Steven Wilson’s Multimedial Metropolis: Isolation and Transcendence in the Concept Album Hand. Cannot. Erase.

Abstract

This article explores simultaneity as a defining feature of life in the modern metropolis by reading Steven Wilson’s 2015 progressive rock album Hand. Cannot. Erase. as a series of interconnected poems complemented by several parallel nonverbal narratives conveyed through music, visual, and digital bonus material. It argues that, through this multimodal storytelling, the album—which adapts the true story of Joyce Carol Vincent, a 38-year-old woman who was found dead in her north London bedsit after lying undiscovered for three years—is able to explore the multivalences of 21^st century urban isolation without having to prioritize either condemnation or idealization. It can posit the domestic space in the metropolis at once as a site of shelter from societal pressure and of inescapable loneliness, of personal transformation and lethal stasis. By chronicling the irreversible, largely self-imposed decay of its protagonist in its lyrics but offsetting it with instances of musical transcendence as well as the strategic ambiguities of an accompanying fictional blog, Hand. Cannot. Erase. simultaneously decries the anonymizing force of modern-day capitalism and the erosion of privacy through the internet, and suggests novel forms of communication and community building can emerge in spite of it, manifesting in moments of solitude, artistic transcendence, and even death. By combining a narratological framework with cues from media studies and musicology, as well as masculinity, critical whiteness, and capitalism studies, this essay hones in on that very simultaneity.  It demonstrates how, rather than resolving the multivalences of 21^st century urban life, Hand. Cannot. Erase. posits that multivalence as its essence.