Popular music has been criticized recently for sounding more formulaic than ever. Looking at some of the biggest songs right now, most of them aren’t doing anything remotely unique or new. Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift’s new hits aren’t bad, but they’re so generic. Morgan Wallen and Bailey Zimmerman are a part of that overly-sentimental stadium country sound that you either love or hate. The Coi Leray hit “Players” is basically a cover of Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message”, just with different words; and even though I love this next track, Metro Boomin’s track “Creepin” is literally a cover of an already huge song by Mario Winans. Heck, even three other songs in the top 10 right now are remixes, the most offensive being Selena Gomez adding nothing to the already good Rema track. It’s not even that all of these songs are bad, I quite like about half of the top 10, but nothing here is looking at where music is going. Even though many people hated it at the time, when dubstep ruled the charts in the early 2010s, it showed where popular music was going to go for the rest of the decade with people like The Chainsmokers and Justin Bieber. There is nothing currently on the charts that is setting that trend. The closest I can think of is The Weeknd and Dua Lipa in 2020 bringing back the 80s synth-pop sound. But even then, that’s more of a rehashing of older sounds than looking forward to new sounds. In order to see where music could go, you have to look a little deeper. Thanks to the internet, that new sound isn’t as hard to find as it used to be.
I’ve talked about 100 gecs quite a few times on here. They’ve had a song in my top 50 every year I’ve made a list, their debut and remix albums were both fantastic, and they were the face of this relatively new genre called hyperpop. Hyperpop goes back way further than the gecs, but they are the reason this label was even invented. It is made to categorize this brand of hyper-electronic, synth-heavy, experimental music that often has extremely sticky choruses that would work in a normal pop song. If you were to transcribe most hyperpop songs onto paper, they would not look that much different than much of the chart topping hits we see now, but they take all of these sounds to the extreme. This new 100 gecs album even breaks away from what hyperpop supposedly sounds like, but it still keeps the same energy that hyperpop has always had.
Throughout this album, they keep the spirit of taking everything to its most outrageous conclusion. For example, the guitar licks are so loud that you could accidentally break your speakers if you played this too loudly. “Hollywood Baby” and “mememe” are both examples of this, especially when it comes to the choruses. Instead of writing songs about love or heartbreak, the songs themselves are about the most mundane and weirdest things imaginable. “Frog On The Floor” is about a frog going to a human party where he gets drunk and starts eating flies. “I Got My Tooth Removed” is a ska song about getting your tooth removed, plain and simple. If taken at face value, they are also the most wanted people in the US, the dumbest girl alive, eating burritos with Danny Devito, and much more. There is also the “boing” sound effect, a star wars blaster, the TikTok computer voice, and a sample from “Insane In the Membrane” all spliced into this album. 10,000 gecs is maximalist in every sense of the word, but they have kept the pop song sensibilities as well.
For example, look at the aforementioned track “Hollywood Baby”. The track revolves around this gigantic guitar lick and minimalistic bassline, but the explosion of layered, autotuned vocals during the chorus just has this irresistible melody to them. They even through in some “oh-oh, oh, woah-oh”s that many pop and rock songs have to get the melody stuck in the listeners heads. If this song was given to an already huge band like Imagine Dragons or Maneskin, it would have a billion streams and top the charts. Heck, I could even see the song itself going viral if it manages to find the right niche on TikTok. Or maybe we could look at “I Got My Tooth Removed”. The bulk of the song has this absurd ska-quality to it that sounds extremely out of place today, but it’s instantly reminiscent of the theme song to the insanely popular TV show, America’s Funniest Home Videos. It sounds crazy now, but this used to be huge! If this song came out 20 years ago, I could imagine it being a chart topper. The same goes the first half of “Billie Knows Jaime”, which has a classic nu-metal flavor to it. It almost feels like something Limp Bizkit would have done back in the day, except that’s before it turns into a demented, guttural, glitchy breakdown for the second half of the song. This album, and group, has so much potential to become viral. I still feel like they could become extremely popular. Heck, they even sold out The Sylvee in Madison, which holds 2,400 people! Having that many people buy tickets to a show of music that sounds like this is proof enough they could be the future. The future doesn’t always have to be made by the newest people, use the newest technology, or even have anything accessible about it.
JPEGMAFIA has released some of the most innovative hip-hop of the past 5 years, and he’s back again. This time, it’s a collaboration album with Danny Brown! Danny himself is just as weird as JPEG when it comes to rapping, maybe even weirder, but he’s not a producer like JPEG is. With these two hip-hop weirdos coming together, expectations were sky high! I was literally refusing to believe this album would actually materialize because I didn’t want to get too excited. But thankfully, the album did come out and it didn’t let anybody down!
The first, and most impressive thing about this album is that JPEGMAFIA produced the entire thing on the SP-404! For those that don’t know, this is a sampling machine that came out in the mid-2000s. When describing this album on Bandcamp, JPEG has said that, “This is what we would sound like in the 90s with no pro tools.” Imagining this album coming out anytime in the 1990s or 2000s is impossible. Even without using any newer technology, this album sounds completely unique! “Steppa Pig” has these maximalist 808s that fit perfectly over the NSYNC sample. The title track, “Scaring The Hoes”, is just claps and a saxophone for over a minute before these manic drums finally come in halfway through the song. The gigantic gospel choir on “God Loves You” and the shoegaze-y guitars on “Garbage Pale Kids” are a couple personal production highlights from this album. There is nobody else that sounds like this besides these two, and even then, this project is unlike anything in their catalog. I guarantee you haven’t heard anything like this!
The rapping on here may not be as catchy as the 100 gecs album, but their flows somehow fit the skittering production here perfectly. Danny Brown’s high-pitched voice is sometimes hard to hear in these maximalist beats, but his flows on here can be as exquisite as ever. I don’t know how he can find pockets in a song like “Heaven On Earth (HOE)” or “Jack Harlow Combo Meal” so easily. JPEGMAFIA is a bit more straightforward with his rhyming, but that’s ok because looking slightly normal next to Danny Brown is expected. And as mentioned above, JPEG also produced the entire thing too, so this project still feels more like his project than Danny’s. I’m not sure this project could reach the level of popularity that 10,000 gecs could, but this is easily just as enjoyable and arguably more inventive.
Both of these projects sound unlike anything else that is currently in the mainstream, nor do they sound explicitly like anything else that I am familiar with. They are setting the trends themselves, and that trend seems to be overstimulation. Now, there is a whole other piece to be written on why overstimulation is the drug of choice right now for many young people, especially when you look at how TikTok videos have to have Subway Surfer videos on half of the screen to get people to pay attention to them. But for this purpose, I think these two projects use overstimulation to help people take a break from life. When I listen to either one of these albums, I can’t think of anything important because of all of the glitchy, gargantuan noises, and the musical twists that are in these projects. This is not something to put on in the background and enjoy passively, it demands your attention. That’s probably why people like 100 gecs and JPEGMAFIA won’t ever top Billboard, because most people are completely fine listening to the 100th song about a breakup with the same chord progression as the last one. Now, there’s nothing wrong with just being a passive fan of music. I know I would rather watch the same terrible movie for the 10th time than watch a new one. But when it comes to music, I love finding things that sound unlike anything I’ve ever heard before. 100 gecs, JPEGMAFIA, and Danny Brown are pushing music to the extreme, and who knows, maybe one of these songs will end up going viral on TikTok or something and become a hit.
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