concept album set on a gentrified moon and riddled with overwhelming thoughts on performance and consumer culture and the mass media, Turner writes, “Trust the politics to come along / When you were just trying to orbit the sun.” Yeah, I’m crying. “When you were just about to be kind to someone / Because you had the chance”? True. What happened to being tender and loving despite the horrors, people? The Arctic Monkeys propose that maybe the cure to all of this fuckshittery is to return to a time before the technology, before the cool space shit, and perhaps ironically to the age of when sci-fi media was first popular.

Dotted throughout the album’s political commentary are lyrics just like this: “I’m just a bad girl trying to be good,” and, “I tried to write a song to make you blush / But I’ve a feeling that the whole thing may well just / End up too clever for its own good / The way some science fiction does.” Yeah, would you believe it? Great songwriting from a great songwriter. That doesn’t have to write about prostitutes or getting cum in one’s fishnets for the rest of his life.

Pop culture realign:

“Four Out of Five” music video

The Arctic Monkeys got their fame from being the 00’s peak of rock, and by 2018, they’d understood that for about fifteen years. Being one of the first artists out of the digital era, TBHC can be read as the Monkeys’ expression of finding themselves in a catch-22. As performers, how would they move on from being more than what the people wanted? How could they make honest, genuine art without being burnt out by media consumption? In this ridiculous world, where everything is for the spectator sport?

Perhaps most confessionally from Turner: “I just wanted to be one of The Strokes, now look at the mess you made me make.”

Well, they did it, and the album is amazing – but for it to be amazing, they had to puncture their bubble of relatability. I restate my first sentence.

ENDNOTES

[1] Wambui, M 2024, UN Relief Chief exits office, expresses regret over global response to humanitarian crises, The Eastleigh Voice News, viewed 4 October 2024, <https://eastleighvoice.co.ke/news/47869/un-relief-chief-exits-office>.

[2] Wikipedia 2012, You Press the Button, We Do the Rest, Wikipedia, viewed 5 October 2024, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Press_the_Button,_We_Do_the_Rest>.