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How Internet music is frying your brain1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2016

Adam Harper
Adam Harper*
Affiliation:
Department of Music City, University of London, Northampton Square, London, EC1V 0HB E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article argues that the production and reception of certain recent electronic musics has resonated with criticisms of the perceived degenerative effects of digital technology on culture and ‘humanity’ – such as the lack of attention it promotes or the ‘information overload’ it causes – in an at least partially positive way. The resulting ambivalent aesthetics, sometimes thought of as one of ‘Internet music’, embraces particular negative notions of digital mediation in ways that can and have been thought of as satirical, exploratory or ‘accelerationist’. I examine three facets of this aesthetics: maximalism, kitsch and the uncanny valley. I also question the legitimacy of dramatising, even positively, digital media and culture as effectively ‘degenerate’.

Type
Articles
Information
Popular Music , Volume 36 , Special Issue 1: The Critical Imperative , January 2017 , pp. 86 - 97
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

1

This is not just a title, it's a headline, particularly one leading an online article: reductive, sensationalist, clickbait. In both its net-optimised style and the position it takes on ‘Internet music’, it's intended to evoke much of the online music-critical discourse this article draws on and in which this author has been embroiled – magazines such as The FADER, Dummy, Noisey, Thump and Dazed Digital – including its (and the author's) ambivalent, even hypocritical stance.

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