Dear Theo,
hope you had a great birthday! So nice to see Nina Nastasia with you (smileeeeyy)
Still can’t work out how i feel about the new 100 gecs album. It’s kind of like picking a scab. Wrong, right, dumb, morbidly fascinating, weird, hurts a little bit. Sounds like the guilty pleasure noises of being a 90s baby — Sum 41, Crazy Frog, Jackass soundtracks — have been gavage-fed to SpongeBob and someone is squeezing him right into my ears.
the dumb, macho sounds of my childhood are being salvaged by another generation and subculture — but for better or worse? Are we getting more nihilistic, dumberer? Or is Knoxville-era masculinity finally getting the kick in the nuts it always needed?
No doubt, 10,000 gecs is the cynical memeification of early 00s pop-punk and rage (‘You'll never really know, know-know-know, know-know-know / Anything about meme-me-me, me-me-me’). You don’t have to be extremely online to know that the samples are a smorgasboard of kitsch, from the TIE fighter blasts on ‘757’ to the panicked horse neighing screech from Cypress Hill’s ‘Insane in the Brain’ on ‘The Most Wanted Person in the United States’.
I’d imagine, though, if you are extremely online it enhances the experience. In 2019, the duo appeared on [adult swim] in front of a green screen backdrop of an aquarium having already played Minecraft’s answer to Fire Festival. The sweat and chaos of the moshpit is flattened and copy-paste into the chat without missing a stadium-sized trap beat.
‘What forms of collectivity are possible in an age of mass loneliness?’ 100 gecs seem to ask, and then promptly answer: ‘None, so why not make the most pointless record ever’, an album like Blink-182 ‘pissing in the wind’ through a Tamagotchi?
That being said, 100 gecs have a vibrant cult fanbase, who turn up to gigs with garlic up their noses wielding plastic miniature horses, as if cosplaying the 00s phrase ‘That is so random’, and geccers do seem to have found a strong feeling of togetherness, against all the odds. Love these pics of the London lot.
A lot of queer people seem to be into them, perhaps because of the band's open support of LGBTQ+ rights, and Laura Les tweeting things like: 'if you like my music you immediately are trans' (she has previously said that her use of 'nightcore style' vocals was due to her experiences with voice dysphoria. What the fuck is night-core?)
Certainly, there could be no 100 gecs without James Franco sucking off a gun in Harmony Korine’s 2012 Skrillex-fuelled Spring Breakers. But whereas Skrillex took British dubstep and Americanised it, adding in his emo roots, into something even more extreme, Brostep, it's as if this 100 gecs album is mutating London's P.C. Music hyperpop back into From-First-to-Last-era emo. It keeps making me thinking of the raging nihilism of Woodstock ‘99, which was closed out by Red Hot Chilli Peppers just before going up in flames: ‘Queen of California, hot like the heat is’ sing 100 gecs: ‘Got Anthony Kiedis sucking on my penis’. The more aggressively macho 100 gecs get, the queerer they get — it’s a riot!
After 100 gecs dropped their version of the nu-metal anthem ‘Toxicity’ at Boiler Room recently, I googled ‘System of a Down politics’ and it turns out that the band’s drummer John Dolmayan was a Trump supporter, while his brother-in-law, frontman Serj Tankian, is more of a Bernie man. ‘We’re family,’ Tankian has said, ‘so we have very similar views on certain things: morals, ethics, Armenian issues. But we have completely different opinions on American politics.’ Despite their differences, they continue to make politically charged music.
10,000 gecs seems to benefit from a similar political push-pull, by appropriating the violent, crusty, dark side of modern America and messing with it. They have created a record so empty it’s somehow turned into the opposite, like the Big Bang or something idk i’m not a scientist.
System of a Down’s Toxicity was released a week before 9/11, a tough time to be broadcasting an anti-patriotic message. ‘There’s terrorist threats every day,’ Tankian said. ‘I’m getting shit for activism and speaking truth to power – all these different threat levels.’ Apparently, Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello called the album ‘crazy-person music’, and really it’s no wonder why it struck a chord:
Conversion software version 7.0 looking at life through the eyes of a tire hub
Eating seeds as a past time activity, the toxicity of our city, of our city.
10,000 gecs is crazy music for crazy times, too and 100 gecs might just be SOAD’s current heirs apparent.
Anyway, I’d love to hear what you make of it — I don’t really know anything about the soundcloud rap side of things — and to make some more weird shit of our own.
Let’s share some seeds soon!
Lots of love,
Godot x