Unfinished essay scrap

 [...] “youthful innocence and hyper alienation delivered with sincerity, without cynicism” [...]

Pop music is conventionally oriented to serve the flesh and to power the unstated but omnipresent libidinous motor of the cultures that surround it. The overwhelming majority of songs that have scored radio play since the 1970s are implicity or explicitly about fucking, and moreso than their lyrics content, they serve the same physiological function, carrying a sense of forward motion that ultimately align with biological goals. The overwhelming majority of post-internet art is strikingly and even disturbingly different in the context of its abandonment of emotional imperatives that previously so thoroughly saturated the mediascape that we scarcely had words to describe them.

In many of these works, the libidinous motor of pop music is short-circuited and redirected in a markedly different direction; the energy that served an explicitly sexual or or non-sexual will-to-power — will to status and superiority, will to control, will to violence — function, is harnessed and reoriented towards a completely separate imperative. The emotional charge is shifted from pleasure to transcendence (the absence of the need for pleasure itself,) the fulfillment of one's need for pleasure to the complete abandonment of that need. There are, at present, dozens of online music scenes that retain the structure and stylings of dance music while specifically trying to make music designed to make you cry. The pursuit of God (not necessarily religious) has found its way to forms of art previously consigned to dancefloor utility because individuals in search of proximity to God have realized that the energy of those art forms — hip hop and electronic club music specifically — have great potential to move in directions towards that proximity. Given that decades of cultural selection have specifically bred forms of music — the aforementioned modern hip hop and club music — designed to carry as much energy as possible, it makes complete sense that artists looking to create powerful forms of transcendent art would  appropriate this energy and use it for their own purposes.

Bubblegum bass, despite retaining (and even sometimes emphasisting, to the point of parody) the sexual innuendos of top-40s pop, has a strange sense of sexlessness. QT can sing about feeling “your hands on my body” without the song having any more erotic energy than a Staples ad (corporate imagery being a deliberate influence in the stylings of prime-era PC Music’s work.) It invokes a feeling reminiscent of youthful innocence — recall singing along to, in retrospect, questionable pop song lyrics as a preteen, not particularly knowing or caring what they meant. The structural energy of pop or club song movement is stripped of its sexual context and set in motion to power the sense of warmth and first-crush innocence these songs convey. (“Where Jason Derulo sings about his erotic, exotic adventures, Hannah Diamond sings about puppy-dog love.”)

This is because the conceptual world of bubblegum bass, and post-internet music generally, lacks flesh inherently.  The semantic signifiers to worldly indulgence remain, but self-consciously point to a very conspicuous nothing; an absence of flesh. In the realm of post-internet art, flesh is substituted by plastic, metal, screens, or simulacra in a kind of casual, unstated transhumanism. It is only logical that post-flesh, post-pleasure media would arise during the formation of a generation whose primary existential medium is no longer their flesh, but the silicon and screens through which they interact with the world that really matters to them (or at least to those of them who take an interest in post-internet art.) Once one has abandoned their flesh, it is easy to see why the pursuit of transcendent states could follow.

[...] could be projected just as accurately among large swaths of the current electronic underground, whose music serves entirely “post-pleasure” functions. However, the emotional affect of current electronic music exists in an odd relationship to depression; the depression of non-pleasure remains, juxtaposed simultaneously and seamlessly with transcendence (the removal of need for pleasure itself.) It is the aural communication of complete bliss in complete loss. These songs exist in a state of bifaceted unipolarity (one image communicating two messages at once,) in which a sense of heartbroken desolation and blissful warmth exist without any sense of contradiction. It calls to mind a non-physical, desexualized experience of love; of first crushes without the demands and impositions later socially forced onto such connections, uncauterized, unnumbed, and unlabelled. The difference between these states (love and longing, bliss and loss, flying and falling) only exist when seen from a perspective in which the concept of the pleasure principle still holds any real coherency; without it (that is, in the transcendent state,) they are seen as one and the same (see also the plethora of religious traditions in which physical suffering and spiritual bliss coexist.)

1. “Danny L Harle's music has this weird property where you can see it as either depressing or upbeat and it's like one of those optical illusions that's two pictures at once.” (@tsero.0)

2. “There's a tangible darkness to "Without You". [...] It's not a feeling a pop song is supposed to give off.” (@Helwy, February 20 2020)