Week 5 - Rejected Sounds
Week 5 - Rejected Sounds
I spent a while this week debating what I’d do for a piece of “bad” music. The first idea I had was a rendition of Lou Bega’s “Mambo No. 5” but un-quantized with no beat and much worse lyrics. But that wasn’t doing it justice. I kept considering from the examples what exactly bad or rejected music was—especially since I loved many of the examples and was thinking about how younger folks definitely love these kind of “vibe playlists” now as background sounds— like this weird fantasy nostalgia thing. Clearsounds is an easy sort of vaporware vibe and Mall Music is clearly appreciated because it got the “slowed and verbed” treatment—which is like the gen z stamp of approval for lofi.
So it kind of dawned on me as I sat at my computer that I already had the perfect “bad” song—in this very online, irony/post-irony sense I’d been pondering. My friend Jesse made this hilariously weird like joke rap album in high school named Bridge Over Troubled Water (HOT FIRE!! WOW!!!) which was like proto-Deep-Fried meme music that was oddly prescient in terms of where music was going in the “post irony” age (other excellent pieces on this here re: Emily Montes and here more “hxstorically” as well). Jesse was super into Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff etc. It’s totally brilliantly simple and distilled, totally funny but kinda awesome musically—anyway rewind a few months ago and I was like mid-quarantine just messing around with the tracks—and ended up chatting to Jessie (who couldn’t believe I still listened to this album) and being like yeah lets do a re-release, I’ll remix all of them. So they made some crazy cover art and I made some new versions of the tracks. I hadn’t touched it in a while, so I opened the Ableton file and got back to work on it for this week’s assignment. Hopefully we’ll put it out the full album this year sometime, there’s an unreal track about Skeeter from Doug. I love it so much, as well as some honestly amazing like noise-dance pieces.
But that didn’t seem like doing it enough justice, since I loved the sort of larger aesthetic vibes that this week’s examples created with visual aesthetic on cover art, and in thematic content. So I tried to nail this like bad 2000s vibe—we have MMD (miku miku dance) with Waluigi (Nintendo’s reject character who has been slighted once again in a lack of inclusion in the most recent Super Smash bros. the poor guy—even with that incredible eye shadow) in this Ikea model looking thing. I found the camera animation and the elements on Deviant Art and put them together to get this going. I exported the the video from MMD in this random format that turned out to be quite old—it squished it to standard and compressed it down a lot—so I rolled with it. I made sure to get the video quality as low as possible and the audio quality as well to be super compressed, so we have this like 480p 64kbps mono audio with 24 fps. Went for the awful Windows Movie Maker text and transitions, put that quintessential awkward apologetical thank you messages in there to set the stage—on the worst possible color and font choices everyone used to go for: magenta and lime green.
The thing about the idea of post irony tho is that I actually like this song and the video because it brings enjoyment—therefore it is good. Even if something is bad but gives you some sort of reaction—it seems to be good in a sense. When you break it down to be that simple, it’s kinda funny how obvious it seems that “joke” or “ironic” things have never been bad if they have been entertaining. It’s funny how “bad” things can both be extremely low effort and extremely high effort—although in my opinion rarely in the middle. I personally stopped trying to decide if music was “bad” a while ago—I’ve changed opinions too many times to believe it’s possible to call it one way or the other—feels pointless. But I do think people would call this bad in the sense of its quality and content. I instead like to ask “why do I have an interest in hating this content?” And I think that’s more useful for people. I hope they consider that if they ever stumble onto this video while watching a clip of a guy actually hitting a dab in IKEA—the only video that truly shares SEO with this now.