Is 100 Gecs' music the sound of the Internet?

15:51Is 100 Gecs the once-promised music of the internet age — or something so much more?

If you could listen to music that sounded like being hit in the face with pies for approximately 26 minutes, would you? That is how one critic has described the experience of listening to 10,000 Gecs, the new album from musical duo 100 Gecs.

The pair is making some of the most challenging, exciting and frustrating music of the moment. Music writers Carrie Battan and Richie Assaly have been following 100 Gecs for a while. They join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to get into who, exactly, are 100 Gecs, and why are they the talk of the music world?

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Carrie Battan is here. Richie Assaly here. I love their writing about music. They're here to make sense of this world for me and you. Carrie, Richie, one thing I really enjoy is people's feeble attempts at describing 100 Gecs, so I'm going to put you through that torture because it's important to me. Carrie, how would you describe 100 Gecs?

Carrie: I was thinking about those AI-generated images of, like, a really messy living room, and the caption says, "Identify one object in this photo." And you think it's this very familiar scene — and then you zoom in, and none of it is actually a real identifiable object. That's what it sounds like to me. 

Elamin: I love a visual representation of their sound. That's fantastic. Richie, what about you? 

Richie: I like to think of 100 Gecs as this sort of magical music meat grinder. They sort of take three or four disparate musical genres and they kind of shove it into the grinder, and it spits out these sort of deranged and noisy, but ultimately catchy pop songs that somehow wheedle their way into your brain.

Elamin: If I was to describe it, I'd say it's like if Weezer married Primus and had Papa Roach as a baby, and then that baby was put on a floppy disk. There's something so ineffable about trying to describe their music. Richie, why is it so hard to describe the music of 100 Gecs?

Richie: I think I find it less difficult to describe the music than it is to describe the music's appeal, because this is arguably one of the most polarizing groups out there right now. A lot of my friends have trouble understanding why I would want to listen to a third-wave Ska song with autotuned vocals, singing about vaping and gas station McDonald's…. That's not for everyone, and I think that's okay. But I think like any countercultural art or music that's pushing boundaries, there's going to be detractors and people who think it's just noise for the sake of noise. 

I think in reality, these songs are built on contrast. There's a lot of noise, but there's also big, beautiful hooks within it. There's a lot of artificial sound, but there's also genuine human emotion hidden in there too. And I think if you let your guard down a little bit and kind of embrace the chaos, you'll be a Gec-head soon enough.

Elamin: I think embracing the chaos is a good way to describe how one gets on board with 100 Gecs, because I don't think it's music you can listen to passively or if somebody just introduces it to you without context; it's a little bit hard to get into. So, Carrie, you've been following 100 Gecs for a minute. What stood out for you when you first encountered their music?

Carrie: I mean, all of the descriptions that we've been talking about, the shorthand for all of it is it makes you feel alive. I think it's very bracing and you can't ignore it. So much of the music that has come out of the last five or ten years moving towards the digital era, and streaming music has created this kind of inert, boundaryless music that is almost like easy listening — and 100 Gecs is kind of the opposite of easy listening. I hear a lot of people describe 100 Gecs as, "this is the sound of the Internet," and I disagree with that because I think it sounds like what I wish it felt like to be on the Internet.

Elamin: Richie, we were promised, I think, at a certain moment that the Internet would sort of liberate the boundaries between genres — the idea that the Internet is going to change how we listen to music. But instead, what we got is a lot of music that sounds vaguely similar, right? Spotify rewards a kind of sameness. You don't know when a song starts and ends with an artist like Post Malone, and he quite often ends up being at the top of the charts. 100 Gecs are sort of a massive disruption to that. Is it actually the finally promised music of the Internet, do you think?

Richie: Oh, that's a big question. I think we can't talk about 100 Gecs without talking about hyperpop, which is this interesting subgenre of music that cropped up about a decade ago. It's essentially an exaggerated or extreme form of pop music with a lot of autotune, pitched-up vocals, distorted bass, overblown synths — that kind of thing. It's very online music that can only come from a time when all these genres are available. But I'm kind of with Carrie on this; I don't know if it's the Internet or if it's just what boils down to what a lot of great genres are, which is just two people who want to make music that you can bang your head to. I don't think it's necessarily of the Internet.

Elamin: Carrie, when this idea is presented to 100 Gecs themselves, they kind of deny the idea that they are the sound of the Internet; they just think of themselves as making something that resembles their environment. But is there something to the idea that actually they are so steeped in it that they don't even necessarily know the thing that they're making? Does that seem crazy to you?

Carrie: When you listen to or read any interviews with the duo behind 100 Gecs, they're extremely coy when you ask them to elaborate on any of their process or their thinking. So of course, they kind of brush it off … But I do think there is something to this idea. It's interesting because if you think about all of the references that get brought up in listening to their music, a lot of them are pre-internet; they're early 2000s, '90s, etc. — before we were all so steeped in the Internet. I think it's that sensibility, but it's processed through the minds of people who are attuned to the metabolism and the rhythms of the Internet. That's what the 100 Gecs sound is.

Elamin: I think a trademark sound of the Gecs is … they are going through these genres that have been maligned and discarded — we're talking about genres like nu metal or dubstep or emo rap — and they take all these sounds and conventions, and then they piece them into something new. What do you say to someone who can't really get past the fact that they are only working with certain genres that have been dismissed as "bad music?"

Carrie: I would say just take a walk, or go to the gym or the subway or whatever, and just listen to it — and then I dare you to not play it again.

Elamin: Right. It's as simple as that. The idea is that it'll just hook you for what it is.

Carrie: Because they are such strong pop writers, they have a really innate sense of what makes a good pop song that is sort of undeniable.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.