The 3rd Millenium: Party in the Robotocracy

I'm not afraid of robot overlords, trans-humans, test tube babies, government surveillance, mind control, corporate hegemony, alien overlords, or ramped-up eugenics.  I'm not even afraid of the grey goo that we'll all be turned into once nanotechnology goes awry.  I'm not afraid of a dystopia because, as I've made very clear before, we are already living in a dystopia.  The thing that scares me most about this dystopia is Miley Cyrus.

There are two types of people in 2010.  There are those who like Miley Cyrus' "Party in the USA," and then there are those who hate it but for some reason deep down inside kinda like certain aspects of it.  For example, I'll punch a hole in the next speaker that I hear playing the song, but you can put a foil helmet on my head and call me paranoid if I don't like that guitar riff that they ripped off from some 70's R&B track who's title eludes me at the moment.  The song is ubiquitous. You can't escape it any more easily than you can escape the watchful eye of Big Brother.

The music industry has reached the point where they can pinpoint the exact musicological aspects of songs that people will find aurally pleasing.  If you've used Pandora you've experienced the lite version of this.  Songs are broken down into elements, or "genomes" as they're called by the folks at Pandora, and your feedback is used to determine which elements you like.  (For example, I'm all about extensive vamping, mixed electric acoustic and electric instrumentation, and busy horn sections, apparently.)  You can then discover music that sounds like the music you already know, but structured differently.

If you watched last election's presidential debates (ok, you probably didn't) you noticed that certain networks had instant feedback from voters using knobs to indicate whether what the candidates were saying had a positive or negative effect.  What people didn't realize is that this data was being used to determine which talking points were the best to hit, so speech writers could take the guesswork out of their jobs.

And now we have the same thing with music.  Using focus groups, record companies can find out which riffs are the most pleasing.  They're not looking for a riff that sounds good anymore, they're looking for the best riff, the riff that will hit our proverbial cash gag reflexes.  We don't know why we like the riff at the beginning of Party in the USA, we just do.  But the people who wrote and produced this song (aka, not Miley Cyrus) sampled literally dozens if not hundreds of riffs to use.  The same methodology was used for the synth bass line that everyone loves.  The lyrics are about what everyone loves: having fun, being un-inhibited, patriotism (sort of), hearing the music that you like, Middle America's disillusionment from Los Angeles, and the word "yeah!"

At some point down the road, it could be fifty years, it could be five, this is how all pop music will be made.  It will be nothing but aggregations of musical elements that have been empirically proven to please listeners most effectively.  Pop music will essentially become a gray goo of songs that all sound kind of the same.  And if that's not a dystopia, then I don't know what is.