At Pitchfork, Meaghan Garvey connects PC Music and my digital maximalism essay "Maximal Nation" (also for Pitchfork) from several years back, under the rubric of what she calls "the Internet Hangover".
"The most fitting torch-bearers for the ideals of digital
maximalism in 2015 are the members of PC Music... Masterminded by producer/conceptual svengali A. G. Cook,
the crew makes music and visuals that are uncannily cheerful and shamelessly
synthetic, a self-aware mash of faux-naive teen girl caricature and leering
corporate brand-speak....
"PC Music’s music is a means to an end, just one tier of the label’s half-performative, half-serious post-postmodern branding experiment.... Fully "getting" PC Music relies on the spectator’s awareness of the artists’ winking performance of Web 1.0 zeal in a Web 2.0 world: the post-ironically naive lyrics ("I don’t wanna be an MP3/ 320 kbps, you know that I feel kinda real") or the poker-faced, bizarro-world advertising spots. I initially read this as satire, though certainly not without an obvious tenderness for its source material (the business of pop, the art of branding), that would ultimately lead to some critical conclusions about consumerism, art, and identity in the digital age....
"But there’s something awkwardly dated about PC Music’s approach, too—an unwavering optimism in the chaotic, supersaturated digital realm, and a desire to immerse oneself even deeper within it, that I find hard to relate to in a way that I would not have a few years ago. PC Music’s approach amplifies and exaggerates the ideals put forth in "Maximal Nation," but our experience of the Internet has warped pretty drastically in those deceptively short four-ish years. These concepts felt sexy and vital in the early 2010s, but in 2015, "digital maximalism" isn’t so much a limitless frontier as our exhausting day-to-day reality.
"Internet culture feels like it’s reached a critical mass: non-professional bloggers feel like a dying breed, privacy is nonexistent, our most essential social media platforms have grown tedious and rife with harassment, content is branded and SEO-optimized within an inch of its life. Everyone I know is "thinking about deleting Facebook." We use technology to help us stay away from technology. In short, a predominantly digital existence just doesn’t feel that fun anymore, at least not as fun as PC Music makes it out to be. I wish I could muster up A. G. Cook’s enthusiasm about life in the digital realm; instead, I’m listlessly scrolling through my Twitter feed in the dark, wondering why I even bother...."
"PC Music’s music is a means to an end, just one tier of the label’s half-performative, half-serious post-postmodern branding experiment.... Fully "getting" PC Music relies on the spectator’s awareness of the artists’ winking performance of Web 1.0 zeal in a Web 2.0 world: the post-ironically naive lyrics ("I don’t wanna be an MP3/ 320 kbps, you know that I feel kinda real") or the poker-faced, bizarro-world advertising spots. I initially read this as satire, though certainly not without an obvious tenderness for its source material (the business of pop, the art of branding), that would ultimately lead to some critical conclusions about consumerism, art, and identity in the digital age....
"But there’s something awkwardly dated about PC Music’s approach, too—an unwavering optimism in the chaotic, supersaturated digital realm, and a desire to immerse oneself even deeper within it, that I find hard to relate to in a way that I would not have a few years ago. PC Music’s approach amplifies and exaggerates the ideals put forth in "Maximal Nation," but our experience of the Internet has warped pretty drastically in those deceptively short four-ish years. These concepts felt sexy and vital in the early 2010s, but in 2015, "digital maximalism" isn’t so much a limitless frontier as our exhausting day-to-day reality.
"Internet culture feels like it’s reached a critical mass: non-professional bloggers feel like a dying breed, privacy is nonexistent, our most essential social media platforms have grown tedious and rife with harassment, content is branded and SEO-optimized within an inch of its life. Everyone I know is "thinking about deleting Facebook." We use technology to help us stay away from technology. In short, a predominantly digital existence just doesn’t feel that fun anymore, at least not as fun as PC Music makes it out to be. I wish I could muster up A. G. Cook’s enthusiasm about life in the digital realm; instead, I’m listlessly scrolling through my Twitter feed in the dark, wondering why I even bother...."
"Divisive" as PC Music has set out to be.. they subvert nothing, nor do they add anything to the discussion beyond noise. They merely reflect the flat, bright, incessant, corporatized banalities of the current age... PC Music had the potential for insurrection, subversion, or at least some shred of insightful commentary on our dumb, addictive, overwhelming digital existence. But mostly, they remind me of ideals I believed in not so long ago that now just make me feel tired."
Garvey identifies 2015 as "the year of the Internet Hangover"....
Guess it hits everyone at different points, but looking back it feels like every year for the past seven or so felt like a year of encroaching burn-out, from both a personal perspective and what I was observing in those small corners of the blogosphere / social-media that I frequent.... a sense of increasingly frazzled brains struggling to process all the sound-image-text flowing ever more swiftly and inundatingly across our mindscreens.... people dropping out to rejoin "real life"
Garvey identifies 2015 as "the year of the Internet Hangover"....
Guess it hits everyone at different points, but looking back it feels like every year for the past seven or so felt like a year of encroaching burn-out, from both a personal perspective and what I was observing in those small corners of the blogosphere / social-media that I frequent.... a sense of increasingly frazzled brains struggling to process all the sound-image-text flowing ever more swiftly and inundatingly across our mindscreens.... people dropping out to rejoin "real life"
But somehow you get used to it, you persevere...
I was alive and alert for too long in the analogue-only world to be called a digital native... but I have been on the web since 1996, so that is nearly 20 years... and in truth, probably every year has felt like an escalation... the number of emails you have to reply to, the copiousness of stuff to read out there, the equally ever-expanding incitement to deposit discourse (first the website, which Joy painstakingly constructed and taught me how to use; then the blog; then the blogs plural; then Facebook, Twitter, etc, not forgetting various message boards and forums I participated in intermittently, with varying degrees of intensity, UK Dance, Dissensus, ILM); the ocean-of-sound becoming a tsunami with the sharity blogs, Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Mixcloud, ad nauseam; YouTube's invitation to get lost in elsewheres and elsewhens, live in the past... The TV recaps, the forensic political coverage at election times... both equally exhaustive, equally exhausting....
"I can't go on. I'll go on"...
("Maximal Nation", incidentally, was far from a straightforward celebration of the digital existence; there's an undercurrent of ambivalence, perhaps more apparent when read in conjunction with other things I published that year, from Retromania to this Wire essay).
In the piece, Garvey also steps sideways to consider Hipster Runoff and the untaggable sensibility of Carles:
"... I don’t think HRO would have resonated as much, personally, if I hadn’t sensed something deeply sincere and weirdly intimate beneath all the layers of irony: the quiet existential shame that creeps in as a belief system to which you’d once earnestly ascribed (in this case, the "alternative," but also, the Internet as an inherently positive force) reveals itself to be flawed and ultimately hollow. I recognized it because I was starting to feel it too."
Carles on PC Music...
Carles on PC Music...
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