Songs In The Key of MP3

In a time of big data and algorithmic consumption, it's easy to buy into the myth of human passivity. Are the styles of art people enjoy really just chosen for us by the old powers of corporate capital and the new sway of the internet? In 2011's Retromania, Simon Reynolds made the case that musicians themselves had stalled creatively too. The internet had given us all unprecedented access to the past, and a new era of artists were left just repeating and regurgitating variations on old ideas. Thankfully, the decade which followed told a very different story; one of relentless innovation, creativity and broken boundaries. At the end of it, both the mainstream and the underground sounded completely different; liberated by new concepts of what is and isn't possible in song, uninteresting in the hindrances of genre, palatability and even gender. Crucially, the story of how these ideas came to be stands in direct contradiction to the kind of creeping nihilism which claims that the society we live in and the culture we interact with are already out of our hands.

With a title taken from the FKA Twigs song 'Ride the Dragon', Mysterious Beings will argue for a more deterministic point of view: focussing on five musicians who make the case through their careers that the creative boon of the last decade was a choice made by a pioneering wave of artists who responded in a post-modern way to the exact stagnation Reynolds diagnosed, and made music which was thrilling, open and completely new. These five artists in question are Devonte Hynes (of Blood Orange), FKA Twigs, SOPHIE, Oneohtrix Point Never and Earl Sweatshirt. Only a decade ago, each of these artists were niche concerns: true outsiders musicians who made definitively weird music and shunned typical relationships with the industry. Now, they have not only produced some of the most beloved albums of the last decade, but have also had an outsized influence on the sound of mainstream pop, electronic and rap music, where their ideas have become ubiquitous. They didn't just idly drift into the mainstream or compromise to get there either: they set popular music in their sights and sought to completely reshape it in their image. Sometimes they did so without even needed to partake in the typical motions of the industry, which were once absolutely essential to the success they went on to obtain.

Liam Inscoe-Jones is a music and fiction writer who has written for The Quietus, The Social, Line of Best Fit and Spectrum Culture, and has interviewed members of Five Seconds of Summer and Tame Impala, alongside Lianne La Havas, Bartees Strange, Enter Shikari, Xenia Rubinos and Amber Mark, among others. He was music editor at IMPACT Magazine and runs his own site Sorry Scholar, where he has charted his 100 favourite albums of each year since 2015. Each month he produces playlists of the best songs released each month, every month, since 2018.

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