I’ll always associate the year 2011 with Glass Swords, the debut album from Rustie, the Glaswegian producer of the Hudson Mohawke school of aesthetics. It’s kind of lazy to hold up cover artwork as a visual translation of an album’s sound, but in the case of Glass Swords, it’s just too perfect: the album really does sound like those gleaming crystal obelisks, towering, synthetic and overpowering. Rustie was frequently saddled with the term "maximalism," a phenomenon broken down in Simon Reynold’s "Maximal Nation" later that year. Many of the defining electronic artists of the early 2010s (Skrillex, Grimes) seemed to be dealing with this same aesthetic philosophy, toying with these bright, artificial, exhaustively layered sounds. Intentionally or otherwise, their work giddily reflected the limitless source material and everything-at-onceness of the Internet.
"Maximal Nation" stuck to electronic artists, but you could see the ideals of digital maximalism represented elsewhere in popular music, too. Kanye was in the home stretch of his overblown-on-purpose phase: performing "Niggas in Paris" ten times in a row with Jay Z on the Watch the Throne tour, with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy still in the rearview. (And "digital maximalism" pretty much sums up Ye’s golden era of all-caps, stream-of-consciousness tweets, for that matter.) Nicki Minaj had thrown everyone for a loop with her major label debut Pink Friday, a glossy, hyperactive fusion of EDM, rap, and bubblegum pop, all bug-eyed camp and well-manicured fist-pumps. Even known neo-LudditeDrake had just dropped his maximalist opus, 2011’s sprawling, 80-minute Take Care.
Maximalist aesthetics predated this particular era by a long shot, but in the context of the age of still-new social media and peak digital saturation, they took on a new significance. Glass Swords and "Maximal Nation" emerged right around something of a turning point in Internet culture, though the shift didn’t happen overnight and is easier to identify in hindsight: that dizzying precipice of scalability and corporatization of what used to be a landscape dominated by nerds, weirdos, and people who blogged for the fun of it. Twitter and Tumblr still felt fresh and revolutionary; it was hard to imagine these tools doing anything but enhancing life. The seamlessness with which URL-based subcultures were being absorbed by the mainstream still felt like a big deal, something "pure" that was being actively co-opted rather than the natural upstream flow of the cultural current; it’s hard to imagine something like Rihanna’s "controversial" seapunk-inspired "SNL" performance being news in 2015. (Or maybe not so hard to imagine, but more as a result of the think piece industrial complex than genuine surprise.) For the moment, immersion in Internet culture still felt mostly like a choice rather than a necessary evil, and the aesthetics of digital maximalism felt optimistic, a pledge of allegiance to the Internet’s infinite horizon.
The most fitting torch-bearers for the ideals of digital maximalism in 2015 are the members of PC Music, the London-based label and collective who recently released their first official full-length, the PC Music Volume 1 compilation. Masterminded by producer/conceptual svengali A. G. Cook, the crew makes music and visuals that are uncannily cheerful and shamelessly synthetic, a self-aware mash of faux-naive teen girl caricature and leering corporate brand-speak. Musically, PC Music’s artists bring little to the table not already existent in J-pop and K-pop (and American pop, etc. etc.) of the last decade-plus, especially those involving Japanese producer/composer Yasutaka Nakata: Perfume’s 2006 compilation Complete Best, or any number of Capsule’s mid-'00s releases, or more recently, the work of synth-pop surrealist Kyary Pamyu Pamyu.
But that’s all beside the point, anyway—PC Music’s music is a means to an end, just one tier of the label’s half-performative, half-serious post-postmodern branding experiment. Some of the songs are pretty fun (Hannah Diamond’s "Every Night" sticks out above the rest) and they’re definitely well-crafted, but it’s hard to consider them as standalone pieces divorced from the surrounding conceptual hijinx—which of course, they were never intended to be. Fully "getting" PC Music relies on the spectator’s awareness of the artists’ winking performance of Web 1.0 zeal in a Web 2.0 world: the post-ironically naive lyrics ("I don’t wanna be an MP3/ 320 kbps, you know that I feel kinda real") or the poker-faced, bizarro-world advertising spots. I initially read this as satire, though certainly not without an obvious tenderness for its source material (the business of pop, the art of branding), that would ultimately lead to some critical conclusions about consumerism, art, and identity in the digital age. Something about the absurdity of capitalism sans capital, maybe, or the relationship between avatar and "authentic" self. I’m not sure if I misunderstood their mission, or if it shifted gears upon the realization that this shit was actually profitable—either way, what was once presumed to be a conceptual prop is now being sold as a meaningful post-Internet beverage for $20 (plus $10 shipping/handling) a pop.
All this is very 2015 in the sense that these artists have figured out how to make the machine work for them; I get the feeling this would all disappear if the think pieces stopped coming (which yeah, I know, pot, kettle). But there’s something awkwardly dated about PC Music’s approach, too—an unwavering optimism in the chaotic, supersaturated digital realm, and a desire to immerse oneself even deeper within it, that I find hard to relate to in a way that I would not have a few years ago. PC Music’s approach amplifies and exaggerates the ideals put forth in "Maximal Nation," but our experience of the Internet has warped pretty drastically in those deceptively short four-ish years. These concepts felt sexy and vital in the early 2010s, but in 2015, "digital maximalism" isn’t so much a limitless frontier as our exhausting day-to-day reality. Internet culture feels like it’s reached a critical mass: non-professional bloggers feel like a dying breed, privacy is nonexistent, our most essential social media platforms have grown tedious and rife with harassment, content is branded and SEO-optimized within an inch of its life. Everyone I know is "thinking about deleting Facebook." We use technology to help us stay away from technology. In short, a predominantly digital existence just doesn’t feel that fun anymore, at least not as fun as PC Music makes it out to be. I wish I could muster up A. G. Cook’s enthusiasm about life in the digital realm; instead, I’m listlessly scrolling through my Twitter feed in the dark, wondering why I even bother.
Our current Internet hangover had been encroaching for a while, but for me, the moment that felt most like the official end of an era was in January, when Hipster Runoff was sold by its elusive mastermind, at that point known only as "Carles." (An Australian investor snapped it up for about 21K.) Love or hate HRO, as it was known, it was the blog to end all blogs, and Carles was the Überblogger. The site’s demise felt like the last nail in the coffin of a bygone and arguably more "pure" era of the Internet (and yes, scare quotes are meant in the Carlesian sense—i.e., with some implied degree of irony). HRO had been dying a slow death over the last four or so years; the site remained active until 2013, but having been partial to its '08-09 heyday, I’d tuned out around 2011. Still, when Vice published a thorough HRO retrospective this year that unveiled Carles’ identity once and for all, after nearly eight years of anonymity, I was surprised by how little reaction the big reveal provoked—one of the most influential and fascinating blogs of the last decade, out with barely a whimper.
In his prime, Carles posed as a painfully self-conscious hipster, desperately seeking what he perceived as authenticity and relevance in a world of "lamestreamers" (aka basics). Carles sought meaning in consumerism—thoroughly-branded festival experiences, or the "alt" new novelty drink, or the latest Urban Outfitters-core buzzband—with drivelling pseudo-sincerity. In hindsight, the whole shtick was weirdly prescient of the past couple years of brands’ woeful attempts to become our Twitter BFFs. "HRO was part relentless hipster scene chronicle, part relentless satirization of that scene, part shameless clickbait, part self-reflexive critique of the entire online economy," Brian Merchant wrote in the Vice piece. Often, HRO skewered Pitchfork; responding to Nitsuh Abebe’s "A Brief History of Knowingness and Irony," published here in 2010, in which he mused on HRO’s performative hipness, Carles faux-breathlessly responded: "Not even sure what the message of this article is about, just feeling ‘incredibly culturally relevant’ after reading the HRO blog name in Pitchfork. Feel like a bro in the 1970s who got blurbed about in Rolling Stone magazine." In other words: caring about any of this is incredibly stupid, the knowledge of which doesn’t make it any easier to stop caring.
Sometimes HRO was painful, sometimes it produced the most incisive and hysterical cultural criticism of its time—usually some combination of both. It was impossible to deduce just how serious Carles was being in a given post. But I don’t think HRO would have resonated as much, personally, if I hadn’t sensed something deeply sincere and weirdly intimate beneath all the layers of irony: the quiet existential shame that creeps in as a belief system to which you’d once earnestly ascribed (in this case, the "alternative," but also, the Internet as an inherently positive force) reveals itself to be flawed and ultimately hollow. I recognized it because I was starting to feel it too.
Around 2011, HRO began to eat its own tail. It grew cruder and more offensive, even by already dicey standards; Carles’ tongue-in-cheek skewering of music industry misogyny and indie "otherizing" began to blur into the real thing. The sardonic clickbait impressions quickly became indistinguishable from earnest clickbait to anyone not aware of the implied wink, and it was clear he’d grown as thirsty for page-views (which were higher than ever) as the celeb-gossip content farms he mocked. Carles’ increasing jadedness was obvious; sometimes his posts hinted at existential meltdown, and by 2013 the site was gathering dust (though still generating decent revenue each month). It was the same thing that was happening to most of the passion-project bloggers of the mid-'00s, who were either swallowed up by a major media company, or threw in the towel as blogging unprofessionally grew increasingly thankless and redundant. The idea of the Internet as a countercultural utopia was quickly eclipsed by the Internet as capitalism’s bold new frontier, and what once felt like staking a territory began to feel more like taking up space. "I have lost interest in Hipster Runoff as an expressive medium," Carles told Vice. "I was fortunate to have ‘mattered’ in a time when the scale of the Internet wasn’t as vast." The most recent tweet from the HRO account is an advertisement for an Australian sustainable clothing brand that uses terms like "vege threads." In a perverse way, it’s very full-circle.
How do we approach the philosophy of digital maximalism in 2015, the year of the Internet Hangover, when even the Überblogger has decided it’s no longer worth it? By this point, these ideas are practically impossible to consider on purely aesthetic terms, at least without a certain knowingness. If anything, PC Music’s current take on digital maximalism functions similarly to something like normcore, the wryly “neutral” cool-kid fashion trend that made headlines last year. To an uncritical eye, both are indistinguishable from the values and aesthetics of the mainstream; both use normative culture as their source material, repurposed into something that is supposedly more artful, unique, and valuable. (Thus: $200 mom jeans, or $20 cans of what is probably re-packaged Diet Red Bull.) But as evidenced by HRO’s inglorious decline, these metamodern modes of expression and critique lose their purpose once they become indiscernible from the culture they reflect. "Divisive" as PC Music has set out to be (a designation that’s as much bullshit shorthand for "primo think piece fodder" as it is accurate), they subvert nothing, nor do they add anything to the discussion beyond noise. They merely reflect the flat, bright, incessant, corporatized banalities of the current age, with all the insight and nuance of clickbait—"This Woman Wore a Fat Suit to Understand Prejudice and You’ll Never Guess What She Experienced" levels of duh.
More than even their J-pop forebearers, PC Music reminds me of a recurring and unpleasant Twitter phenomenon I’ve noticed over the past year, one that reached a fever pitch around the time #NotAllMen became a thing. Almost as irritating as the droves of Internet meninists, derailing discussions of misogyny and rape culture with the pointless hashtag, were the "nice guys" who’d mimic their sputtering tone with a knowing wink, as if to say: "This is how I would sound if I were one of those dickheads, which as you can clearly see, ladies, I am not!" But from the receiving end, these knowing comments function no differently than those they supposedly critique: they instill the same dread, the same urge to withdraw completely. PC Music had the potential for insurrection, subversion, or at least some shred of insightful commentary on our dumb, addictive, overwhelming digital existence. But mostly, they remind me of ideals I believed in not so long ago that now just make me feel tired.