Listening to 100 Gecs, you’re inundated by a constant stream of sounds, none of which stick around for very long. Their lyrics hide their vulnerability through layers of absurdity. “Money Machine,” a track about trying to convince yourself you don’t care about someone who might be ghosting you, begins, “Hey little piss baby, you think you’re so fucking cool, huh?” There are softer parts, such as the crooning, romantic declaration of, “I’m ’bout to hit the boof,”before you’re hit with a wall of chunky guitar drops and AutoTuned screams and percussive shouts (different from the screams), which at some point gets augmented by black metal-style growling and a riff that kind of sounds like Leftöver Crack. Between the video game blips and beeps and the catchy guitar twings and twangs, the layers of each song form a sound that’s difficult to parse, like — do these instruments even exist IRL, or is this a sample of a coffee grinder pitched up and slowed down through four filters and then algorithmically cut to a beat? This is music that sounds like how being on the internet feels.
While writing this piece, I finally committed to canceling my Apple Music subscription in favor of fully purchasing music and revisiting my old mp3 library. The change was a shit-ton of work, requiring that I manually enter a log of the albums I’ve bookmarked on Apple Music since 2017 and then finding the corresponding album’s page on Bandcamp so that I can purchase a digital copy. If an album isn’t on Bandcamp, I then log the record on a different list I’ve made, titled Albums To Figure Out How To Purchase. The move is born from guilt and a quest to not only consume music more ethically, but to narrow my choices of what to listen to in the hopes that I’ll then appreciate that which I do have.
Archivists are always seeking to preserve all that they can, just in case what seems like a meaningless piece of data today will one day reveal exactly what our current moment’s entire deal was. I remember the chill that went down my spine when I first really realized that my beloved hard drives would one day crash, that everything required a backup, that nothing in this world truly lasts. But like DIY spaces and defunct blogs, ingenuity is born from the margins, making the best of the glitches and accidents some used to bemoan. Record-scratching becomes stylistic, the grain of shooting film in low light now looks charming, purposeful typos become memes, we download apps to replicate the restrictions we used to have, throttling our ability to be always online, locking our phone in a box to get back to an old feeling, an endearing side effect of the limitations of reality. 100 Gecs might have bottled this moment’s feeling in a Four Loko can, preserving those glitches and sonic spasms as a portrait of this time. Elon Musk’s vanity mp3 will too live on, unplayed and collecting dust in whatever state-of-the-art archival system he can afford, untouched and uninteresting, fading into obscurity as its cultural capital diminishes. After all, deterioration is not solely physical.