music as non-neutral // hyperpop as the sound of atomization

one of the holy prescripts of our age is that taste is beyond reproach, cannot be read into, is merely preference. this has mostly been good because it's kept us away from some of the dumber arguments and dick measuring contests of performative distain. but i also think we've lost something of an understanding of a "varied substance of the arts," as Dewey would call it.

one place to start this investigation is in the simple fact that taxi drivers, as a class, tend to love pop music. very simple, indisputable fact of the world. I would like to suggest also that taxi drivers have a very stressful job, which involves long periods of situation awareness, causing a high degree of exhaustion. I would like you to believe these two facts are linked.

the same arguement, again but from anecdote: there is some music that is not comprehensible when I'm in a state of high stress. Personally, in a state of sleep deprivation, I lose my ability to enjoy polyrhythms, screaming, most kinds of metal entirely, jazz as a totality. Longer musical phrases seem to recede in importance, and shorter, catchier tunes take more importance.

I don't think this is unique to me, but I do think most people have a fairly consistent level of physical stress in their lives, and wouldn't notice if their tastes were influenced by such factors.

One more angle, again uncontroversial until its implications are unpacked—people don't listen to music as a kind of general improver of life; they listen to it because it improves their life in specific dimensions or ways. While perhaps part of the experience is purely that of rhythms that massage the brain, I listen to Carly Rae Jepsen in particular because the music unlocks a specific kind of experience; that experience is, like a chicken unable to eat pecking at the ground, a kind of proxy for an experience I find inaccessible elsewhere in life. Gabe uses the word "nutrient" to describe these things.

You see pop-crit along these terms often— "Oh, you listen to Drain Gang? I also have depression lol." There's an awareness that taste is related to need—I take a medication that alters my sodium levels, I begin craving pickles—but I don't think this thread is really pulled through to the end.

Music is so closely related to identity because it's imbricated in the process of creating a lifestyle—the act of listening acts as an offset that enables actions. I listen to a bunch of 90s UK club hits, and it creates in me a set of possibilities that function together with my lifestyle—an hour a day in a tracelike state is possible within certain lifestyles and inspires certain actions, and unfortunately for a certain British cultural critic, it doesn't seem to deeply linked to taking radical worker's action.

And it is imbricated—once I begin to adapt my life to the possibilities the music creates in me, or the needs it fills which I no longer seek elsewhere, I'm pulled towards a common state with others.

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=YG0ggHM1PLM

all of this is a prologue to my much simpler belief. Hyperpop—the highly-compelling no-longer-quite-niche genre helmed by A.G. Cook and his merry band of savants, designed to optimize pop in a kind of maximalist-yet-nihilistic direction—in some cases acts as a superstimulant. More bluntly, it's often more than people can emotionally handle, or that it might just be bad for people. In other words—the popular description as "sugary" is a deeper similarity than might be expected.

Notable—the degree to which hyperpop relies on totally synthetic production of sounds that would typically be sampled; I hypothesize that the kind of recognition and dismissal that happens with a tired sample is less possible when the arbitrarily is entirely removed. The removal of detail produces enduring surfaces.

Hyperpop descends from Nightcore, the genre produced by 4chan, consisting of sped up pop songs; it is, in some sense, the first fully online genre. It was never a soundcloud genre—optimized for sociality, for creators; it was always a Youtube genre—the backdrop for anonymous souls, gaming for twelve hours. The question is, to what degree is it imbricated into that mode of living? This isn't a new question, cf Nick Hornby:

What came first – the music or the misery? Did I listen to the music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to the music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person? People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.

And so, the heading—in the 00s, much music encoded a kind of Wertherism, a kind of lovelorn panic in which it became fashionable even to wring your hands about your own miserable state, which is what makes High Fidelity such a miserably self-indulgent film for anyone above the age of 19. But today, it encodes the experience of watching anime for 7 hours, jacking off listlessly, waking up at noon in an empty room with a small window and drinking soylent.

I don't mean to denigrate such a life. Many people live miserable lives. But I think hyperpop perhaps needs some sullying of its reputation, to make clearer the direction it leads, the lifestyle it affords.