Now where did we leave our gecs-to-baked goods conversion chart?
[Video]
[5.75]
Juana Giaimo: What I like about cakes are all the different textures and flavors they can offer: you have the pillowy layers combined with silky frostings, and mix-ins add crunch or some freshness that create contrast. Cake pops destroy all that by processing everything together; that’s why they are generally made from leftovers. So yes, that’s exactly how I feel about “Black Rum”: it has interesting elements, but it’s all so mushed together that I can barely distinguish them.
[4]
Aaron Bergstrom: Dumb on purpose and weird for weird’s sake, which works out pretty well when it comes to the music (vocals that sound like someone hit “Select All” on a whole list of effects, a drum track best described as “intermittent,” an all-consuming sense of accelerating chaos and decay), but doesn’t work at all when it comes to the lyrics (Is candy supposed to be a metaphor for drugs in the first verse? Is it supposed to be a metaphor for a destructive relationship in the second verse? Is the whole thing just literally about candy?).
[6]
Alfred Soto: They love to sing-y sing-y sing-gy like a bird on the wing-y wing-y wing-y.
[5]
John Seroff: Hyperpop’s merger of driving dance beats, electroburbled vocals, jaded world-weariness and an affectation for juvenile effluvia mark it as a too-appropriate anthem for the rightly nihilistic generation, just the thing for dancing through a mass pandemic. The joke is that there’s no joke and it’s on us; the Froot of the Loom visuals are explicitly commercial but slyly subversive; the vibe is joyous and pained; the song is one hook, barely there, but pretty good. Fizzy and compulsive, “Black Rum” is less cynical rotgut and more 40-ounce 7-11 mega cup every fountain drink mix, a flavor best appreciated by fresh tastebuds desperate for scarring. I think they still call it a suicide.
[7]
Leah Isobel: “Black Rum” replaces the Red Bull-chugging spirit of Brady’s other work with dreamlike ambivalence; the result is rather diffuse and a little aimless. It’s not bad, but it’s also not much.
[5]
Jonathan Bradley: The Dylan Brady project without Laura Les shares much in common with 100 gecs: a playful commitment to sounds that twist and explode like screensaver scribbles, a collapsing of the distinction between effervescence and effluvia. But Cake Pop is unidirectional, a hyperpop that doesn’t go too much further than the junk-store emo of Hellogoodbye in the early ’00s or twee trolls Happyland in the late ’90s. More than zaniness, what made 1000 gecs so disorienting and so resonant was the sense that all its noise and disorder was holding at bay a darker chaos lurking in the distance, an awfulness that could never be banished and must not be contemplated. Silly noises, on the other hand, are fine and fun.
[6]
David Moore: Some songs I’ll play and my son will freeze and his eyes will widen and you can just see his brain starting to make tentative new connections. I’m jaded — for me this is practically sellout MOR at this point — but it’s good to be reminded that this music is, in fact, kind of weird. And it has the benefit of the squeaky voices and big dumb hooks of children’s music without the saccharine messaging, and any explicit content is distorted enough that you can’t really parse the lyrics (not that they usually parse them anyway; I remember when my niece was four and her favorite song was “Essessenem” by Rihanna). Ah, a new career path — Common Sense Media for hyper-pop.
[7]
Samson Savill de Jong: Do US teens still say “hella”? I thought that was incredibly old fashioned. That’s basically the only thing about this that could be called old fashioned though, as the rest of this is decidedly and unapologetically modern. I think each section improves on the previous bit, the autotuned “rap” suppasses the initial chorus, and then the part with the shouty man at the back (technical terminology there) is better again. I think I want this to be more frenetic, if you’d believe that. I think the energy it’s going for is good, but crank that BPM up and see where this could truly take off to.
[6]