the I Enjoy Music anti-slop manifesto

Things feel pretty bleak right now. Executive orders are terrorizing trans people, and also I guess everyone who receives any kind of help or money from the federal government. The president is cruel and his cruelty creates unimaginable stupidity. People are becoming conservative because they're dying to say slurs again. The big AI company is upset that another cheaper AI company trained their model on the data that the big AI company had already stolen. There are Cybertrucks driving around all over Los Angeles, all ugly as sin; a while ago I saw one that was covered in stickers for popular EDM producers—Seven Lions, Illenium, Excision.

Everyone's been talking a lot about "slop" lately—low-quality 'content' forced onto our feeds, ready to fool our senses and offend our sensibilities. Slop degrades your sense of truth, beauty, freedom and love, and yet slop is so pervasive and addictive that you might not even notice that degradation until it's too late. We're drowning in slop—I'm drowning in slop—and I hate it.

I haven't felt this dark about culture at large since I was a teenager in Vermont. Everything is cyclical and this includes, I guess, my own personal doomer mindset. 20 years ago we were two years into an endless war in the Middle East, and I read dispatches from Matt Taibbi about it in Rolling Stone magazine, alongside Hurricane Katrina postmortems and ambiently horny profiles of beautiful celebrities. I watched rich teenagers wear expensive sunglasses on MTV reality shows. The president was stupid and his stupidity created unimaginable cruelty. High school dances played popular songs meant for sloppy adult club nights. At homecoming, I was dancing with my crush to "Get Low," and as the song reached the bend over to the front, touch your toes moment, his friend bounded over and screamed "LISTEN TO THE INSTRUCTIONS OF THE SONG" at me. Everything felt askew. Culture wasn't serving me.

That all felt like slop to me. It was a different slop delivery system: slop monoculture. Clear Channel radio stations, a few dozen cable channels, clothing bought in person at the mall. That monoculture said that it was worth your time to care about whatever Paris Hilton was up to, and that it was normal to write creepy shit about famous women, and that it was important to follow Lil Jon's instructions to the T. Television was The Swan and The Surreal Life. Books were The Da Vinci Code and A Million Little Pieces. I was young and I couldn't drive, and I didn't have a lot of spending money. Everything felt cheap, obscene, and dumb. It makes sense that one of the most popular musicals of the time was about a society of closed-minded individuals experiencing a mass psychosis of conformity through the use of propaganda. They just made a movie out of this musical, it got nominated for a bunch of Oscars.

Now the slop is back, and this time it's in our own hands. We can make the slop ourselves with AI. We can press play on a never-ending auto-generated Spotify playlist, itself populated with AI music. We can watch the whole concert through our phone camera, and we can even start a petition to remove a tour opener if we don't know her music well enough (our slop needs to match with our other slop). We can order the same album in 10 colors of vinyl and the same reusable water bottle in 10 colors of plastic. We can talk through the movie and no one will tell us to stop. We can turn our phones into slot machines, we can watch shopping apps like they're television.

My personal slop limit was reached, not with AI-generated videos of children morphing into bowls of pasta, not with the young woman who went viral in a man-on-the-street video about blow jobs who created a cryptocurrency scandal then disappeared from the internet, but by, of all things, the release of the song "Sports car" by Tate McRae. I've been watching Tate's rise with interest, and I listen to every new song of hers with the hopes that it will slap. I was intrigued by "Sports car" at first, and then I realized the song is just warmed-over Pussycat Dolls. And then all those grim feelings came back. 2005 feelings, Get Your War On feelings, sex and death and shopping, not in that order. And at least the Pussycat Dolls had verses with melodies, choruses—Tate's just mumbling and whispering. That's the attrition of slop: we're doing it all over again, but a little bit worse this time.

So yeah, I feel pretty bleak about stuff. It's hard to keep my PLUR energy going in times like these. But I have to keep reminding myself that the overculture of the mid '00s did something positive—it pushed me toward alternative stuff. I traded pop radio for alt rock radio, then I traded alt rock radio for college radio. I started going to record stores and buying cheap used CDs and ripping them onto my iTunes. I got really obsessed with making mix CDs; I read the Thurston Moore mixtape book so much that the cover fell off, and I started going on The Art of the Mix and checking out random peoples' mixes.

I started reading music blogs, and I went to shows at Higher Ground when I could afford them, and shows at the Odd Fellows Temple down the street that only cost a couple of bucks. I divested from the mainstream. I felt a sense of purpose and self-actualization because it felt like I was choosing my own destiny, rather than having it chosen for me. I also wore a lot of cardigans.

And I think we're going to have to do that kind of thing again. It feels like we're at a breaking point right now. Jacqueline Codiga wrote about it in her incredible essay about Ethel Cain's Perverts:

"I hate the people who treat astroturfed trends like Tik Tok or AI as natural inevitabilities, who shrug their shoulders and blame 'attention spans' or 'the economy' as if those are forces entirely outside our control. I hate the word 'content.' I hate people who treat sketchy data metrics as inexorable proof that most people want and crave slop, no matter how many times it is proven that these metrics are often fabricated. I hate Daniel Ek and the CEOs of every AI music company, people who know nothing about creativity. People tell you some bullshit that you 'have' to do as an artist These Days and tell you 'that’s just the way things are'."

I'm so, so guilty of going along with these astroturfed trends! Even just to gawk at them under the pretense of 'wanting to know what's up online.' It used to be interesting, but now it feels like a waste of time, a waste of energy.

I'm writing all this because feel like I have lost my "finding an alternative" muscles and I need to get them back. That's what starting the blog was all about, really. Being a real person, talking to real people about music. Sometimes I'll be searching for something online and I'll come across an old music blog post, something from 2006 or 2010, and it always makes me smile because that was a real person, writing for the love of the game about something they cared about, and it's still on the internet for all to read, rather than lost on the timeline and dissolved into the ether.

So this is my commitment, my modern manifesto: to stop being willing to accept slop, to look for alternatives to slop, and to seek out community in places outside of the usual Slop Zones. That's what I did the last time I felt so awful about the state of the world, and it changed my whole life. I plan on going to shows, buying music and merch, encouraging music conversation in places outside the Meta/Twitter vortex, writing about artists making good alternative and independent music (especially artists whose existences are threatened by the current administration), and celebrating how music is social and interactive ("Music makes the people come together" - Madonna) because connecting to each other is ultimately how we're gonna get through all this shit. Okay, good talk, see you out there!

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