I feel so Brokencyde
They say there’s nothing new under the sun and in the normal walks of life and art, it’s true. But in certain cases it falls apart as little more than a flimsy, laughable tautology.
There’s nothing new about art that’s so bad it invokes a combination of rage and laughter. The moral terror that accompanies the mental justification for forced sterilization camps set up specifically for fans of this music – is not special. The self evident fact that somebody spent money promoting this and the heinousness of such a cynical exploitation of those so unfortunate to be totally unendowed with any sense or taste, that’s happened before. The comparisons to Hitler that inevitably follow are also of little consequence. So if I tell you that what has been found is something new and special, I want to impress that I don’t mean something that’s just bad in any conventional way.
Well, this is new. This is special.
For this to have been done before, in the Renaissance there would have had to have been someone running around stealing the worst statues he could find, smashing them into little pieces, throwing the pieces into a bucket full of tar and trying to sell the hardened lump as art. And this couldn’t have been some postmodernist statement about how beauty sucks, it would have to have been an honest attempt at making a statue. And people would have had to like it. I feel completely justified in saying the world has not seen the likes of this before.
“Mankind’s ability to outfail itself boggles the mind” – Some genius on Vimeo.
The problem should be obvious. Freaxxx by Brokencyde is a laundry list of everything wrong with music, where every component could ruin a song on its own, and the failure is as deep as it is widespread. What’s interesting is that the idea of a song that does everything wrong isn’t new. In the late 90s a scientific project was undertaken by scientists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, along with composer David Soldier to do exactly that.
Hundreds were surveyed to find out which instruments, themes, styles, singers, lengths of songs and anything else are most and least wanted in music. They found people don’t like opera, rap, bagpipes, banjos, jingles, songs about cowboys, holidays and patriotism, children’s choirs, and that the optimum length for a song is about a few minutes, so David Soldier set to work. What was created is a twenty-five minute song that incorporates all of this and more. It’s called “Most Unwanted Song”, and it is wonderful.
I think there are a number of crucial differences between these two works.
- Brokencyde is not competent. Brokencyde combines everything bad about music incompetently, while David Soldier combines the most disliked parts of music extremely competently. There’s a difference between bad kinds of music and disliked kinds of music. In the survey nobody mentioned the sound of pots and pans falling down a flight of stairs, despite that one would think people would find such a noise more objectionable than bagpipes. The pots and pans could have easily ended up in Brokencyde’s effort, and probably would have if any musician in the last ten years had successfully employed them.
- If Brokencyde were competent it would still be offensive. Aside from every aspect of this song being annoying in a juvenile way, it incorporates high school “my differentness saddens me while my sadness differentiates me – it’s a vicious cycle” whining with “acquisition of bitches via unmeasured application of bling” materialism and misogyny. Even if you aren’t offended by either of these constituent parts, you must be offended by the combination. I consider this a sentience test.
- The failure extends much further than the music. Brokencyde’s lead singer has named himself Se7en. I guess he liked the movie. Another band member’s name is Antz. I think he’s the drummer or something. Anyway that’s cool, I like cartoons myself. Bitches, like the shirt says, do indeed get stitches. I counted at least three different times in the video when the screaming kid seems to choke on it. The video was clearly produced by other people, but it seems the failure spilled over and twisted that into its own inexplicable combination of terrible ideas as well.
- Brokencyde contains no opera-rap about cowboys. Do all your shopping at Wal*Mart.
