In 1902 the American entrepreneur Thaddeus Cahill presented a paper on the world’s first additive synthesizer in London, on invitation from Lord Kelvin. Cahill called his new device the telharmonium. It was going to make orchestras and operas obsolete, delivering music to the masses through newly installed telephone wires with mathematical precision. The first 7-ton Mark I wowed New York investors with a juvenile performance of Ombra mai fu from Handel’s 1738 opera Xerxes. The savvy business men contributed over 3.5 million dollars (adjusted) toward a full build of the machine, hoping it would revolutionize music production as the automobile revolutionized travel. The result was the Mark II Telharmonium which weighed 210 tons and was amplified by a series of horns running 60 feet long. Soon after its completion it began cluttering telephone lines with synthetic renditions of simple tunes like the William Tell Overture and Toreador’s March.
Despite idealistic promises and clever engineering the telharmonium was a commercial failure. It was born of modern capitalism — the desire to innovate, but also the desire to exploit discoveries in modern science for vanity and glory. It was at its core a music novelty. Today Cahill is remembered as one of the fathers of electronic music. The telharmonium is only known to us for what it was — an ambitious footnote in electronic music — not for what it did.
Today what passes for musical innovation is much less impressive in scale. Hobbyist gadgets and experimental compositions are always in production, but nothing which spawns its own cultural footprint like the B3 Hammond organ, to give an example. This trickles into the craft of music making. At this point in the 21st century, aesthetic change through material innovation is almost stagnant. Capitalists take advantage of this barren ground whenever it occurs in order to pedal novelty and spectacle through music. The telharmonium is still a good example of a misguided attempt at innovation for innovation’s sake, sold through the pageantry of music. In these times, one thing remains: that decades old tug-of-war between artistry and the capitalist quest for wealth. Musicians are creating prescient and inventive albums while entrepreneurs dump new trends into our slop bucket. Some dopes can’t tell the difference.
MTV rang in Sunday’s Video Music Awards with a performance of From the D 2 the LBC featuring Snoop Dogg and Eminem. The song is decent. The beat is simple but jives well with Snoop’s placid delivery. But the studio single from June isn’t really on trial here. The 4’43” music video is a vessel for one of the most visibly cynical grifts in music production from the past decade. About 30 seconds in we see Snoop smoke a massive joint which gets them so high they become transfigured into their NFT apes. The tortured visage of the 3D creatures is maybe the perfect analogy for the pair’s recent turn toward the NFT space and embrace of the California weed industry. Snoop’s been known to chase a bag for years, and there was something of a farcical admiration of that. This video may have soured even the most diehard fans. It’s obvious that Snoop the artist hasn’t given up — you can hear that clearly in the music. But the video is done in such bad faith that the entire project is foul with the smell of the dying Web 3 racket. I would be shocked if the video sold a single bored ape without the workings of some back-room puppet master, which makes me wonder what it’s all for. It can’t all be a play for optics — that production money would be better spent on the NFT recovery effort.
The VMAs aren’t known for high scores on the integrity test, and you’d be a fool to expect anything less in this Year of the Grift. Celebrity endorsement of the NFT project certainly used to be widespread, but this is on-the-nose silly. Rather than invest in music as a craft and reap the capital benefits of a well executed production, MTV chooses time and again to invest in music as capital. I use From the D 2 The LBC as an example, but I encourage you to look out for this in other professional music. It’s pervasive in both popular and classical music from writing to radio programming to production, and it remains a significant barrier to the accessibility of well crafted music. You’ll always see this garbage cluttering headlines, newsfeeds, and streaming platforms.
On the opposite end of the production spectrum is Tim Pool’s latest single Only Ever Wanted, released last Friday to throngs of ridicule. The music video features YouTube’s beanie-clad pervert alongside vaccine skeptic Pete Parada in one of the most insipid music productions since How to Save a Life. It’s maybe the most inauthentic version of Tim we’ve seen so far, and we’ve seen quite a lot. He commended his work in a Twitter post on Sunday, falsely praising the song as “a success.”
Tim’s reputation, rather than musical acumen, undergirds this whole production. Parlaying the momentum from his YouTube scheme into a half-baked attempt at a music career is the only hope Tim has at building a body of work that lasts longer than he does. This is grift for fame and legitimacy cowering inside the Trojan horse of the right-wing cultural project. According to Tim: “winning the culture war means building culture. The Daily Wire understands this with their children’s content and their movies and that’s why Timcast started making apolitical shows and now music.” If he keeps it up he might someday have the purchasing power to break out of right-wing YouTube and buy mainstream attention.
That aside, this is an embarrassing product to put out in 2022. The lyrics are weepy, the music video is cloying, and the song is poorly crafted. None of Tim’s work here leads anywhere. It is completely devoid of life. Even if you buy his message, Tim is hardly the person to champion a reactionary alternative to popular music. He asserts that “[people] don’t have to bow down to the cult in order to make good art,” but we’re still waiting for the good art to arrive.
The simple promise of innovation doesn’t necessarily make great music. Western positivist notions of history contribute to the fetishization of innovation which is used to sell products that don’t actually innovate, or worse, innovate in poor-faith. Put another way, they fail to use new developments in the art to create strong music. In the case of Snoop and Eminem, the ad buy is obvious. The innovation in this case is the embrace of NFTs and Web 3 — a marriage of culture and product. The NFT business is meant to steal the show, and it absolutely has.
Tim Pool is sneakier. There’s nothing immediately offensive or flashy about his production. He claims to innovate toward a broader cultural end, but that innovation is only skin-deep, and in poor-faith. Only Ever Wanted is not well written or clever. It’s a poor foundation on which to build a cultural movement. Tim never intended to add commentary to his music, but he doesn’t have the skill to create something meaningful without it. His attempt at abstract art is as stale as his beanie, but is no less a grift for it.
The capitalist’s failure to influence music at will — whether with new devices, lucrative alliances, or artificial cultural movements — speaks to the shallowness of their project. As targets of this media we owe it to ourselves to question the extramusical message we’re inevitably bought into, because the grifters are not always so obvious. Maybe that’s fine for right now. There’s a whole sack of problems waiting to be dug up and analyzed, and music grifters are at the bottom. Just don’t confuse what they do for good music.