you'll have to tease this out for me a bit more i think. im wondering what qualifies as surface and subterranean in reference to music. can music hide anything? if so, how?
i think we can hide from it, in the way we can recoil from a caress
but how can it hide from us?
so i get the technical side of this music. it's a continuation of the distillation, reducing down to the bare necessities to get people moving. that's cool. but on a personal, value laden level i have an instant recoil to things which are this devoid of
(gonna have to go there) soul. it's a product of the time. and maybe the problem lies with me and my curmudgeonly resistance. but i just can't click with something so utterly base in it's mentality. like sure, you can look at it from the philosophical pov and see that as some kind of reaching an ultimate truth about us as humans. but i don't know if that makes it something i have to submit to (?) also see how it's inevitable given the landscape of a generation of people raised on computer games, the internet and drugs. that's what this music sounds like to me. a child exposed to all of the worst possibilities of life and trying to feel in control, but totally overwhelmed and getting out of their mind to escape it. ultimately i just hear sadness. total despair. like the reverting back to computer game soundtrack sounds is innocence lost, clear as day. but then to dress that up in the form it takes, to flip it in this way, to me just feels like evil won. there's no turning back.
so with that out of the way. assuming you're not being facetious. surface level obviously means there's no depth. no reward for repeated listens. like the film where you notice new things each watch. the shit that stirs your innards.
perry farrell (soulful infantilizer) does a decent job of saying what i mean here:
4:47
"I looked at making a record like making a salad. I go, you know, Janet Jackson, she just gives you lettuce. And she calls that a salad. But I give you the croutons, and the shredded cabbage and the shredded lettuce. You know what I mean? And the really good dressing and the seasoning and stuff like that. You know, I don't just call lettuce a salad. I think past that. And the only way to do that is to concentrate, concentrate, concentrate on it. And when you're concentrating on it like that, you can't possibly turn around and start dealing with these men that are twice your age, that have fucked people all the way up. And have got you by the balls now."
current rap sounds like there was no concentration involved. it rejects it. maybe it's got none to give. and it sounds sold out. it sounds like the corporates have literally got the rappers by their autotuned balls. it only takes a few hits for everyone to follow. it's the sound of the conspiraverbial satanics taking over.
just say no to lettuce. demand your croutons, i say.
