Travelling a long way again and getting stuck into the Spotify Global Top 100. It’s so appropriate for the present moment isn’t it - I suppose how could something like popular music not fit into the present moment, that’s what it always does - the way the computers have totally taken over. It’s weird listening to 90s stuff and despite all the production, which is of course a kind of fake-natural, an appeal to the idea of people playing instruments and so on but still very much processed in various ways into quite a consistent set of sounds and signifiers, despite all of that it is still a lot closer to sounding like people playing instruments and singing in a room. Even all the hiphop drums that spread throughout all kinds of music in the 90s sound like a drum set even if they are a preset. All the popular stuff sounds fully synthetic, no pretence of anything, computer music, apple mac music, moving sliders and ctrl-c and ctrl-p music. Everyone doing backing vocals for themselves.
I’m not coming at this from a rockist perspective, I don’t have any particular love for ‘real’ instruments or anything like that. It’s more a case of noting how comprehensively the computers have won. It’s not even like it’s 808s or 90s electronica sounds or synths or apex twin that have won, it sounds nothing like any of that, it just sounds like DAIs.
Strangely in the Spotify Global Top 100 the one thing that does endure is the acoustic guitar on ballards, even by people like SZA. Somehow it still seems to convey emotional sincerity (which is obviously what’s off-putting about to me as well, it’s a fake old trick that’s absolutely transparent)
Separately it is kind of amazing that Drake is still so popular and his sexual and relationship unease / uncertainty resonates with so many people. Possibly says something about the way that love and sex work for people in their 20s now, the kinds of situations and difficulties that everyone runs into.