whole new world ON PC MUSIC AND THE FUTURE OF POP MUSIC Zain Ahmad
I was first introduced to what would become the future of pop music in 2015. An avid Charli XCX fan, I tuned in to the first episode of her new Beats 1 Radio show, The Candy Shop. Coming off the release of 2014’s Sucker, Charli was set to debut new music, which she had previously described as being “the most pop thing, and the most electronic thing” she had done to date. I had no idea what to expect. Thus far, her music had more or less been palatable, somewhat-alternative skewing pop, and I was inclined to believe that her new stuff would harken back to the sounds from her debut album, True Romance. Boy, was I wrong. The moment I first heard her chant “Let’s ride!” over an industrial sounding beat, I knew that I had entered the future. Over the next two hours, Charli’s show introduced me to the bizarre, sped-up world of PC music, one marked by textured sounds, pitched voices, and an overriding sense of euphoria. I had never heard anything of the sort—sounds clearly mired in early 2000s pop that simultaneously still managed to sound as though they had been beamed in from a distant, sleek future. As she played songs from various new collaborators such as SOPHIE, A.G. Cook, and Hannah Diamond, one thing was certain: I was hooked. PC Music refers to both a record label and an art collective founded by Alex ‘A.G.’ Cook, a producer who was attending school at Goldsmiths, University of London at the time of its inception. According to Cook, the ‘PC’ in PC Music
Photo © Henry Redcliffe
stands for ‘Personal Computer,’ a term meant to highlight the music’s tendency to sound both incredibly mechanical and intimate. “I was trying to think about how you could make music on the computer that had personality, or felt very intimate or uncanny,” he stated in an interview with Dazed Magazine. “I was burned out on studying and wanted to test these ideas in the real world.” PC Music is notable for its exaggerated take on traditional pop music. The structures inherent to pop are all still there, but they’ve been amplified and distorted to their logical extremes, resulting in highly stylized, textured, yet cartoonishly bubble-gum sounds. In his attempt to push the boundaries of pop music, Cook’s project quickly gained a following and was transformed into a legitimate movement. 33
“The structures inherent to pop are all still there, but they’ve been amplified and distorted to their logical extremes, resulting in highly stylized, textured, yet cartoonishly bubblegum sounds.”
