2012: The Year in Preview

One day, when I was only four, my father marched me through a maze of alleys behind a bazaar and brought me to the stale, hazy bedroom of an ancient curandera, who cupped my face in her palm and exclaimed that I had “the gift.” El reloj, she said, este pinche gabacho rompió el reloj de mierda, meaning “This child is the one, he has the gift of foresight.” Let others rate the past year’s top product. I, Moe Bishop, will use my visionary gifts to reveal the coming year’s styles unto you. Here are the two major trends that will shape the fresh new sounds of 2012.

IGNORANCE

We all know that the last date on the Mayan calendar is December 21, 2012, at which time the magnetic field will swap polarities, water will turn to fire, and a beam of antimatter from the center of the galaxy will fill the sky with a dread light-that-is-not-light, sucking the eyes and tongues out of every skull in a painless flash of evaporating universe. Was there ever a better time to get your thizz-face on and go dumb?

Around the time full-blown Asperger’s became a prerequisite for a career as a singer-songwriter, people started talking about the genius of Beach Boy Brian Wilson in new terms. Previously, Wilson had been praised for his talents as a harmonist and arranger, who, the legend went, blew his mind with too many acid trips and was led astray by a psychotherapeutic Svengali. By the mid-90s, though, rockers began to value Wilson less for his music and more for his total inability to deal, which guaranteed his perfect childlike innocence. The guilelessness of the mentally ill became pop’s highest value.

This historical development will climax in mass orgasms of ignorance during 2012. Singers will approach the microphone as if they had never seen the device before, and will spend most of their sets staring at the thing in atavistic terror. Instrumentalists will not even be able to touch their axes—it will make them sob just to imagine what kind of corrupt civilization could have produced inanimate sound-machines. Fans will prize their heroes’ uncomprehending wonder, and Pitchfork and other respected organs will have no choice but to get on board. Look for game-changing music pieces with titles like “I Never Learned to Tie My Shoes” and “The Simple Pleasures of Playing with My Own Shit.”

SAMENESS

The sheer volume of recorded music prevents many sensitive people from listening to the stuff at all. Friends have filled 200-gigabyte drives with centuries of pilfered music and never played back a single note. Fans have always preferred acquiring music to hearing it, but now that it’s all around us in the “cloud,” why bother acquiring sounds at all? If you have a computer or a smartphone, you already own every musical sound ever recorded. Killer collection, fuckface!

I predict that the problem of genre will evaporate some months before the world does. Tomorrow’s superfans will roam the streets in silence, wearing identical T-shirts that read MUSIC. All value judgements will be void. People may continue to utter sentences like “I love [musician]! [Musician] is in touch with [musician’s] feelings as well as those of [speaker’s demographic], and [musician] speaks for me!” or “[Musician] is a total con artist who is just taking advantage of the kids’ belief in [scene/movement/fad] to make [national currency]!” or “[Musician] is a felcher! Trevor’s dad listens to [musician]!” but they will be regarded as Flat Earthers, Holocaust deniers, Weezer apologists, or some other insignificant population of cranks.

Crumbling under years of assault by such luminaries as Beck, the walls that have separated genres as diverse as Tuvan throatsong and Christian hardcore will collapse, bringing the peoples of Earth together in unanimous violence. Soon after genre classifications go, the arbitrary division of sound into songs, symphonies, concerti, not to mention notes and beats, will vanish. When society comes to its final grief, and you are whaling on the stranger who tried to steal your last can of Fancy Feast, the number one single will be the undifferentiated blare of every sound ever recorded played at once, forever.

Previously - Christmas Weirdness with the Beatles