Generation Pokemon

Music genres tend to excite obsessives and critics disproportionately. The public doesn’t care about genres: they want “rock stars,” breakup ballads and bravura; from their vantage, genres are off-putting as homework, a cliquey prescription of expected imagery and behavior. For the most part genres are the provenance of the young, who can embody new social propositions with abandon, the albatrosses of consequence and responsibility not yet descended upon them. And lately, as is often mentioned in articles concerning our “global economic downturn,” they have a lot of free time.

Critics adore genres for how they simplify dialog — “a prosthesis to fill a hole in writing” as Barthes expertly put it — and lend conforming relevance to their work. The quickening of a new genre in any art form is an internecine gambit for critics, as established reputations liquefy, and all are forced to reprove themselves in the quality of their response. Artists ensnared by this rush to consensus are confused, wary, and usually offended, previously convinced of their inscrutable genius. In the history of pop music there have been maybe six people justified in thinking this way, so it is hard to sympathize with an unproven act’s resistance to qualification. Yet the increasingly desperate drive to divine new editorial lingua franca (Chillwave, Witch House, and, case in point, “Rape Gaze”) indicates artists may have the upper hand here. Assured their music can only generate social currency, musicians are free to laugh at failed attempts to market them, rather than demean themselves to convince editors they are marketable.

Salem is already doing this. The band’s touted history of drugging and sucking shit in concert has proven irresistibly controversial, but the joke continues to be on writers, whether fawning or frothing over their ostentation. This is the ghost of Dash Snow, the low-life as art paradigm: in spirit and execution, Salem are functionally VICE magazine’s house band. If they can afford — through acceptance of poverty or benefit of wealth — to ignore outside appraisal of their work, critics have no leverage.

Following a spate of dismissive, disinterested interviews, the band’s manager has taken to invoking an imaginary genre I helped frame over the summer, Night Bus. Various writers, bloggers and musicians (including of-the-moment acts like Elite Gymnastics and CFCF) participated in this free-for-all, building a positive consensus reinforced by debate.

The people who worked this up were sincere, considering Chillwave and Witch House vague, editorial terms that didn’t clearly invoke whatever qualities the music branded by them shared. Added to which we were more interested in the darker music of recent years than the obliquely “dreamy” Chillwave material that had crossed over as fad culture. Launching from Burial, who titled a transitional ambient track from his still-astonishing 2007 debut accordingly (and discussed the context at length), we found that artists disparate as Robin Gibb, Public Image Limited and G-Side were suddenly relatable. That perhaps this was a better phrase for the uniquely dissociative sense of privacy and freedom one feels — protected from their everyday identity, from familiar faces and places — on a bus, at night, in the experiential vacuum of transit. Departed, yet to arrive, and deeply alone.

u know i ▲ u

Rather than interact with their audience in such ways, music publications impose their vantage on the listener, issuing value judgments from a position of presumed liturgical superiority. They strive to maintain back-channel dialog and distance, to occupy an elevated space between the audience and musician. But this is an increasingly untenable distinction, as pop music is approaching infinite mutability , both as a commodity, and as a mode of expression.

The generation of music journalists I belong to has evolved based on an old definition of intellectual prowess — the acquisition of information — because in our lives, information had value. This is no longer the case. When information was disseminated at pace, through print media, there was arbitrage opportunity. An audience could be won and held by how close you could get them to the artist, by the depth and refinement of your content, or at base, your ability to break music news first. As music and information are now the same thing, and ubiquitous, relaying and relating them no longer confers authority, and you are left with a culture of comment.

This is not the end of the world, as plenty of great writing is out there of late, driven by — and arguably driving — pop music. But there is loss for any writer who assents to feed the beast: when your first impulse is to apply music to other ends, whether promotional, editorial, or academic, you can no longer interpret it emotionally. You cannot live with it. Music has not “become content” because of the Internet, dislocation in the music industry, or the changing attitudes of listeners: it is so debased because it is being aggressively harvested by music publications, as fuel to keep their advertising blast furnaces running. Even the best writer today is also a stoker.

If you look at the stranglehold critics have on the dissemination and interpretation of early-stage independent pop music, that is not a victory for the budding musician, who might receive real, semi-profitable attention earlier in life than in the past, but is unwittingly forced (or opportunistically decides) to play by house rules. Musicians conform to or at least consider the style and imagery dictated by these sites, rather than develop and express what is inside them, and trust (or disregard whether) it will be recognized. That is an intellectual fiefdom.

Young people are totally divorced from — and confused by — my generation’s panicked response to the current state of affairs. We drape their music in auxesis and frillery to frame dichotomies and debates amongst ourselves, presupposing questions that might fire neurons in people who lived through an era of physical media and Tectonic genre shifts, but are surplus to requirements for the young. We should have evolved relativistically to account for that, to develop an interpretable version of a world they occupy, but is yet to be reflected back at them. Our baggage is a past where pop music and print media were broad, corporate industries, and a present where there is dissolution in both spheres. This backdrop is conceptually alien to kids. It’s not that they don’t care — it’s that they literally cannot understand what we are talking about.

Liberated from the stricture of marketing and distribution cycles — and for all practical purposes cost as a barrier to entry — music is becoming ether. Where in the past pop genres had linear trajectories — the forming, reign and death of disco, punk, etc.— all music will float in digital suspension quite soon, part of the commonly-invoked cloud. The cloud is mere acknowledgement of a future state of affairs, christening a shift presently occurring in the distribution and storage of media. With this first principle we can debate the necessary accommodations businesses and consumers must make to interface with the cloud, and wonder what benefits and sacrifices await each. It’s an attractive and well-aligned metaphor, but I find it ultimately unsatisfying.

A better choice would be Hawking’s goldfish bowl, which accounts for the psycho- and sociological impact that infinities of storage and access will have on a sensorial art form with rich traditions. Previously fixed definitions and contexts will distort as time goes on, destroyed by variable interpretation. On the upside, the social currency of all genres is inexhaustible in the goldfish bowl: they are either actively traded or potentially valuable. Genres will no longer be “revived” sartorially or as influence; rather, they will be reincarnated in-state, the music interpreted with the same novelty as when it was first released. Any unseemly traditions or affectations of the past will be forgiven as quaint and unthreatening, or lamented as sad friezes of a time when pop music had greater socioeconomic import.

This transition presents an existential quandary: If old music is retrieved with the same convenience and experiential novelty as new, is then New a valid or valuable context? The predominance of Old sounds and fashions filtering through New music over the last few years suggests this may be syllogistic.

Be Real, it Doesn’t Matter Anyway

Chillwave, Witch House and the like are the first distinct musical propositions from Generation Pokemon, raised in the 1990s and inundated with low-cost, infinite-pool consumerism. Scarcity has been an artificial concept their entire lives: a trading card manufactured in lower volume to inflate its value, both actually — as a collector’s item — and with respect to the leverage it affords the bearer inside the game. Academically, artificial scarcity goes back to baseball cards, but in the 1990s, in collectible card games like Pokemon and Magic: The Gathering, a confluence of disposable income and marketing acumen fomented an acquisitive mania far beyond anything in the past. The emotional makeup of an obsessive baseball card collector has not changed much since 1940, because neither has the game, nor the function of the card. The difference is the conjoined emotional, social and economic value of a trading card that is at once a prized collector’s item, a cuddly stuffed animal, and a component in a monumentally complex version of War.

I was disheartened to see Jon Pareles deliver a yawn in place of real analysis, especially since his stature meant any comment would throw fuel on the Chillwave fire. Yes, the imagery here is beyond exhausted — science cannot calculate the number of recent recordings that apparently sound like sunrises, sunsets, or Polaroids of either — and I suspect this is a major component in the dismissive responses of Pareles et al. But unaccounted for in this dismissal is the mindset of the artist behind this music, and that mindset is very, very new.

Kids are selling each other distressed cassettes dubbed on decks with tired motors to lend the warped imprint of unpredictable, external forces. But this is not borne of nostalgia for cassettes as a medium. That’s lazy thinking: cassettes have no meaning for anyone under 30. The often-invoked “warmth” of analog tape is interesting and pleasing in contrast to the geometrically precise music that seeks these kids out, and there is even a community-building prerequisite in finding a cassette player these days. But the weathered presentation is a prayer to the artificial limited editions of their youth, not any rosy memory of the cassette as an outmoded format. My generation is missing this, because we are infected with a functional memory of the cassette, of buying new music on cassette and using blanks to make mix-tapes. Kids today have never done either of these things but as exercises in art or affectation.

Where I End

Downloading Kid A was probably my generation’s last novel, shared musical experience. I recall being driven around by a band-mate who’d burned the final running order, and thinking, “This was literally never possible before.” And it felt weirdly small and private, like Radiohead were no different from any other band, their music suddenly richer for existing outside the promotional hegemony of radio and television. The same way bootlegs conferred heightened status to rabid Bowie or Cure fans — a deeper and more exclusive experience — but exploded across the Internet. Since we had to burn these MP3s to CD (the iPod did not exist when Kid A was released), our historical reception of music via physical media continued uninterrupted. For all the hysteria and novelty surrounding the MP3, the three-year window where MP3s had to be converted to CDs to be enjoyed outside your computer felt nearer to the past than the future, a new process with the same result. I don’t know if anyone will even remember it, but it had a definite texture.

My first observation on taking in Kid A was not comparative or critical; I wasn’t much concerned with the stylistic lineage the album does or doesn’t tap into. What struck me was the moment in “Idioteque” where Thom Yorke’s lyric, “Women and children first, and the children first” looped back on itself, becoming a new element in the song, one that spoke to a multitude of impulses beyond “evocative rock music” as defined by U2. The first and most obvious import of the loop is how it melds with “Idioteque”’s electronic foundations, refocusing the listener on the choked, fibrous snare and throbbing kick that buttress what is basically a run-on sentence. What crept under this was more sinister: the notion that someone in the band, perhaps Yorke, observed that the loop could be stopped and started such that the syllables formed the words “If I asked you to kill me.” I blurted this out semi-ecstatically to my bandmate and chauffeur, who laughed incredulously, thinking I was trying to frost Radiohead’s cake. When we later tuned in for the band’s rapturously-received, if from my vantage unhinged and uneven SNL set, we were both waiting to see what would happen. My chauffeur was thereafter convinced, both that Yorke was singing “If I asked you to kill me” in at least some iterations of the song’s finale, and that I was in some way brilliant for having noticed. But I wasn’t then and still can’t be sure, because it doesn’t seem anyone else in ten years has ever suggested Thom Yorke sometimes sings “If I asked you to kill me” during the finale of “Idioteque.”

And You Begin

In 2010, we have software that affords creative people lacking the patience (or neural wiring) to deal with music theory the ability to paint with sound. Using an infinite palette of synthesized sounds — and not least, loops and tones cut out of other music — previously sacrosanct, rare sonic footprints are immediately accessible. Past prerequisites — the exorbitant cost of the Fairlight CMI, Voyetra 8, or Emulator; core knowledge of phase, pitch, or MIDI programming — have been absorbed as code, made available to the musically curious in graphical interfaces children can understand (and you would be hard-pressed to say a child has not made some of Chillwave’s highest-profile cuts). Right now, these are exciting and novel times for bedroom musicians, who can invoke these instruments in new collages of sound and memory. But what happens when the historical weight and cultural value of a sparkling Jupiter 8 beam, or the chubby thud of a LinnDrum snare evaporates, as it will for subsequent generations? If you’re raised in a culture of reflexive thought, what will you end up thinking?

Daniel Lopatin in particular fascinates me. As Oneohtrix Point Never, Chuck Person and various other monikers, he embodies a future where you can recreate another musician’s work on your own time. I would liken this to transcribing BASIC and LOGO routines from magazines to Trash 80s or Commodore 64s (the modern reflection would be script-kids reverse engineering web code, “hacking” their Myspace pages, etc.). The sensations one feels in reconstructing ideas from the ground up are deeper than simply sampling and incorporating them as components of a new idea. Both are potentially creative actions, but replication offers the exclusive rewards of comprehension, sympathy, and mutual participation. While recreating Lopatin’s loop of JoJo’s “Too Little, Too Late,” I was drawn down an existential spiral last month.

Slowing the song extracts maximum return on its overstuffed harmonies: the collisions from Lopatin’s signature quarter-measure delay and reduced frequency response smear away the treble-heavy sheen of modern pop, shifting the melody toward the mid and bass ranges. Closed loops like this lead me to emotional drift, to meditation on the artist’s intentions. In this case the lyric functions variously: as a despondent call for personal integrity from a hugely manufactured artist; as submission to or enraged mutilation of that facade; as strictly literal nihilism; and finally as a reminder that no one should take this sort of thing too seriously, that it’s just a loop.

I’d argue that last hedge is yours to take, and further, that it’s a trap, a way for Lopatin to filter out people he doesn’t want listening to his music. In capturing and proffering this moment, Lopatin is telling you that gag humor is the wrong reading. You can laugh a good deal of his work off as half-assed, too-easily composed in the digital age, and sideline him as a cut-and-paste hack, but the insistence of these loops forces you to recognize the musicality of his choices.

This is another upside of life in the goldfish bowl: more people will understand how music is made, generatively and procedurally. Lopatin is part of a long lineage, of the Art of Noise sampling the chorus rush from Toto’s “Rosanna” in “Beat Box”, the same year it was released (this was an unheard-of novelty, and perhaps insult, in 1983). Likewise DJ Shadow’s “Mutual Slump” and Bjork’s “Possibly Maybe”: these cuts radically recast other pop songs while they still had present-tense weight as pop. The heady implication is that all and especially the most successful, widely-embraced pop music contains potentially other music inside itself. That like people, songs contain dark, deeper truths and revelations, hidden from perception by marketable conformity and expected behavior. That inside Toto’s “Africa” lies the warning, “They’re waiting there for you,” and the nagging question, “Are you deaf?” That in Ian Van Dahl’s trance anthem “Castles in the Sky” writhes a downtempo chillout classic. (Especially unsettling is his slowed loop of the Satanic-psych obscurity “Four Horsemen”, by Aphrodite’s Child). Unearthing these artifacts can be a matter of tedious archaeology or laughable happenstance, but there is radiant lunacy buried in the cemeteries of pop music, if you have a gravedigger’s stomach.

They Don’t P▲y Like They Used to P▲y

We are in the earliest days of receiving wholly self-styled, self-created digital upstarts as Real Musicians, interpreting them alongside corporately-funded, professional acts; CFCF is running bylines alongside RATATAT alongside Florence + the Machine alongside Lil Wayne. Front-running in the music press has completely flattened the promotional landscape, which is terrible for promoters, and binds artists to the whims of writers and editors, as I’ve already mentioned.

Neon Indian dodged this quagmire during the summer of 2010, signing with Mountain Dew’s Green Label initiative, one of few substantive promotional avenues available to young artists in recent years. The Green Label idea harks back to co-branded discount compilation CDs of the 1990s, brought out by Stolichnaya, Coca-Cola (7-Up, Fruitopia) and countless others. Alan Palomo (Neon Indian) was more pragmatist than opportunist in this: he knew his audience wouldn’t care, because 1) they know they’re not helping him — they’ve stolen his music, and 2) they’re almost completely advertising-resistant, unthreatened by promiscuity of this kind. Alan knew these things about his audience because he is just like them.

Moves like this always fascinate writers, because money is changing hands, and the sponsors are promoting musicians on a purely commercial, financial basis, which could be seen as grossly inartistic (see Owl City). The busier bee in their bonnet is in how that money allows the artist to bypass the critic as a gatekeeper. During an interview with WFMU last week, Matt LeMay duck-tested this vexation and termed it brand jealousy — e.g. blogs and publications are brands built on the sovereignty of their recommendations, and big-money promotional campaigns deny them a bite at the apple by reaching the consumer directly. It was a brilliant observation, but in this interview, Matt — like many of my peers, I’m not singling him out — exhibits a very selective memory of the 1990s branding moves I mentioned above, and (he’s not alone in this either) tends to make a straw man of “major record labels.”

In the 1990s, Elektra records released albums from Moby, Ol Dirty Bastard, Bjork, Luna, Archers of Loaf, Stereolab and countless other canonical artists. Capitol Records lassoed a horse that supposedly couldn’t be broken, releasing the Jesus Lizard’s forgettable Shot, and had a 49/51 stake in Matador Records. Warner Bros. had Built to Spill and Ministry, and even today, through Asylum, counts Waka Flocka Flame on its roster. Every major label operates wholly-owned or licensed subsidiaries employing younger, hungrier fans who love music and lobby for its promotion zealously. I’ve dealt with a lot of these people, and usually they believe — often naively — that they’re in a position to introduce kids to richer music. This is what drives them: not simply that they can make money and down free drinks in the process, but that they could be responsible for redirecting their parent corporation’s dumber, older money to younger, cooler musicians, enliven the landscape of pop, and take a cut. For these people, music is an art form, and they seek to operate as acolytes and curators. This surely sounds familiar, as it’s the defense all music critics hold dear in the Internet age. But no music publication will be offering Warpaint a $500,000 advance. Would that we were heading into the world record labels controlled in 1991, rather than the one critics control in 2011, that kind of money would assuredly be in the offing.