Slop vs. ‘iPod music’: frictionlessness, vibes, and the end of the modern episteme

Jodi Dean argues that AI-ideology frames its telos as unrestrained – and in psychoanalytic terms, infantile – wish-fullfilment. “The fantastic promise is AI is limitlessness, unboundedness”: no labor, no delayed gratification, no need to overcome and/or assimilate difference, no need to respect a law, prohibition, or taboo. In fact, the limitlessness is the point. To respect a limit is to subordinate oneself to an authority; the rhetoric and performance of unboundedness demonstrates one’s freedom from subordination, like libertarianism taken to its most extreme and absurd endpoint.

As Dean argues, such limitlessness is a regression from law and superego, the disciplined limits and rules instituted by the psychoanalytic figure of the father (or what I would prefer to think of as society – hence my earlier gesture to libertarianism). I would argue instead that this is less a regression to a less-developed state and more a sign of a broader shift away from the structures, codes, and episteme of European modernity (like psychoanalysis) and towards a newer framework with different stakes and terms. We are exiting the modern paradigm of work, friction, delayed gratification, the Bildungsroman, tonal harmony, etc, toward one that idolizes scale without friction or limit. 

Across modernity, theories of the self or subject, political philosophy, literary form, musical form, etc., all centered around the assimilation and overcoming of difference. There’s the labor theory of value/property, which argues that labor transforms raw material into private property by bringing it out of its natural state through work. That’s how you make a coat out of linen and the United States out of supposedly terra nullius. From Lacan’s mirror stage to Levinas’s face of the Other, 20th century French philosophy has numerous ways of theorizing the self/subject as a being defined by its integration of variably knowable difference. As Susan McClary famously argued, tonal harmony, the main structuring device for Western music from the 18th century onwards, is likewise a structure for introducing and then domesticating dissonance. “The sonata and likewise tonality…depend upon the logic that assumes as natural the tonic protagonist’s necessary subjugation (‘resolution,’ ‘grounding’) of whatever ‘large-scale dissonance’ occupies the second narrative position” (Feminine Endings 15-6). Traditionally, pieces from Beethoven symphonies to stadium rock anthems start in one key, go into one or more other keys, and then conclude by going back to the original key. This harmonic journey creates the feeling of tension and release, as increasingly distant or dissonant keys build tension and the return to the original key brings the feeling of release or resolution. The intro to GnR’s “Welcome to the Jungle” does something like this: its chord progression builds and builds harmonic tension and releases it on the downbeat of the first verse. This tension/release structure represents how the integration of difference feels: instead of a self or a piece of private property, it produces a payoff in the form of aesthetic pleasure.

As Melinda Cooper shows, this modern idea of work-as-domestication-of-difference fit the needs of 19th and 20th century industrial capitalism because it was possible standardizeable and regularizeable. In her book Life as Surplus, she explains, there is 

A common principle of production or labor—muscles perform mechanical work through the combustion of nutrients, just as the steam engine produces energy by burning carbon. The physico chemical labor of the body was measurable in the same terms as that of heat. There was thus a fundamental equivalence between the labor of the organ and that of the machine—the equivalence of abstract, divisible labor time. And this equivalence meant that the performance of the machine and of the body could be subjected to similar strategies of regularization and even reproduction (107; emphasis mine).

Combustion represents friction as heat, heat that can then be applied as force to do things like move a train or build something on an assembly line. Bodies burning calories or engines burning coal metabolize fuel into abstract equivalent units of force and labor time, which is helpful if you want to figure out how to produce X number of widgets in Y time, or keep the trains running on schedule. Those activities are advantageous in the style of capitalism where companies make money from selling commodities, and in a society that prioritizes discipline and statistical regulation – i.e., in the kind of biopower that Foucault talks about in his work.

But as I argue in Good Vibes Only, that form of biopower is old news as that disciplined regularity is no longer productive enough for either markets or states. That volume builds on Cooper’s claim that something like what I would call a structure of resilience has replaced the old modern calculus of combustion: productivity shouldn’t metabolize at a regular and regulated rate, it should compound and exponentalize, or as the bros say these days, “scale.” Musical gestures like the soar depict such scale by creating the sense of compounding intensity. But the soar is over a decade old and the pop charts have moved on; these days, big tension-release gestures like the soar or like the intro to “Welcome to the Jungle” are out and milquetoast slop is in. “Choosin Texas” has been #1 on the Hot 100 for 20 weeks – longer than only Mariah’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” – and it has no real climax to speak of; it’s a twanged up “Spotifycore” song designed to fade into the background just like the music in the first two scenes of its video. Slop scales because it is indeterminate enough to work across a wide range of contexts, like several different radio formats or as a sound to accompany a short-form video of a wide range of life moments. Slop, in other words, is relatively frictionless. 

This frictionlessness, or what others might call immediacy, is what Dean is referring to in her analysis of AI discourse about wish-fulfillment without limit. But just as “Choosin Texas” reigns the Hot 100 while millions of working musicians have their songs demonetized on streaming platforms, this frictionlessness is unevenly distributed. AI users may have their wishes fulfilled instantly without the need for the messiness of practice or work, but the remote assistance workers behind Waymo’s supposedly autonomous vehicles and the communities suffering through the myriad negative externalities of data centers certainly experience friction in their relationship with AI. Just as Hegel argued in 1807, masters experience frictionlessness as they outsource the actual work of living to subordinates. In the current AI discourse, frictionless scale is a status marker: owners and bosses experience frictionless gratification whereas the rest of us have to toil away doing labor that is necessary but poorly-paid because its friction-full nature makes it difficult if not impossible to scale. The payoff of frictionless experience isn’t instant enjoyment, but rank. 

Whereas modernity framed the master as the one who could conquer and domesticate difference (think of bell hooks’ frame of ‘eating the other,’ how white masculine “cool” is about appropriating Black masculinity, or again of McClary’s analysis of the gendered dynamics of tonal harmony), today’s AI discourse frames elite status in terms of its remove from friction and the things it produces, like subjective interiority, educated expertise, command of the exotic, disinterested remove, discipline, you name it. Slop’s formulaic and indeterminate character represents the lack of depth that defines frictionless experience, just as its dominance on the pop charts represents the scalability such emptiness facilitates.

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Slop might be dominating the Hot 100, but it’s far from the only thing going on in music these days. Slop might scale most efficiently, but other parts of the industry require a there there for audiences to engage with: you don’t get brat summer without some sort of iconic color, just as trending sounds on TikTok like the intro to Slayyyter’s “Dance” go viral because their structure scripts the pace and arc of the kinds of narratives that drive user engagement. Slop may scale most efficiently, but some markets require music to provide actual content.

Charli and Slayyyter may not be making slop, but they’re not making songs that center around big tension/release structures either.

“Dance” starts out with a tension-release moment as it soars up to the hard-hitting downbeat of the first chorus as Slayyyter’s character in the video shoots her abusive parent. However, the placement of this soar as a prologue and the fact that what would traditionally be the song’s main, biggest soar at the end of the break is actually less intense suggests that the function of this intro soar is somewhat auxiliary to the actual song. Instead of taking three minutes to build to a climax, the song gets it out of the way right away before proceeding on with its main idea. That intro soar is less the song’s main idea and more its abstract or marketing thumbnail, the distilled-down version designed for circulation (and monetization) on short-form video platforms where it is commonly used to accompany user-generated videos of big reveals. The main body of the song traces out a Ke$ha-meets-JUSTICE indie sleaze vibe where the early 2010s-style soar functions more like another reference point used to build the “iPod music” vibe, alongside the sidechained synths and the exclusive Urban Outfitters 7” single. The song collects a set of references to build a vibe, and that, not the narrative introduction and domestication of difference, structures the aesthetic experience it offers – vibing, not climaxing.

Charli’s Music, Fashion, Film also builds vibes. I’ve written a bit about that here. But since we’re talking about musical structures I want to focus in on my favorite track on the album, “Yeah.” This is basically a quite/loud/quiet track built on a single two-measure vamp. Instead of building to a climax, the track decelerates at the end, changing orientation or creating a slightly different vibe by shifting from dance-punk to a little more shoegazey direction. And then there’s “Card Declined”: starting off with an sprechstimme critique of consumerism over some minimal strumming and noisy improv, the song is mainly Kim Gordon vibes, but then halfway through we get a more hyperpop take on that same material as guitars shift to synths and sprechstimme becomes Ariana Grande-like vocals. AND THEN the last 40 or so seconds jump the shark completely and goes power-pop – reminds me of “Girlfriend” era Matthew Sweet, or maybe also Ted Leo and the Pharmacists. Talk about “iPod music” – “Card Declined” shuffles through a few different iconic indie rock styles, itself almost like a playlist sketching out a taste profile.

Charli and Slayyyter’s recent songs don’t build climaxes, they create and shift vibes. What’s going on here isn’t desire: there’s not a created sense of lack or difference that feels good when it’s resolved and the lack has been fulfilled. That’s how modernity (as say what Ranciere would call both the aesthetic regime of art and metapolitics) functioned. But we are genuinely seeing something different now, and I am agnostic as to the orientation of this vibe shift: I don’t think we should go back to the law of the father, the split subject, or whatever – these were not great to begin with are mechanisms of a particular configuration of patriarchal racial capitalism. The crucial things IMO are society (a sense that other people matter and our existences are mutually dependent) and mutual accountability, but there are lots of ways of organizing that. And to be honest if you want to hear a big drop just Google your favorite headlining DJ and listen to their most recent big festival set. Or you can go to OMNIA in Las Vegas and see their custom animated light feature that is choreographed to accompany the drop in Benny Benassi’s classic “Satisfaction.” Drops aren’t dead they’re just basic.

I am likewise ambivalent about pop girlie vibes as an alternative to slop.To associate yourself definitively with a specific cultural context prevents you from sloppy crossover and the scale that such crossover brings. In the slop era, claiming a distinctive vibe is not exactly countercultural, but it is a deliberate opting out of the rat race: despite headlining Lollapalooza (Charli) and getting moved to the main stage (Slayyyter), neither Charli nor Slayyyter have any songs in the Hot 100 this week. But it is also not correct to say that Charli and Slayyyter are underground artists or anti capitalists or doing anything to ameliorate the broad demonetization of musical labor. They’re just a different flavor of capitalism, a niche market in the slop era.