"mapping the brainrot continuum"

Hasten to read - while the paywall is relaxed for 24 hours - this fascinating conversation between Kieran Press-Reynolds and Shawn Reynaldo (no relation) for the latter's substack First Floor. Kieran talks about being a Gen Z writer about music + memes + internet subcultures - or as Reynaldo puts it, "mapping the brainrot continuum". 

There's also some glimpses into Press-Reynolds family life. 

E.g. 

"I think I always wanted to be a writer. When I was six, I made my own newspaper. But I also had that teenage rebellion thing where I thought that what my parents did was the lamest thing ever. I’d come home from school and my dad would be playing weird ambient alien sounds, and I’d think, 'I just want to go play Minecraft. Turn this off.' Then my mom would come home and she was exhausted every day from work. Both of my parents were like, 'This is the worst job. Do not follow in our footsteps'."

I must say I don't remember ever saying it was "the worst job", being a critic - after all, it's got a lot of upsides. 

But we did kind of hope he would choose a path that didn't lead to precarity. 

And we really didn't expect him to go down that same path. As a teenager he showed no interest at all. I always thought Kieran would do something involving video. Or invent an app.

But he's joined us in the incredible shrinking field. 

"jumping iz not a crime"

Kieran Press-Reynolds with a guest piece at Shawn Reynaldo's First Floor, while the main man takes a vacation.  It's a report on "the holy hell of cursed jumpstyle" - a zoomer-oriented TikTok-propelled twist to the gabber continuum.  

"vyrval’s ballistic banger is the biggest tune in a growing wave of psychotic jumpstyle music that seems made to express existential fears: technology has gone too far, we’ve broken the world beyond repair, autocratic autobots will soon seize control...  In the comments of the clips that accompany these songs, people write what’s basically apocalyptic science-fiction, imagining grim future scenarios: “Me watching an AI generated video of me doing the most atrocious War crime ever.” The visual aesthetic mirrors the freakiness: unsettling cyber graphics are superimposed on neon landscapes, with distorted limbs and objects."

"At its most baleful, these songs obliterate any and all melody, leaving listeners with no chance for reprieve from their unrelenting assault. Dj Svevsx’s “jumpstyle (1)” has over 8 million plays and it’s just a 42-second spasm of feculent kicks." 

Looks bit like the Moving Shadow logo, that silhouette. 

Weathered legend returns to youth currency 

What K calls "peak slumpstyle" - the slowed + reverb remix 

Lithuian "nu-jumpstyle Jesus" Yabujin 

And his alter-ego

"What makes this internet-addled aesthetic so addictive is the way it taps into the younger generation’s collectively fried childhoods. It’s a shitposty Tower of Babble that crosses countries and languages."

Talking of shitpostmodernism, Kieran is quoted in this Kyle Chayka article in The New Yorker on corecore and "The Dada Era of Internet Memes"

Check out also K P-R's piece at No Bells on the Bushwick nightclub Rash, which was attacked by an arsonist in what may well be a hate-crime a few years ago, but has now been rebuilt and relaunched. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The uglier aspects of this scene reminded me a bit of this spoof  and spoof pt 2 I concocted back in 2007 (inspired by guesswho)

Old post on hardstyle, a related genre that has some militaristic undercurrents... well, overcurrents really

Jumpstyle in simpler, happier, more innocent days. 

Reynoldso versus Reynaldo

Shawn Reynaldo is a music writer who's just published his debut book First Floor: Reflections on Electronic Dance Culture through Velocity Press, which has a growing catalogue of interesting tomes on dance music.   

The title comes from Shawn's Substack / newsletter First Floor. Check out his columns like this recent one on the rise of spectacle within dance culture.  

Recently Shawn and I had a really enjoyable, wide-ranging chat about club culture, nostalgia, futurity, music journalism, genre-naming, and more. For a day or two, the conversation is accessible to non-subscribers here.

I put it to Shawn that we are phonetic near-namesakes.  Strangely, he said this had never occurred to him! Perhaps when I was starting my writing career, I should have put an 'o' on the end of my byline - it has a dashing, swashbuckling air.