It's always interesting to discover something new. And not that I never heard of this type of music before but rather that I've actually bothered to listen to it. Thanks to Twitter I thought I'd go check out an album by a Seattle-based musicmaker named
maedasalt called (named called, stupid)
you are special & that is exactly why i love you so much. Literally as soon as it started playing I was like wtf is this — however, I listened to it all. I couldn't stop myself. It is totally addictive. And really good if you have to do things at a computer, helps time whizz by.
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What is this strange genre? It's lolicore. What? Yes lolicore is like speedcore (super fast dance music, like rarely below 300bpm) except with less of the aggression. Rather in its aesthetics it follows in the same vein as loli-based stuff (a truncation of 'lolita' – yes the same as "Lolita" in Nabokov's creepy book), which is basically a hyperextension of what might be called kawaii or cute with regards to young girls. Kinda weird but that's that. Much like trap music seems to have paired with anime for otaku trap, if that it can be called, lolita sensibilities ooze into these extreme stretches of bpm for lolicore. Nuff said.
Anyway one song stood out: '4u'. Featuring rapid chipmunk vocals – so deformed that you cannot tell what they're from (unless you knew the original already) – over a sped-up drum-and-bass pattern, the track is filled with ascending melodies and toybox twinklings that effuse the impression of living Einstein's dream of riding on a beam of light with the redshift more like pastel pink and the blueshift more like pale teal. Yee-fuckin-haw. Then you realise its not space you're flying through; you're just zipping around and around and around attached to a mobile at the ceiling of a colourful plushie-filled distorted and giant playroom.
It's a ball of energy, not just through the sounds but through the dynamics, how and when the rhythm of the drums changes, when to change the tack of the vocal sample, all to keep it wildly interesting and me jiggling my foot like a paranoid maniac. So it came as a surprise to learn that the album this track comes from was maedasalt's "swan song", the final album made under his current moniker. The reasons?
because i’m also over feeling the way i did back when maedasalt started, which was over heartbreak. the dream ends and real life begins. from 2011 to this year i’ve changed as a person and it’s only fitting. i’m no longer feeling restricted to feeling bad for myself endlessly.
Fair enough (more from his tumblr post about it here). He also adds: "at the end of the day its all just lolicore which is inherently a silly genre, but i always made it with my own personal touch." Inherently it is a silly genre – breakneck bpms? Funny voices? That's silly alright. But silly doesn't necessarily mean lacking in emotion, lacking in depth, lacking in talent and vision. And with '4u' I was and am aware of something catching my attention, an inexplicable love, which usually happens when everything in a song is just right, and that takes some doing.
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