the music of the internet generation

Brockhampton. Odd Future. V A P O R W A V E. Death Grips, although maybe not Death Grips really - they're old, they're too rock.

Edginess. Transgression. Permissiveness. Trolling. Memes.

Raised by computers. The first generation to know nothing else.

Some of it's good. Much of it's awful. I listened to Brockhampton today and felt a combination of confusion and contempt. The kids are celebrating sexual violence. I mean, these are allegedly the progressive ones. Maybe I missed something. The production is brash and impatient.

Everyone under the age of 25 thinks that Frank Ocean is the greatest artist of our time.

It all feels bound up in some inexorable cultural movement that incorporates the alt-right, the alt-left, and for better or worse a complete abandonment of traditional morality. I don't know what to make of it.

This is a terrible, clueless opening post, obviously, but let's work through this. Am I right to be scared? Are these kids heading anywhere good? Is this all, somehow, necessary?

I feel old. Maybe we all go through this. Hit thirty, hear what the kids are into now and feel scared. Or try to embrace it.

Good or bad, it all sounds like air. Fucking air. Flavoured air.

thumbs up!

orange milk records s/d

death's dynamic shroud feels like a really substantial metacommentary on the forces guiding this, and I absolutely love it/them

ditto whatever Oneohtrix Point Never has been up to lately

i was totally surprised when i went to see Oneohtrix that a huge portion of the crowd was like teens and early 20's.

anyway, i love him and Death Grips and some of this other stuff but i am obviously on the older end of the demo and am clueless as to where it lives on the internet

can we please not do "alt-left" again thanks

I thought everyone under 25 thought Kanye was the greatest rapper of all time

kanye has been semi-ironically coopted by the alt-meme generation but he's presumably completely oblivious to it

To what extent is early-childhood immersion in the internet tantamount to trauma, and to what extent is this music the working-through of traumatic issues, on a generational scale?

george bush doesn't care about harambe. that's what i read.

Some of it's good. Much of it's awful.

like the internet!

For some reason, I actually think about this too -- when I read about this stuff, it's usually regarding the generally all-over-the-place, pulling-from-a-million-perspectives aspect of the internet. This is why DDS.wmv (and many other vaporwave artists) seem to fit the tag easiest; lots of samples, very cut-up, lots of stylized callbacks (80s gated reverb, 90s imagery and pop culture references, etc).

But there's also an aspect of the sheer amount of data that people wade through, and scroll past on the internet. I like music that seems to address (or be born of) this, even when its manifestations can vary wildly.

Yeah I see what you're going for. But hey, every generation has its asinine music that appeals to edgy teen boys. Remember, the 90s had limp bizkit

it's wild that music has sexual violence in it now......that never used to happen

there wasn't so much of a 'u triggered bro?' vibe to it before though, it feels nihilistic but still completely libidinous. it makes me wish all kids had access to free therapy

The kids in this generation belong to the vanguard of the truly hopeless in life. Like, most of them really have no future or place in this country.

From the anecdotes I've heard of teens and early twenty somethings, they've got some fucking weird stuff going on. Makes me glad I grew up right before this place really went down the toilet.

just thinking back to like "lol chillwave" it's funny how much harder edged everything has gotten

That's the music of the kids who grew up during an economic boom, and graduated during an economic boom. We got out easy compared to these new young ones...

It seems like you're reaching for examples here, and I think music that's hyper-conscious of progressive values/inclusiveness/identity etc is more common and on the upswing.

i enjoyed that lil uzi vert album a lot, so i gave the xxxtentacion thing a try and was impressed with how trash it was. most of his popularity seems to stem from impressionable teens getting off on his "edgelord" behavior and shitty emotional issues. i take it most have seen the allegations against him so i won't even post it but damn... definitely not to be celebrated

also agreed re: jordan

also imago feeling old and worrying about the kids makes me feel incredibly old

Why say these artists?

Ed Sheeran is playing the football stadium near me, he's more popular than all these ppl combined.

the kids are fine. at least they don't have to listen to all those Sleep Chamber and Controlled Bleeding albums that they made us listen to when i was a teen. they can just listen to Creedence on Spotify ALL day long. lucky bastards.

not saying he's good but you can spin this "what today's kids listen to" any way you want

These artists are all massively popular on RYM, which is a decent bellwether of what the world's music nerds are into. This is a slightly nerd-centric concern; normie shit like Sheeran is kind of irrelevant and there've always been equivalents to him

also Death Grips, at least Zach Hill might be closer to Gen X actually

normie shit like Sheeran is kind of irrelevant and there've always been equivalents to him

― imago, Friday, September 29, 2017 3:57 PM (twenty seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

or you could make the argument "normie shit" is actually 1000X more relevant that Oneohtrix Point Never

my kid is all like I LOVE SWELL MAPS and a couple of weeks ago he was all like OMG HOW HAVE I NEVER HEARD PEARLS BEFORE SWINE BEFORE NOW and i'm like dude you are 14. his new EP on Bandcamp is pretty tight. it's a wild world out there.

yeah, acknowledged that they're an anomaly in this - 'old, too rock' xps

sheeran maybe not irrelevant in the wider culture but his music feels like part of a universal continuum - i can't see how it specifically feeds from the internet-generation V I B E

irrelevant to this thread i meant

my 12 year old listens to nothing but lo-fi rap and chill trap mixes now. it's a phase.

your kids are glorious and impeccably-adjusted and they will probably grow up to be excellent musicians/music fans, but their upbringing and especially musical upbringing feels atypical (in a good way)? disabuse me if wrong but

sheeran is nihilist as fuck. have you seen his tattoos?

all he cares about is doritos and wine, what a depressed slacker.

surprised this thread has gone on this long without a mention of James Ferraro. in fact the OP sounds like a direct quote from one of his interviews.

I feel like the actual music that the kids are into doesn't really bother me as much as the amount of influence that Anthony Fantano seems to have in dictating their tastes.

yeah that is infuriating

I look forward to meeting there strawkids irl

I saw a young kid at the X show (40th anniversary tour) anyway he had a spiked jeans jacket and a Stiff Little Fingers back patch that was so clean it looked like he must've just made it, was so cute

Lol @ 'strawkids'

Man, it's like some of you didn't go through most of your teens listening to mixtapes of Nasenbluten, Necro and Mayhem..

But no I don't think there's anything particularly provocative about the bands you mention imago. Most of them are listened to by Quietus readers and get (or got - most of them had their times in the sun a good few years ago now) covered in the Guardian Music section, so hardly a bellwether of what "the kids" as a conglomerate mass are thinking about these days.

*anything particularly provocative compared to bands of yesteryear

the " they're old, they're too rock." thing is funny too because most of these soundcloud rappers talk about how much they love marilyn manson and kurt cobain (also more questionable stuff like dashboard confessional). some even not even listing rap influences at all

Good or bad, it all sounds like air. Fucking air. Flavoured air.

― imago

ah for the days when we had painted air instead of flavoured air

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMQYy8fZZ9E

like, i watched one of those xxxtentacion webcasts and he was talking about how he wanted to get The Fray for his "upcoming music festival he has in mind" and i was like hahahahaa what the fuck

Fwiw, I teach music technology and contemporary music at a progressive liberal arts college and have never heard a student talk about anything from this thread except Frank Ocean and Kanye West. Oh, I noticed Kurt Cobain is in here. He's important, yeah.

I wonder if Kurt Cobain is like their Jim Morrison

For those from the 90s

The Mysteries of the Youth. Ehhh, fuck 'em

don't compare kurt to jim morrison come on.

expert pop craftsman who was too morose to continue that streak

Here are my thoughts which likely make no sense: I was born in 1986, which means I was raised on Sega Genesis and Nickelodeon. I would never have guessed that 20 years later you'd see dads with NES controllers on their T-shirts and a whole cottage industry dedicated to analyzing old episodes of Rugrats. I didn't really think I was in the golden era of anything. But we did have access to so much more media than our parents did...way more TV channels, tons of video games which you could spend months on, we were advertised at in every direction, etc etc. But it's nothing like what it is now - in high school we didn't have Facebook or smartphones or Reddit or anything like that. The internet was kind of its own little world that you didn't really refer to in real life. It was kinda fucking weird to see something from the internet world on TV or mentioned in person.

Now, everyone's got everything in their phone, internet culture is now real culture, and a lot of those people are now making this sort of art. I mean the shocking thing about vaporwave to me is that a lot of the people making it are like, 5-6 years younger than I am. Floral Shoppe was made by a nineteen-year old who maybe never used Windows '95, which is like the touchpoint for all this shit. Online humor is totally bizarre now, just a wall of meta-referencing and abstraction, to the point where one of the most popular meme pages is something called ShitpostBot5000 which just matches up templates and images randomly. The idea of explaining that shit to my parents would be just...I don't know. Its like younger people are being bombarded with so much and maybe not really connecting with any of it on a level other than "lol". Funny enough, Neil Cicierega, who was a hero to me when I was a teenager (even though he's like, two months younger than me) presaged all this shit by like, a decade.

I grew up on the internet in the late 90s/early 2000s, and it's the same shit, except everyone's in on it now.

Among my internet nerdo friends back then, Wire was the cool artsy band. Now kids get their Oneohtrix Point Never and Death Gripes for artsy cred ... at least they have active artists they can follow now for that. There was none of that shit back then.

lol at "i've hit thirty" lj you've had harumphing gasbag opinions abt new music as long as i've read this site; odd future came out when you were 23 &c&c

The kids in this generation belong to the vanguard of the truly hopeless in life. Like, most of them really have no future or place in this country.

From the anecdotes I've heard of teens and early twenty somethings, they've got some fucking weird stuff going on. Makes me glad I grew up right before this place really went down the toilet.

― carpet_kaiser, Friday, September 29, 2017 4:03 PM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

just thinking back to like "lol chillwave" it's funny how much harder edged everything has gotten

― hackshaw, Friday, September 29, 2017 4:16 PM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's the music of the kids who grew up during an economic boom, and graduated during an economic boom. We got out easy compared to these new young ones...

― carpet_kaiser, Friday, September 29, 2017 4:18 PM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol unemployment was like 5 points higher at "peak chillwave" than it is for kids graduating hs/college now or in last couple of years. chillwave was even framed that way by music critics, escapist. from pitchfork eoy list 2009:

Ernest Greene, aka Washed Out, may have had time on his hands this past summer, but it was hardly by choice: He was unemployed and actively seeking a regular paycheck. Like countless victims of the new economy, the recent college grad even had to move back in with his parents in Perry, Georgia, where he recorded this EP. Fortunately for the rest of us, Leisure is more escapist fantasy than involuntary vacation. From the very first lines, Greene makes no secret of his intentions ("Gotta get up/ Gotta get away"), imagining a decadently lethargic, beach-bum existence-- one far removed from the dull procession of job applications and phone screens. It's a seductive break from reality, an extravagant denial tailor-made for the saddest summer ever.

how are you guys even worse than like David Brooks at this lol

last time I rode with The Authentic 24 yr old Millennial I work with he was listening to.....The Doobie Brothers

he loves Vulfpeck. never heard of em, don't think I ever saw em mentioned on ILM, but they sell out First Avenue when they come thru

he was sad about Charles Bradley

lol yeah i didn't know how to respond to that one. i was mostly saying it in a positive sense... like "oh remember seven years ago when there was that lily-white laptop music severely lacking in much of a punch... look at how it is not quite like that anymore"

xp Flopson

Chillwave dude's my age, and if he followed the same generic trajectory, he graduated college during an economic boom time. When I graduated everyone was hiring like crazy, and I was able to get massive employment experience kids younger than me couldn't. And I'm still living off that.

I don't include people younger than that in "chillwave" because they're not in the same age group.

Reading further, maybe these people are just lazy morons, then.

also there's more music influenced by Wire now than there was seven years ago... jussss sayin' (on an indie rock bandcamp page sense)

lol this thread is reminding me of one of my favorite students who loves death grips and v a p o r w a v e

thank god the kids wear headphones all the time

as someone of that generation it's been very weird seeing vaporwave go from being a mostly-joke niche thing that only places like /mu/ (ugh) seemed to care about, to something much more widely known?

the strangest is probably hearing some very non-internet/music nerd acquaintances excitedly talk about seeing yung lean live

as someone adjacent to that generation it is very weird and offputting (although I'm used to it by now) to have "the internet generation" equated with "a small subset of redditors"

that's fair, but I did concede upthread that this concerns music nerds rather than the generation as a whole

maybe it's just about RYM lol

although as ufo says, it probably does stretch a little beyond the nerd inner circle at this point

Ugh the love for Frank Ocean makes me feel old. I’ve seen more young people praising Run the Jewels and the Kanye West “vibes” over Death Grips tho.

Fwiw, I teach music technology and contemporary music at a progressive liberal arts college and have never heard a student talk about anything from this thread except Frank Ocean and Kanye West

who else do you hear them talk about instead?

i remember when i was young and people used to talk about "my generation". apparently i was a "slacker" and i wore flannel and i listened to pearl jam. now that i am no longer young people have stopped talking about "my generation", which is a significant relief.

ilxors be agin'

there wasn't so much of a 'u triggered bro?' vibe to it before though, it feels nihilistic but still completely libidinous.

yeah horrorcore rappers definitely weren't trolling for a reaction

would be nice to have young people on ilx to provide insights on this

wonder if ilm at some point becomes an alternative Steve Hoffman forum

"becomes"

Dude if you're going to handwring about the kids then you might want to do so on the basis of more than just Odd Future + a load of shit that hardly anyone listens to.

"the frank ocean love makes me feel old" why?

also I can't think of a single frank ocean song since nostalgia. ultra that was built on meme

who else do you hear them talk about instead?

Varies between classes but it mostly seems unsurprising to me: if we exclude jazz and classical, mostly a mix of Top 40 (Chainsmokers and Daft Punk were among the most popular presentation topics last year; Adele, Lana del Rey), mainstream EDM (Major Lazer, Tiesto), classic rock/jam bands (a lot of Zappa love in addition to more obvious stuff like Zep/Floyd + contemporary stuff like Trevor Hall), 90s alternative rock (Hole, NIN, Beck, Radiohead, one guy really into old grunge), some Pitchfork-ish indie (Mitski, Tame Impala, Mt Eerie, Bon Iver), trap (Future), and alternative hip-hop (Kid Cudi, MF Doom).

"the frank ocean love makes me feel old" why?

― hackshaw, sábado 30 de septiembre de 2017

Because I don’t get it at all and the people I know in their mid 20s and below all seem to be on board.

Yeah, but I think that that's labeling. It's like: that kind of music — like, what does that mean? I love music; I love all styles of music. I love Mike WiLL's music; I love Wayne Coyne's music. I love country music; I love Dolly (Parton)'s music. I love Leonard Cohen's music. I may be the only person that has Wiz Khalifa and Leonard Cohen on the same iPod. I don't ever label music.

http://www.npr.org/2017/09/24/552924293/-i-m-not-afraid-of-who-i-used-to-be-miley-cyrus-on-younger-now

interview is full of gems like this

Your art makes people uncomfortable sometimes!

That's what punk is all about. If you don't piss somebody off, then that's not punk rock, I guess. But I wish people wouldn't be pissed off.

dam miley u special snowflake.

I may be the only person that has Wiz Khalifa and Leonard Cohen on the same iPod.

http://replygif.net/i/1216.gif

a leonard cohen and wiz collab seems like the most conflicting thing ever

Wiz Kohen's "Famous Black and Yellow Raincoat"

/dadjk

*smoking weed* damn, that raincoat... hurts me.

who is the internet generation? ... it sounds like a useless term, like the electricity generation, the cotton gin generation, the hitler generation ...

sarahell oTM

Actually, I'm thinking the person I know who seems to be most on board with this groove is my decidedly not-young former PhD supervisor, whom I knew as a composer of hardcore serialist orchestral and chamber music but who, in his retirement, seems to have bafflingly dedicated himself to doing things like chopped and screwed remixes of Petula Clark or Nicks/Henley songs with Soundcloud tags like #vapor.

People are less tribal about their music genres than before, yes. Beyond that what I'm not getting is the difference between this conversation and all the "can't understand this young people's music" conversations that middle-aged people have had since forever.

The only thing that seriously unnerves me about Brockhampton is that they seem to be named after the village next to the one I grew up in.

Yeah, it makes me think of cricket on the village green, parish councils, Tory majorities in the 10,000s.

This Brockhampton - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brockhampton,_Herefordshire

just heard a bladee song

fucking soul-destroyingly terrible, obv

and i do not mind sounding like a raving elitist when i say that the problem is just a complete lack of musicality. compare and contrast the pc music gang, who all know music theory and production to a v great extent

see also black dresses etc. artists who mine a similarly deathly ultramodern vibe but know their shit. bladee is just an embarrassment

see also 100 gecs

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/8e3b222f0c916d0baf4e27bb354a9f844d2c74c5/0_113_3500_2100/master/3500.jpg?width=1200&height=1200&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&s=9dd0f44ec11a3cfa5e1a5dab77c73d04

Actually Bladee is good

When Bladee said "When I'm in New York I go to Jersey" I felt that