Contemporary chart pop delivers instant climaxes because digital overload leaves no time for seduction.

Evidence

In a brilliant essay on The Quietus website, Dan Barrow analysed the tendency in a slew of chartpop over the past few years – including Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’s ‘Empire State of Mind’ Kesha’s ‘Tik Tok’, Flo Rida’s ‘Club Can’t Even Handle Me Yet’ – ‘to give the listener the pay–off, the sonic money-shot, as soon and as obviously as possible’. Pop has always delivered sugar-sweet pleasure, of course, but, Barrow argues, there’s a tyrannical desperation about this new steroid-driven pop. It doesn’t seduce; it tyrannises. This, Barrow argues, is ‘a crude, overdetermined excess, as if pop were forcing itself back to its defining characteristics – chorus hooks, melody, “accessibility” – and blowing them up to cartoonish size.’ … According to Berardi, remember, we are so overwhelmed by the incessant demands of digital communications, we are simply too busy to engage in arts of enjoyment – highs have to come in a no-fuss, hyperbolic form so that we can quickly return to checking email or updates on social networking sites. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 462

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Extends the ‘noise as hostility’ thread of earlier reading but more directly connects to the reader’s standing theme about how technology restructures pleasure and attention.
• XREF: Parallels Berardi’s work-and-fun collapse and resonates with the reader’s earlier annotations on information overload undermining independent thought.