Remember how much I stanned the vertical bar in BIG|BRAVE‘s name at #71? Bro, I was super simping for that punctuation symbol, wasn’t I? It was totally… bussin’… and… PAWG…? Look at all these hip new words I’m using! As far as you know, I’m, like, 22 years old or something. Yeah, I’m a hip young gunslinger. Yes I am. Stop gaslighting me.
Eeeeeeeeeeew, ‘PAWG’ stands for ‘Phat Ass White Girl’?? I honestly never knew that, it’s so gross! I will state at this point that I personally will not be referring to either Melanie James/melodus nor Elora Driver/metagirl as ‘PAWGs’, though they are of course free to refer to themselves as such and may well fit the description.
Yeah, well, I am absolutely not a fan of the underscore (we were talking about punctuation, remember?), such as the one used in ANGEL_TECH’s name. When did the underscore become so popular?? I’m never sure where it is on the keyboard, are you?? I don’t have any jokes here, it’s just an important issue that I felt I needed to air. That’s the end of the #PunctuationBantz.
Can we talk about 100 gecs for a minute? When they were officially named the forty third best album of 2019 my ‘review’ was literally two sentences taking the piss over them being named in the top 20 albums of the year by Rolling Stone (which, I’m sorry, is still fucking hilarious to me) and how officially uncool that made them. Yeah, I know, fucking hilarious, and yet while we laugh we also learn more about the wider world and the human condition. I stand by my witty calling out of the ridiculous overenthusiastic fawning laid upon 100 gecs by the mainstream press. The fucking lamestream press, ammi right?? Ammi right?? Ammi right? I’m right. However, I feel like those two sentences didn’t tell the entire story of the band.
I went to see 100 gecs play the Manchester Ritz this year. I’ve never been the biggest gecs fan, but I was curious to see which people actually were. And the crowd absolutely drank the Gecs-aid. The place with packed, they were manic, they dressed up appropriately, they recorded the gig on Nintendo DSes, they all brought into the image, they all liked the memes, they unashamedly brought into everything gec. And good for them. Can I present an alternative viewpoint though, like I was an ‘expert’ invited onto a BBC broadcast to argue that climate change is actually a scam thought up by transgender Cultural Marxists? 100 gecs are amazing live, but on record…? They really aren’t that good, are they?
Their music is fine, occasionally brilliant, but largely recovering ground that bands like PC Music and Sleigh Bells covered years ago. I was about to at least give them credit for bringing hyperpop into the mainstream, until I used my brain for a second and realised that wasn’t true at all. The sadly departed SOPHIE was making expansive and critically adored hyperpop records for years before her passing, and the always amazing Charli XCX had been introducing the actual mainstream to hyperpop since around the time ‘Vroom Vroom’ EP (produced by, yep, SOPHIE) signaled a massive leveling up in her musical ambitions around 2016. Basically, all the credit goes to SOPHIE, really.
Quick aside – how fucking amazing is Vroom Vroom? That is all.
100 gec though? I guess they kind of saw and were appreciative of the serious and important work being done by artists like SOPHIE (but, again, mainly SOPHIE) and thought “What if this was all a bit more ROFLCOPTER? Hold my Monster energy drink…”. I feel that 100 gecs really played – spectacularly successfully -to the “megalol, memelord, lol that’s random” crowd. Their songs were so often decent to great, but nothing especially new (especially if you have a BandCamp account, where you’ll hear a lot of similar bedroom Garage Band efforts). They were, however, experts in the online world, knew what was more likely to go viral, and knew exactly what would produce the dankest memes. Their music was always going to secondary when they could spit bars like “Stupid horse, I just fell out of the Porsche” or “Hey you lil’ piss baby, you think you’re so fucking cool?/Huh?/You think you’re so fucking tough?/You talk a lotta big game for someone with such a small truck”, or the constant allusions to Minecraft, Spotify, GTA V, signalling a keen awareness of their audience (perhaps, along with lines like “I’m taking pills that shorten my dick“?). They are the musical interpretation of the Nyan Cat. They are totally PAWG.
No! Sorry, I forgot, I keep thinking that word just means ‘good’.
I’m the first to argue that you can become an amazing and important musical artist by only concentrating on your image and ‘vibe’, I’m just saying that 100 gec’s current musical output on record isn’t worth that much praise.
Quick aside – how fucking amazing is Money Machine? That is all.
What I’m getting at, is that the hyper, hyper, hyperpop that ANGEL_TECH are producing axtually is all that and a bag of potassium on record. ‘INITIATION :3’ simply works as a record of astonishingly great pop songs that happen to be presented in a hyperpop style. It’s hardly a humourless enterprise either (from this point on any album featuring a sock with a name as good as Pavlov’s Dipshit will automatically make the list), the lyrics are fabulous, both witty and irreverent, and there’s no doubt this couple of phat ass white girls had a ball recording it. It’s pay what you want on BandCamp, so you have no excuse if you claim to enjoy life.
Bollocks, 100 gecs are actually releasing an album next year, they better gve me something to talk about, I’ve covered a lot of my #GecsTakes right here.
(Metagirl. Well, it was Aqua Girl when it was released, then changed to Metagirl by the end of year list. Yeah, yeah, *I know*…)
(OK, so this was definitely by Aqua Girl. But Aqua Girl is Metagirl, remember?)
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