"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. 

The Final Countdown

Bandying the word "apocalypse" feels a little off after the local events of last week, but here is Kieran-Press Reynolds on The TikTokalypse - a Pitchfork piece on the drastic effects of TikTok's potential banning in the USA on the memey end of music culture. 

And here's another K P-R report, this time for GQ, on hopecore - "the last gasp of a less-toxic internet?".

This kind of thing brings the homilyphobe out in me. 

I'd probably get on better with the spin-off subtrend Kieran further identifies - "hopeless-core", which sounds like the spirit of slacker reanimated...  Processed World as digital samizdat, spores of unproductivity and demotivation circulating.  

thrills versus landfill

Kieran Press-Reynolds on how "the recent explosion of remixing — from sped-up edits and nu-SoundClown mashups to fanmade bootlegs — is rewiring the way we create and consume music in both thrilling and unnerving ways". At No Bells blogzine.

Upside: 

"It’s hard to deny the wild thrill of tempo-twisted remixes, and it’s cool to see them gain wider appreciation. The appeal of shifting the speed up is the way it gives a song a pleasurably tickly feeling, or injects the vocalist with a burst of frantic energy. Lowering it can give music a dirge-like melancholy and a cinematic main-character tint. Add reverb to the slowness and you have a perfect recipe for vaporous psychedelia. At best, these remixes are helping explode the genre conventions that prevail in radio-ready music. Popular indie country is being remade into gloriously deranged flutters of squeaks; Mainstream R&B and pop are combusting into inhuman blazes of twitchy yearning." 

Downside: 

"There’s an empty, formulaic quality to some of these mashups, where they feel like bait engineered for viral traction. I can see a future where labels hire mashup makers to produce in-house SoundClowns... So many mashups are low-effort, and the heap of fast/slow remixes and other online styles... forms something like a giant musical landfill, the cultural equivalent of a black hole, into which we’re pouring all our attention and killed time."