I dunno, my kids don't listen to stuff like that, though. My kids are the opposite, they always want to put on contemporary radio, they can tell if something's not contemporary. I think it's Auto-Tune! They want that sound, that's what they think a pop song sounds like.
PEOPLE ALWAYS HAVE, WHEN THEY ARE YOUNGER, A MENTAL CONCEPT OF WHAT MUSIC OF THE FUTURE SOUNDS LIKE. AND THEN THEY GROWN OLDER, AND THEY HIT A POINT WHERE MODERN MUSIC DOESN'T MAKE SENSE TO THEM, AND THEN BOOM, THAT'S THE MUSIC OF THE FUTURE THEY REMEMBER THINKING ABOUT. DOES FUTURISTIC MUSIC ALWAYS HAVE TO BE WEIRD-SOUNDING? I MEAN, IF YOU LISTEN TO MODERN POP MUSIC, IT'S PRETTY WEIRD; AND I'M A FAN, BUT AS POP MUSIC HAS PROGRESSED, IT'S DEFINITELY GOTTEN SUPER WEIRD-SOUNDING.
Yeah, I dunno. I mean, what sorts of things do you think are weird, then?
I DUNNO, I THINK EVERYTHING THAT'S NOT ADELE IS; THE NEW NICKI MINAJ IS PRETTY WEIRD. SKRILLEX IS PRETTY STRANGE MUSIC. AND IT ALL HARKENS BACK TO SOMETHING OLDER, BUT —
—Yeah, Nicki Minaj is original, because she has such a personality, and there's so much in her voice that makes her so freaky. And Skrillex — I've been into dance music so long, and when I listen to a Skrillex song and it doesn't seem that surprising until there's a breakdown, and you get these crazy gnarly basslines, and it's one of those new sounds that everyone talks about, the "wobble" dubstep thing. It's apparently due to some specific software that generates those basslines, I forgot the name of it. But it's as specific as a Cry Baby wah-wah pedal that Hendrix used. That's one of the few things where I thought "Oh, that's a real 21st century sound." Skrillex has taken other people's sounds and elevated it to this almost baroque wobbliness. And then a lot of things that people do with Auto-Tune, misusing Auto-Tune, that is something that you can tell the time by. But the Auto-Tune thing is more of a gloss, it isn't in the structural melody, it isn't a fundamental shift in the way things were done in the past.
But yeah, there are a bunch of rap things nowadays that are pretty excitingly stark and futuristic. It's almost like a tradition of the future nowadays, like "Now, the future will sound cold and empty." There's a lot of rap productions now done by this guy Lex Luger, or people who are imitating him and this track "Rack City", and it's quite an excitingly minimal sound, but in this weird sort of way like "The future will be cold and inhuman." It's like the future got rarefied, like the future will be robotic and less human, right?
One thing that is quite new is people like Drake, just this super-emotional oozy rap, that seems to be connected in some way to the Internet-y tradition of over-sharing. And there are tons of things that are surprising or interesting, but not necessarily "futuristic."
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