Albums of the 2010s - 2019 - 100gecs' '1000 gecs'

I really don't wanna write about 100gecs, man. I don't even want to listen to them, let alone listen to them enough times to form a a cogent opinion. It was one of those things where you all went mad one summer and as a result I though it would be best to just avoid the whole album. Unfortunately, there's not anything remotely as interesting that happened that year, our last year of freedom, our last year of normal. Everything I look at on year-end best ofs, as I do when an album to write about isn't immediately forthcoming, is part of a different narrative, as I suppose you'd expect at the end of the decade. 

really not relevant this week so im getting it in well early, but a bit is a bit, folks

fka Twigs came up in the same wave as the James-Blake-y SZA-y "PBR&B" phenomenon I touched on in 2011 and 2012, even though she really doesn't like the term. Angel Olson, like St. Vincent, came up backin others, like My Morning Jacket, before really coming into her own with the other girl music practitioners of the late 2010s. Bait Ones by Jai Paul literally leaked in 2013 and as much as I adore that album 'BTSTU' came out in like 2009, it doesn't feel right to think of it as a '2019' release. DaBaby and Polo G both came into their own last year rather than 2019. Danny Brown and Kanye are, to varying degrees, past their most relevant periods. Dave, Stormzy? I guess? I don't listen to Stormzy outside of Croydon national anthem 'Shut Up', but Santan's Psychodrama is one of those albums you listen to and think "Wow, this is good, and especially Important," and then you don't feel the need to listen to it again. Note: your mileage may vary, I feel similarly about Summertime '06 despite that having some heavy bangers.

100gecs, though, are the culmination of one phenomenon I have talked about - emo apologia - and one I haven't - PC music and the subsequent hyperpop phenomenon, so I guess I'll do that. The emo bit first. If Algernon Cadwallader and Snowing were reviving knotty second-wave emo bands like Braid and American Football, and all sorts of later emo revival bands would crib to My Chem or Fall Out Boy being influences, 100gecs are coming from a far more unfashionable - far worse, let's be honest - period: crunkcore.

"Crunkcore?" Oh, honey. You know crunk? "No?" Lil Jon. Dem Franchise Boyz. Ying Yang Twins. Minimal af beats and stupid repeated hooklines and raps about getting unbelievably fucked up. The sound of your older cousin's Bluetooth-enabled Nokia circa 2007. And you remember scene kids, right? The massive emo fringes. The bright, neon, almost-raveish accoutrements and accessories. The metalcore and (scr)e(a)mo obssesions? Okay. Mix them.

"...mix them?" Sounds appalling, doesn't it? This is perhaps the key thing about music criticism. Music is inextricably linked to your age. The natural movement of things is kids adore kid shit when they're ten, and then produce all sorts of intellectual justification to explain why the stuff they liked at that age was actually smart and good, once they're old. I'm no different. Remember, this series started over a year ago with me pretending Two Door Cinema Club deserve to be part of the canon. You are not immune to propaganda  over-hyping teen bullshit.

Another layer to this is as the third millenium has progressed, people have begun to question the narrative surrounding music for kids, and music for young girls especially. The poptimism vs rockism war has been quiet waged among annoying music nerds like me since time immemorial, really, but it blew up in 2004 as a result of this Kelefa Sanneh piece and only got stronger as the millenium progressed. The argument is pretty simple, from the poptimist side. Why is it that the Beatles only became a serious band worthy of analysis when they grew beards, stopped singing about holding hands, and - crucially - stopped being solely the province of (pre-)teen girls? Why is ephemeral music released on singles or as downloads more important than album-oriented music? And why is crunkcore necessarily worse than anything else that came out in 2010? Just because teenage girls liked it?

"Because crunkcore sounds awful?" Gold star, reader I made up, but 'sound' is surprisingly low on the list of things that make something worthy of criticism or not. Problem is, and this has only become more of an issue the more accessible music production has become, anyone can make pretty passable music. Even I do that, and I'm a fucking moron. Narrative is far more important. The focus of this series is narrative, not "music I think sounds boss" otherwise it would've just been Jai Paul, Ovlov, and James Blake. Reviving the aesthetics of crunkcore, at a time when people will have forgotten the original stuff, and at a time when people are more receptive than ever to the idea that they've done something wrong - not just musically imprudent, because you're missing something you might like, but morally Wrong - by dismissing a genre beloved by marginalised identities, meant 100gecs were bound to be successful.

1000 gecs is the most annoying thing I've ever heard. This is the point. Dylan Brady and Laura Les take influence from all sorts of previously abrasive forebears - crunkcore, like I said; more normal pop-punk and emo; Skrillex's larger-than-life take on dubstep; a surprisingly large amount of happy hardcore, according to my not-particularly-electronica-inclined ears; PC Music, which I promise I'll get to - and there are all sorts of musicians I hear in this stuff that they probably wouldn't cop to listening to - Sleigh Bells and Death Grips for two - but at the end of the day I hate how it sounds and that's all that matters. I'm twenty-three. I'm not old in the proper life sense, but I'm old in terms of appraisal of what's cool. That's kind of the point of this series. I've written about music I genuinely love, but I'm also trying to work out what other people valued in the 2010s. You have to know what's cool and what isn't for that. I'll be able to listen to music I think is good the rest of my life, but this is more of a goodbye to caring whether music is cool. Relevant, influential, overhyped, underrated, all words that will not need to be in my vocabulary once I get over that hill and develop dementia and incontinence, or whatever happens when you turn thirty. 

1000gecs, then, is the sound of what will replace what I thought was cool. Someone "old" like me finding this completely insufferable is, like I said, the point. We must all, eventually, become Abraham Simpsons, pointing accusatorily and howling "it'll happen to you!!!!" This is why I don't particularly trust the swathes of old people, in music reviewing, that enjoy 1000gecs. This forty-seven year old bloke that writes for the New York Times gave this #1 album of 2019??? What the fuck are you enjoying, exactly, the parts that sound like a broken Wii Sports Resort minigame or the parts that sound like BrokenCYDE learning how to use Ableton Live? I understand people have different tastes to my own, but Dylan and Laura are so vehemently post-millenium that it transcends pure taste and moves toward 'not having the cultural apparatus to understand what the fuck is going on'. If you're middle-aged you almost certainly do not have the facilites to enjoy 100gecs, big man. Consider it the inverse of Seinfeld Is Unfunny - a trope that means "you've consumed too much media to understand why this old thing is influential". If you're over 30 you just haven't consumed enough YouTube poops to truly grok what's going on with 1000gecs. Simple as.

Anyway. The PC Music half of this shit stew. I promised. PC Music was a label. Maybe it still is. They simultaneously were(are) far too ahead of their time and pretty much just an entire label built off the premise of "what if 'Sweet Like Chocolate' by Shanks and Bigfoot, yeah, but, like, postmodern and stuff? Far out, dude." A.G. Cook kicked things off in 2013, but it's really only in 2019 when the fruits of his, and his signees, labour came to fruition. I don't think it's particularly controversial to say that their first outside adopter was almost-popstar Charli XCX way back in like 2014. This didn't move the needle that much though, because Charli XCX has never actually been Famous famous. Sorry, poptimists, she is the musical Theo Walcott, she's never going to reach the peak you've now been teasing for almost ten years, and if reaction to her current album CRASH ends up being as muted as it's currently looking she's moving into her Theo-at-Everton era. Bleak. 

(Edit: i finished my draft of this on friday morning and in truly hilarious fashion charli literally *just* bagged number one in the charts with CRASH [it's Friday afternoon as I add this]. I am malding so goddamn hard right now) 

The next potential inflection point should've been when McDonald's used 'LEMONADE' by PC Music stalwart SOPHIE in an ad back in 2015. This is the kind of thing that normally happens at the END of a trend's lifespan; the pop culture vultures descend, picking at the bones of a dead moment for any juicy morsels they can exploit, but this was really just the beginning. Over the next few years SOPHIE would become more and more prominent, collaborating with Charli on the Vroom Vroom EP as well as a few tracks of Charli's beloved 2017 albums/mixtapes like Pop 2 and then eventually showing her face in the run up to THE OIL OF EVERY PEARL'S UN-INSIDES (she'd operated as an early-the Weeknd-style 'artist sans physical presence' before, and - at least I don't think - hadn't come out as a woman at all, so up to this point people would sometimes accuse "him" of appropriating aesthetics from women).

Eventually PC Music's sort of Oxide-and-Neutrino-by-way-of-Warhol-by-way-of-drinking-like-seventeen-Pepsi-Maxes-in-a-row sensibility would filter through Cook and SOPHIE and Charli and percolate into the wider consciousness. There, it would mix with other historically maximal pop moments, from Timbaland and the Neptunes' dual chokehold over the charts at the turn of the millenium, through will.i.am's near-scientific quest to create the most annoying earworms of all time with each new Black Eyed Peas single, to, yes, crunkcore, and form what we now call 'hyperpop' because of a Spotify playlist.

It is kind of sad that the Spotify playlist is what ended up naming it, since the genre is a legitimate expression of a shared sensibility among a lot of talented youngers, I presume, but this is the genre that McDonald's cottoned onto before the public did after all, so it guess it makes sense. Despite the kids' protests - I remember reading as early as, like, summer 2020 that hyperpop was Finished and completely co-opted by normies - the name, and the sound, have stuck. I'm not gonna claim to be an authority - or even claim to be able to name a hyperpop artist outside of bait ones like gecs and Charli - but you know it when you hear it. There's a lot I didn't touch on, from nightcore to LGBT representation, and apparently there's something similar but technically unrelated called "digicore" that you should know about too but a) I don't know what the fuck that is, and b) this shit's long enough anyway.

SOPHIE's compilation... thing? PRODUCT is, for my money - however little that's worth - by far the strongest collection of music to come out of anything hyperpop or hyperpop-adjacent. Sonically, SOPHIE sounded different than pretty much anyone else coming out at the time, for nerdy synth reasons that I don't truly understand, but what becomes readily apparent when you compare, say, 'BIPP' with, I don't know, I think 'Summer' by Calvin Harris came out that year?, is how clean SOPHIE's music was. It's so completely artificial, and the artworks that accompanied each song off PRODUCT (they were all singles clumped together after-the-fact) are the perfect representation of how the music itself sounds. It sounds ridiculous but I think you can *hear* the blank canvas on a SOPHIE song (and on a lot of 1000gecs tbf). "What?" I mean these songs are so bare-bones and cavernous that the lingering silence around every fizz, whizz, pop and bang becomes as much a part of the composition as the sound effects themselves, in much the same way as the white negative space around the computer generated plastic objects on each cover functions. I mean it sounds like you can hear SOPHIE plucking the building blocks of each song from thin air, and you can hear the thin air reacting to that in turn. "Oh." Yeah, I think it sounds wanky too, I'm sorry. I can't find the words to describe it any other way. "No worries, writing is hard! You're doing your best!" Thanks, pretend reader. Means a lot.

The other thing that I think sets SOPHIE apart from everyone else is that the hyperpop kids feel one level too abstracted from dance music. You can still hear strains of British underground club music over the years - UK garage as I keep saying, but also grime, dubstep, Midlands bassline shit (you know, like "Heartbroken" by T2, it's up in the playlist), handbag house, and sho on, and sho on - struggling to rear their heads underneath the unnatural sounds of PRODUCT. I can imagine (some of) them functioning on a night out. I think if anything off 1000gecs came on at your local Pryzm or Tiger Tiger, they would only function in the sense of "lmao I can't fucking believe they're playing this", like when they played "Man's Not Hot" incessantly at our student union nightclub back in 2017, except that was never funny. 

I also think, for what it's worth, that's why hyperpop caught on in such a big way during The First Lockdown - sure, part of that is what I've already talked about with the coinage, codification, and subsequent commodification of the term over 2019, but also I think it's fundamentally a bedroom music, far more suited to Monster-fueled MOBA gameplay and Discord trolling deep into the wee small hours than any sort of excursion into the seedy nightlife. 

(I'm not saying, to be clear, that there's no hyperpop "bangers" or whatever; I'm just saying these "bangers" are products of a very specific, very fucking weird, genre vocabulary, and don't really translate outside of that, because they're in purposeful opposition to the notion of translating outside their niche. It's like when Gen X'ers say shit like "Man, Guided By Voices had the tunes to be truly famous, Bob Pollard was robbed!" Yeah, okay, "Tractor Rape Chain" has an unimpeachable melody, but Robert decided to put the words 'BETTER YET, LET'S ALL GET WET ON THE TRACTOR RAPE CHAIN' to it! It can't go on the fucking radio! So yes, the chorus to "Stupid Horse" is indelible, but there's too much hyperpop stuff on top to make it true crossover material - otherwise they'd just be pop, sans intensifier, wouldn't they? Rather than polishing turds, GBV/gecs purposely shit all over gold ingots. And more power to them for it.)

The effect of listening to hyperpop artists after listening to SOPHIE ends up being one akin to how I feel when I listen to any djent band that isn't Meshuggah: this isn't nearly as good as what you're aping, but what you're aping rules so hard that I can't even be mad at you for trying. There's absolutely no point in me being upset that 100gecs aren't SOPHIE. It's not fair on anyone. There's levels, and there's no shame in there being levels. I will say in 100gecs' defence that I've listened to 1000gecs like four times overall at this point, and I hate it slightly less each time. I understand what they're going for and they pretty much nail it. I want to be clear, lest I sign off on a bad note, that it's not a bad album in the slightest. The production is, again, clean as fuck - even the weird pizzicato violin sounds are pristine - and Dylan and Laura have clearly tapped into something that means shitloads to a lot of kids. It's just emphatically Not For Me. It's commendable to try things that weren't made for expressly your viewpoint, sure, but I do think it's important to hold up one's hands and say "you kids have fun" sometimes.

And, I may not like hyperpop, but I know a GOAT when I hear one. Rest in peace, SOPHIE. I have spent this post, and indeed the past year or so, pretending it's not the case, but rest in peace. 

AND And, that's the 2010s, folks. I'll do a little wrap up post next week to go over what we've learnt, but 16 months later we are finally done with that godforsaken decade. See you then.