Flush It Friday: Anti-Slopaganda
I was recently walking around downtown with my partner and a few friends when I heard something truly mortifying blasting out of the speakers of a lifted F15o—a recently infamous song of artificially-generated origins titled “RUBBERZ.” This track, conjured by the malevolently moronic forces of some AI garbage start-up Treblo and tied to the waist of one Fenix Flexin’, is a warped, amorphous blob of ’80s backwash somewhere between The Smiths and “The Safety Dance” that sounds like a filler cut from a rightfully forgotten trend-chaser about 40 years too late, maybe mixed with a lyricist still stuck in the mid-2010s Soundcloud bubble (almost like its own Soundclown edit). It’s a paunchy, bloated number with the tell-tale signs of LLM-dogwater: unnatural vocals that sound nothing like the supposed singer, obscenely drunken prose with broken meter, and a backing track that’s unbearably generic and one-note. That brief exposure to this fan of Mr. Flexin’ made me laugh in the moment, but it has ultimately stuck with me in a way I find anxiety-inducing.
There’s always been an impulse for those who are immersed in more niche and/or supposedly-esteemed musical sub-genres to disregard pop music as disposable and fake in nature; it’s an attitude that directly inspired the poptimist movement that’s shaped much of the musical landscape of the post-2000s. If anything, whatever controversy existing around “RUBBERZ” mimics the ’80s cultural outrage sparked by fellow fakers Milli Vanilli, with the place of the session musician replaced with whatever new vacuous website interface talentless hacks use to make inane dribble (at least the former got someone paid). The same artistic apathy has been embodied by washed-up rapper and guy who got with a 17-year-old (and wrote a song bragging about it) Tyga on his newest $tarface record, making history with the first Pitchfork 0.0 in the site’s current era. “RUBBERZ” at least has the benefit of being kind of funny sounding, whereas the algo-feces that makes up Tyga’s newest cash grab is drab and dull, cribbing heavily from Giorgio Moroder soundtracks and basically reheating The Weeknd‘s nachos with none of the respect or adoration that Abel has for the music he’s inspired by. Smeared with auditory Vaseline and formed into a vague slurry of different 1980s styles, $tarface is the sound of someone who only appreciates this older music and art from the most superficial of levels and thinks you’re too stupid to tell.
Because that’s really the brass tacks of it, people and organizations like Fenix Flexin’, Tyga, Treblo, Suno, and more think everyday people like me and you are idiot-brained cattle ripe for the harvesting, too engorged on brainrot to tell the difference between effort and avaricious sloth. These chuds fully intend on submerging the entirety of one of humanity’s greatest mediums in mass-produced crapola while destroying whatever avenues of genuine appreciation are left, hogging the entirety of the attention economy. After all, the zerg-rushing of AI music is coincidentally coinciding with the madcap purchasing of discographies from private equity groups, the gutting of music journalism institutions online like Brooklyn Vegan and Revolver by its LiveNation affiliated owners, and SunoAI announcing its plans to gum up the works of the vinyl industry by letting senile fascist boomers pretend that they have anything more in their life than a family who doesn’t love them. It has the general vibe of a music industry scrambling to kill itself for 20 dollars.
Short of dipping people in large vats of battery acid, I’m not sure how you defeat an ontological threat this stupid and persistent. Luckily, the Toilet isn’t owned by the fuckface brothers of Good Charlotte (see below for a pod episode about these shit kernels) and as long as there are DAWs and instruments, there will be shitty music done right: by humans, with humanity! At the same time, this begins to feel like hollow victories in a world increasingly swallowed up by the worst kinds of brain-broken unhappy dorks who will never know true joy, leading them to try to rob us of ours. I’m not sure and I’m not sure I want to know; I just needed to get this shit off my chest. Check out some of the below records for cool stuff that’s 100% bot-free (as far as I’m aware—spoooooky):
Swiss / Human Body split (powerviolence / sludge)
AJJ – “Phlamethrower” single (garage punk)
ostraca – Thread (screamo / post-metal)
Scasm – Punished By Disembowelment (slam death metal)
Now, it is time to FLUSH.
Brock Samson took the battle to our ears with this war metal round-up:
Tha Boiz took a big dump on Gooch Shartlott on this week’s Toilet Radio:
Falxifer couldn’t hold any more limes praise for Bleached Cross:
Reliquary Tower admonished all who haven’t heard the latest from Warning:
Plop them G/B/Us below!
