Yeah I was quite into PC Music when they started popping up a few years ago but I couldn’t carry on with it, after a certain point I just found it a bit obnoxious. I think the @weirdoslam point about it all being swamped in a pool of irony is probably the main reason. I like irony a bit here and there but my earlier musical tastes were often either very po-faced (like indie music, Fugazi etc.) or the classic gen-x alternative rock stuff which was all very detatched, ironic and so on, and their hipster indie successors and I do regret not having a bit more unaffected fun.
That’s what I’m drawn to at the moment, like 90s garage and house and stuff where it’s sincere and unaffected, but it’s fun as well. And I find the hyperpop stuff just too detached from that actual place of joy. It’s like eating 10 bags of haribo or something, I get a sugar rush but I crash and I can’t sustain it, and if I keep going I end up feeling empty and depressed. I can’t be bothered with more ill defined critiques-or-maybe-not-critiques of slick commercial culture, without any obvious point. You can do that stuff in a meme or whatever, I want something a bit more from music.
I saw something recently where Simon Reynolds was bashing the UK garage revival because it’s just retreads of the old tunes, there’s no sense of being part of a development of culture to a new place (is that the nihilation thing?)
Previously I might have been sympathetic to that argument, if it weren’t that anything “new” was just mashing up some old stuff, making it sound faster or more obnoxious, and pushing the extremity angle. And as @weirdoslam points out you end up with stuff that doesn’t really sound fresh and isn’t really new, it is just the next iteration of an already-tired idea (magpie from different genres and push them to the furthest logical extension). Perhaps this is a consequence of us hitting a technological wall - there aren’t any obvious technological barriers to break anymore, anyone can do anything on a computer more or less. So there aren’t technical restrictions that are common to everyone pushing people in a similar creative direction, or forcing them to react in creative ways to get the most out of the gear - there’s too many options in terms of the tools you use, and most of the low hanging fruit conceptually has already been grabbed. So people are left with trying to make “new” things by retreading but by pushing things to the extreme to make it “new” or “modern”.
I’m much more attracted to the garage retreads, because they’re a bit more uncomplicated, there’s not a message really (other than DIY, being generous) - but I prefer that to the music being warped in a negative way to push a kind of trite, surface level “modern society is weird, the internet affects things, consumerism results in some strange aesthetics” message without any interesting content or critique. That’s fine for a few singles or a compilation, but you’re flogging a dead horse beyond that point.
Maybe the reason stuff like garage (and acid house and things like that) is attractive to people at the moment is that they were social and party musics in a very literal sense - insofar as it had a visual aesthetic it was often just “people are around, dancing, in a club”. I’m thinking of the video for Flowers or the original video for Re-rewind, or some of the cover art for compilations and stuff.
The MC and vocalling was often “we’re going out, we’re going to the club, here are the experiences you have at the club, we drink champagne at the club”. The scene it was describing was kind of dress-up, champagne, materialistic in a lot of ways that aren’t very suited to left wing politics. But there is a sense of collectiveness there - we’re all here in the same place interacting with each other. The dress stuff is a kind of competitive thing but also a tribal identifier, an in-group bonding thing. The drugs are booze and cocaine which are kind of social lubricating drugs rather than get-in-your-own-head drugs like ketamine or psychedelics or something. It’s a non-atomised thing. And that is something that I think people are really missing, even pre-corona (which is when the revival started) - public space has been increasingly closed down, people are living more atomised lives, everyone is on this hyper-visible social media projection of their personality, loads of people are trying to create a personal brand or do this whole Rise And Grind thing. It feels like there’s less and less space for people to just have fun, relax with no ulterior motive or aim to self-improve, and interact with each other in a non-competitive and healthily social way. Maybe there’s a desire to return to the 90s when lots of jobs that weren’t that hard to get into were paying out good money, cost of living wasn’t so absurd, there was a sense of optimism about where the future was going etc.
The UK garage revival doesn’t really seem to lean into all of these characteristics of classic garage, the club / social orientation - it’s not a hardcore continuum thing really, the MCs aren’t very interested and the DJs don’t seem interested in MCs, so the vocal stuff isn’t really there to paint that picture. It’s purely instrumental or there is a bit of singing, usually about love or generic interpersonal stuff. The visuals are normally graphic designy stuff, maybe a bit of the acid house photoshopped-brand-logos-as-flyers aesthetic - there isn’t much of a photographing-real-people-enjoying-themselves aesthetic, and there isn’t the money or interest to make videos (and presumably there haven’t been that many raves bc it seems to have started becoming a thing on the cusp of 2020, just before corona halted everything).
But even so the music itself is made for dancing, it’s slinky, friendly and approachable but can be deep enough to stay interesting to obsessives - it’s kind of the opposite of extremity-for-extremitys-sake, shred your ears, trebly hyperpop. It’s made for getting lots of people into the same place and being able to draw on and create many different moods for a sincere experience - not using a million different styles to create basically same kind of mood over an over again (maybe 2 or 3 moods if you’re lucky), and not using irony to create distance.
To return to the irony point, there is something interesting about hyperpop, in that it appears to be appropriating things that are very earnest and euphoric and giving them the irony-slick to make them acceptable to people for whom earnestness is difficult or uncool (I’m thinking here of the Harlecore thing, MC Boing and so on which has come out very recently). But it’s like oil and water, it’s interesting that people are being drawn to things that can’t really mix properly, things that are on the opposite ends of the earnestness spectrum.
Presumably the earnestness and euphoria has an appeal that people are grasping for, but can’t quite let go of their self-consciousness enough to grasp it wholeheartedly. That’s a very internet-age sentiment I suppose. Maybe the creators or fans would object to the sense that everything is ironic to them? (But I probably wouldn’t believe them if they did)
I can’t help but find the whole thing offputting anyway. I also struggle with sincerity and earnestness to an extreme degree, but I feel like trying to engage with the most extreme and guileless forms of earnestness through a distancing irony-haze is probably the worst way to deal with that. Which is perhaps why I’m attracted to the non-ironic forms at the moment.
I dunno if that all is coherent tbh, but I started writing and all that came out (I’m procrastinating atm). Hopefully one day I’ll be able to make a post that isn’t 1,500 words long.
we can just keep predicting here forever
but the older we get, the more we see scenes form, grow, ripen, and die / evolve.