The Singles Jukebox

We kick off week two of our reanimation with CONTROVERSY MONDAY. Time to find out once and for all how predictable we are!

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[6.05]

Aaron Bergstrom: On March 4, 2023, in a cold, TSJ-less world, I wrote a few track reviews for my sorely neglected blog, including this one for “Hollywood Baby”: “By far the dumbest song on this list, and yet it leaves me with a huge grin on my face every time I hear it. I can say with 100% certainty that (a) The Singles Jukebox would have reviewed this, (b) I would have given it a [9], (c) the next highest score would have been a [4] at best, and (d) multiple very smart people would have given it a [0]. I don’t care. It’s great.” I have never been more confident in a prediction, and eight months later this song still makes me want to get drunk and light off fireworks indoors.
[9]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Sometimes it can feel exhausting to enjoy 100 gecs because their music feels shrouded behind 100 (10,000?) layers of irony. “Hollywood Baby,” however, is big, loud, and stupid enough that it avoids this problem entirely. 
[7]

Vikram Joseph: Early 2000s punk-pop succeeded on two distinct levels — songs that were radically dumb or deeply, unabashedly sincere. (Certain Blink-182 songs managed both, and that’s why they’re giants of the genre, for whatever that’s worth now as they lurch around the globe like a three-legged nightmare of Christmas past.) “Hollywood Baby” feels like a misguided science experiment — what if we precision-designed a Sum 41 riff and threw some PC Music vocals over it? Wouldn’t that be post-modern? There’s no heart, too much brain, and ultimately it’s just quite grotesque.
[3]

Will Rivitz: Even when they sound like Sum 41 they do! not! miss! Absolutely improbable banger and change to spare.
[9]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Every major label on Earth should pause their direct debit to Travis Barker until he starts svengali-ing pop-punk facsimiles as good as this.
[8]

Taylor Alatorre: It makes total sense to seek refuge in the relative simplicity and guilelessness of pop punk songwriting; I do it all the time. It makes less sense to view that style as an emblem of a mythical bygone purity that disappeared sometime between Tha Carter III and the 2010 midterms shellacking. I mean, the guys who made “Fat Lip” weren’t some three-chord noble savages — those Canadians really could shred. And maybe it’s part of the joke that the gecs enlist actual superhuman Josh Freese to lay down a beat that wouldn’t even be a tier 1 drum track on Rock Band, but that’s too many layers of abstraction for music that constantly insists upon how dumb it is. Point is, both virtuosity and amateurism were key elements of major-label punk in the 2000s, and a pastiche that focuses exclusively on the latter runs the risk of devolving into vaudeville, or what’s worse, novelty music. The high points of “Hollywood Baby” are the parts that enliven the caricature by taking influence, perhaps unconsciously, from the artists that Brady and Les might have listened to in high school rather than middle school — Uffie, Santogold, M.I.A., and yes (*sigh*)… Sleigh Bells. The hectic four-on-the-floor lead-in to the chorus arrives as a welcome disruption to all the shiftless lo-fi riffage, and it serves as an example of the kind of effortless cathartic release that was easier to find on 100 gecs’ debut than on the sequel.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: This sounds almost normal, and I can’t tell whether that’s because 100 gecs have ~*~*~*sold out*~*~*~ or because the Internet now offers a million more post-hyperpop rabbitholes that lead to places a million times weirder and horrifying. It sounds like finding a decaying issue of YM in your childhood bedroom, then shopping the slimy, waterlogged pop-punk spread online with your own adult money.
[7]

Frank Falisi: The falsest artistic binary is the one between accessible and avant, between pop and experimental. These are tendencies, for sure, useful for composing in or avoiding altogether to suit an aesthetic process. But ultimately, the notion that something is either churnable or difficult comes down to the (blessedly) complicated relationship a listener builds with a sound, rather than the (equally complicated) one between it and its composer. Selling out is a whole other thing–we’re talking about strategies of distance and intimacy, staying sharp only so long as it lets us connect, gloriously spilling over into each other. Isn’t part of the earnestness of 1000 gecs in its experimentation? When we talk about charting the changes–in the body, in the same song–aren’t we exploring how “pop” and “experimental” settle in the same physical moment? Those wiggles can hug! And now, a descent into pastiche, into caking and eating it archly. What I mean is: what is this Japandroids shit? Are you being clever? How’s clever going for you?
[2]

Brad Shoup: One of the more straight-ahead tracks on 10,000 gecs, which for our heroes still means “pop-punk but mixed like a crime”. The riff is sick; the gecs rock back and forth like a prizefighter sizing up the opponent. It’s catharsis all the way through, even on a chorus that reads like machine-learning crunkcore.
[7]

Michelle Myers: It seems the conventional wisdom is that “Hollywood Baby” sounds like blink-182, but I actually lived through 2000s pop-punk the first time, and this is way more Good Charlotte.
[7]

Leah Isobel: This sounds like Yellowcard.
[7]

Anna Katrina Lockwood: This sounds like a slightly more legible update on Times New Viking, so of course I love it. 
[8]

Alfred Soto: Fuzzy fun — Sleigh Bells meets Paramore. Attitude compensates for middling hook.
[6]

Ian Mathers: For some reason I didn’t like the “Ringtone” remix back in the day (maybe I just hadn’t been burped), but everything I’ve heard since has been great. And look, anyone in 2023 who’s going to make a record that contains both this and “Frog on the Floor” (to say nothing of sequencing them in a row) is clearly on the side of the angels.
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: juiceworld2 once said this band sounded like white privilege. They were right. During the first hype cycle for Dylan Brady and Laura Les, they were scooping up incredibly corny, laughable music and serving it with a heavy dose of irony that made it only mildly entertaining. There would be actual innovation done with the form, novel uses of long overused effects and the destruction of conventional structure. But now they’re making bland pop-rock that Olivia Rodrigo could write a rough draft of in a week or an hour. And we hyped them to the moon as these inventive, creative artists who deserved the serious recognition we gave them — why?
[5]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: For a while there, 100 gecs had me feeling like Adorno with Schoenberg. At last, here was a contemporary artist who represented total freedom, though in this case it was from the tyranny of taste and genre. More importantly, they interrogated the ways in which sounds are readily situated in a particular social milieu. They didn’t need a gimmick to blend different styles, as 2000s emo bands did with their Punk Goes Pop and Punk Goes Crunk albums. They also didn’t care for musical styles to feel like discrete parts of a song, as acts like Falling in Reverse and BABYMETAL did before them. On “Stupid Horse,” they threw in melodies from blink-182’s “Roller Coaster” alongside cartoonish ska skanks, wimpy gang vocals, and unabashedly excited guitar shredding. This was maximalist joy wrought from patchwork. 10,000 gecs isn’t quite the same. It’s less a surrealist, sublime hodgepodge than the band throwing a simple twist on individual ideas. “Hollywood Baby” is the nadir of this newfound modesty. I hear 2000s pop punk once again, but only the drums provide a real differentiation between past and present. A song like the Mark Hoppus-featuring “I’d Do Anything” had snares that sounded like skateboards hitting pavement; “Hollywood Baby” goes for blown-out bombast. Even the lyrics are more straightforward! I get no joy from these simple pleasures. Again, I feel like Adorno: this is what he’d call “stubborn rationalization.”
[0]

Jonathan Bradley: “Hollywood Baby” has a thick fat-fingered guitar riff and flailing power chords and might as well be constructed from oversized cargo shorts and a chain wallet. I was so struck by 1000 gecs back in 2019 because it seemed to absorb the seething hatreds of the time and the disruption of a world on fire and respond with their own form of chaos: if the world refused to make sense, their music was its own kind of senseless excess. This is less warped zeitgeist and more of a good time. But you can pogo to a good time.
[8]

Tim de Reuse: It’s well-executed, the soft -> loud transition within the first verse is very energetic, and it’s probably cathartic to chant along with at a concert. Good clean fun. Hey, do you remember 2019? Remember when you heard “Money Machine” for the first time and it seemed ridiculous that it could get as big as it was getting, even if you didn’t like it all that much? Remember when the term “hyperpop” had a kind of unbounded promise to it — not even because you liked it, but because it felt like it had some kind of velocity behind it? This Lil Nas X guy came out of nowhere entirely off this new TikTok thing — totally new methods of hitmaking! Things could get more abrasive — more weird — things might finally start to shift around, and we could all look back and tell Mark Fisher that he was wrong, and the early 21st century was just a kind of inexplicable plateau we had to push through so that popular Western music could finally lurch into the future, and I’m sure if he’d been around he would have been glad to hear it. And then 2020 happened, and then we lost SOPHIE, we got “ABCDEFU,” and Taylor made a gesture in the direction of an album and got the top ten spots of the Billboard charts simultaneously. Yeah, I’m making up a narrative here — it’s not fair of me to project my hopes and dreams onto the gecs and their own creative ambitions. It’s not fair of me to say “It’s perfectly serviceable, but if I were in their situation I would have done something that would have saved the world.” But, like, imagine — stay with me — imagine if the verses on this had been deep-fried ska instead of distorted middle-school power pop mush. I’m not saying that would have been good music. But, like. World fucking peace, man.
[5]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I really loved 1000 gecs!
[3]

Tara Hillegeist: In the years between the release of the seminal California pop-punk albums Enema of the State and The Young and the Hopeless, both of which find parts of themselves “quoted” on “Hollywood Baby” and the 100 gecs album to which it belongs, two notable things had happened to a young Tara: my house got “the internet” and I made my first friends who both lived outside my neighborhood and who I could write to and expect an immediate response from; and two people I cared about dearly died, one shortly after the other: my great-uncle, and one of said “internet friends.” I guess I’m supposed to wish I could say I wept harder for my uncle — but he was survived by the rest of my family, in whose arms I found his memory impossible to escape, even should I have wanted to. Meanwhile, I spent three months painstakingly tracing my friend’s initials on the back of my hand in black Sharpie, the only proof I could manifest in my life that she ever existed, that her presence mattered to anyone I knew at all. There was a poetic irony, at least to a morbid preteen, that her username’s initials, “DNR,” also spelled out the universal medical shorthand for “Do Not Resuscitate”. There’s a different sort of irony to that as I write this now, on the other side of COVID and still living with the side effects, more dead friends than I have fingers later. To be a trans woman in her mid-30s now feels a little bit like getting all the downsides of the rockstar biopic montage and none of the talking-head dividends — drugs to keep you alive, drugs to drown in, a bunch of assholes ready to call you washed and wasted at the first sign of failing, and if you haven’t started rotting away in some obscure hotel room where nobody who loves you knows how to find you then you’re looking over your shoulder waiting for the gossip-rag sword of Damocles to fall instead. A glamorous life is a whole fantasy away — if only it were as easy as it looked, then, to mess up my way to success. To have fun like it was real anyway is no small thing.
[7]