Welcome to music's shitpost modernism era

0:00Hey guys, we are here with Kieran Press Reynolds to talk about shitpostmodernism. Awesome. Kieran, thanks so much for coming to hang with us. Thanks for having me on. Very excited to be here. All right. So let's start with the basics. What is shitpostmodernism and what are the aesthetic hallmarks of it? It's this loose term I thought of for what I see as like a wave of new artists and like one-off songs that are kind of like inventive, but also really stupid at the same time, kind of like geniusly weird and a lot of them have like aspects of internet culture baked into them or like a kind of trolly humor maybe like an off-kilter song structure that goes against a lot of like radio ready conventions and just kind of has like a wacky appeal that might take a few listens to like really get the hang of and is very young and like absurdist I'd say.

0:59so contextualize it a little like who are maybe a couple of artists that kind of really epitomize this spirit for me one of the main forerunners are like kind of god parents oh this music is 100 gex

1:17i think the way that they just fuse so many different genres together in a ridiculous way um i think like laura once described it as like exquisite corpse music where it's almost like a big janky contraption of different sounds like both gender and genre oscillating it's just kind of ridiculous and they have so many silly lines but at the same time it's really hooky and you could imagine like blasting this outside at like max volume and getting people dancing because it is so fun you know someone like tisa korean too is like this texas rapper whose whole thing his whole aesthetic is like being silly.

2:03It's kind of like a throwback to Soulja Boy and like 2000s rap, but it also feels very modern. He has all these like inane ad libs and it feels kind of like the opposite of a lot of the more like smooth, like pristine rap that's in the mainstream nowadays, like Travis Scott and I don't know even like Drake someone like that like T63 and stuff is just so goofy and weird okay agree or disagree is it kind of like a cousin of hyperpop yeah I feel you could even like like qualify if you're putting shitpost modernism as like a macro genre or like a set of traits like I feel like hyperpop would fall under that for sure are there certain musical or even visual signifiers that you see a lot with these artists there's a lot of like weird sound effects in a lot of the music like you might have air horns or a squeaky voice there's a lot of squeaky male voices um and like visually there's this aesthetic that i really love called x spiritual like spiritualism but with an x and it's kind of like if you took like 50 internet websites and like went on photoshop and just like layered them all together and it looks almost like like very kind of religious like a sacred text or something but it's just so like fried just like very fried visuals i guess and videos that involve very fast edits like blitzes of like stimuli and feels like very like capital t terminally online stuff hmm spongebob yeah well there's cash crabs I feel like that was one of the big things to me that stood out last year, which is this guy, I think he was just imitating the voices of Spongebob characters.

3:49And then now there's another guy called Glorb who's doing AI voices of Spongebob and those people and getting millions and millions of plays on YouTube. And it actually sounds pretty good.

4:11I feel like everyone like my age especially just like grew up watching Spongebob. So it's cool to see that stuff being reused. And it's interesting that you mentioned, you know, some of this stuff having millions and millions of plays. because you also talk in the article about some artists that I think make sense to me as an antecedent of this style like from you know the late 2000s early 2010s like Lil B James Ferraro I don't know like maybe I would throw like some aspects of young lean and his like sensibility but a lot of that stuff I think was very squarely like fringe they did not have like these kinds of numbers I guess not the youngliness fringe now but I think he was originally what are some commonalities between like that moment in music and this one and what are some differences yeah totally I feel like back then I mean the internet was was really popular but it was in much more of like a fledgling form of like people didn't know what was going viral, I guess.

5:19And so I think that people didn't exactly know how to like, game it yet. And not like a lot of these new musicians are gaming it. But I feel like back then people weren't exactly like ready for like a lot of the really weird stuff coming out today. I mean, back in the 2000s, you had like, even like Viper, who is an awful person, but he was doing like really strange things and putting out like, like hundreds of albums, like hundreds of albums of super bizarre lyrics and themes and he only really amassed like a small cult fan base and like you know james ferraro like inhale c4 like that tape to me you know still sounds very new today and like it's kind of like a proto shit post modernist-y type thing and that's it for the free preview version of this episode there's lots more ahead you can get full access by becoming a paid subscriber for just five bucks a month over at theculturejournalist.substack.com.