The Top 40 Songs of 2014
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXqfwTHEZ6M
GFOTY – “Don’t Wanna/Let’s Do It”
QT – “Hey QT”
Which brings us to PC Music, a British collective of pop-music cyphers who strive for perfection through artificiality, and produced way more hits than anyone else on the planet in 2014. They get that any music’s makers aren’t really so interesting when compared to a blank void of intent and meaning that can be debated endlessly with no possible answer. They also understand that dark shock and abrasion has been fully absorbed into pop culture. You can be way more upsetting by being maniacally chipper. GFOTY’s “Don’t Wanna/Let’s Do It” is as insane and extreme as any song released this year, a composition made of incomplete thoughts and schizophrenic self-arguments. PC Music’s best-known song QT‘s “Hey QT”, subverts actually popular pop music’s inevitable end-use as advertising jingles by creating its own fake product to promote as a component part of its initial presentation. Label-head A.G. Cook (who created QT alongside associate Sophie) comes closest to recognizable hits, his chipmunk voices delivering blasts of idealized sappiness with a speed and efficiency that triggers our natural uncanny valley defenses. His song “Keri Baby” puts it best, it’s all “kind of real, kind of ooh.”
A.G. Cook (feat. Hannah Diamond) – “Keri Baby”
A.G. Cook – “Beautiful”
Hannah Diamond – “Attachment”
Hannah Diamond is credited as the vocalist on “Keri Baby,” and she may actually be the most interesting member of the whole gang. In artwork she’s always presented as an actual woman rather than a brand graphic abstract. She’s presumably the girl who made this music? Her voice, though clearly fucked with, falls just on the right side of scanning as human. “Attachment”, my favorite song of 2014, at first seems shallow but is sort of super deep. It expresses flowing emotion for the saved smartphone photo that stands in for her one true love, this completely fake facsimile of a real thing on a screen in her pocket, capable of making her feel so much.
Follow Jeff Klingman on Twitter @jeff_klingman.