YOU COMPOSIN’ TO ME?! ‘Doomer jazz’ and the strange afterlife of Taxi Driver:

Look online and you’ll find dozens of playlists loosely gathered together under the sub-sub-genre of ‘doomer jazz’. These are collections of tunes which, taking [Bernard] Herrmann’s soundtrack as their root, feature an array of downbeat jazz curated around the atmospherics of blurred neon, wet windscreens, dank truck stops and quiet torpor.

Of course, hacks like me who wish they could take a deep bath in pure essence of Bukowski and Hopper (Edward, not Dennis) are bound to enjoy this kind of music – mainly due to the painfully immature but still extant pretence that a full ashtray, a drifting saxophone and an Anglepoise lamp illuminating a book shelf of musty orange Penguin paperbacks makes us more interesting people. This is highly erroneous, as my friends and fiancée never fail to remind me.

But the fact that doomer jazz has become an attractive genre for twentysomethings should comfort anyone around my age who despairs at the fragile egos and endless neediness of the generations below us. Doomer jazz, belying its title, actually acts as a repository for feelings. It’s the antithesis of the kind of music that takes a listeners’ vulnerability and accentuates it ruthlessly into a paroxysm of self-pity. Yes, I’m talking to you, Morrissey and Thom Yorke.

Doomer jazz is the Gary Cooper of late-night music: stoic, silent and taking care of business regardless. Pain, these chords and solos tell us, is to be endured rather than disseminated over all and sundry at every opportunity. The mood is sad of course, but not in a way that would inspire anyone to post missives of hate on social media or to take a razor blade to their wrists. Rather this is music that (in the best lesson imaginable for anyone under the age of 30) shows us how a little bit of emotional repression can go a long way.

As James Lileks wrote of Taxi Driver: “It’s a brilliant movie. The civilization it portrays is a sad and empty place — Weimar Germany without the energy to muster up the brownshirts, Rome that fell because it was grew bored waiting for the Huns. If I had to choose between its 1 hour and 54 minutes of brilliance and the few minutes of Herrman’s score — no question. That sad sax theme alone sums up everything about the latter 70s, its exhaustion, its dead-hearted nostalgia for everything it grew up pissing on. Julia Phillips was one of the movie’s producers. I’ll bet she would have wanted someone to play that theme at her funeral.”