Whatever's left that doesn't change
An essay by Caleb William MacKenzie-Margulies

It’s tempting to say content (defined as the events, physical detail, and information in a work of art, or topics/matter treated in a written work [yes I’m starting an essay by quoting the dictionary]) matters less now that it ever has before, because the aesthetic trappings around content (their form) are the only things that anyone seems to care about, or even notice. No one is listening. We’re accustomed to being told exactly how to understand new music by way of album covers, costumes, backstories, fonts, music videos, production styles, instrumentation. As with other forms of art, we’re increasingly reliant on assumptions. I’m not here to downplay the importance of context (quite the contrary, I make my students watch 'Ways of Seeing' every semester), but context isn’t everything.

Luckily, when I indulge this crabby line of thinking, another part of me steps in to remember that the line between aesthetics and content is an arbitrary one, drawn by those too lazy, or too afraid, to commit to both aesthetics and content, or to blur the line between the two. '0 Views' goes a step further, boldly declaring that line fraudulent and dashing it entirely. Call me a Greenbergian or a Modernist, but to me the SILLY album uses aesthetics as content — it puts pressure on the inherent meanings of the forms that it uses.

The formal proposition of the album is not complicated, nor unique, in terms of what it foists upon the listener: a collage of past sounds, manifested here as ‘90s guitar-based indie rock, NOFX-styled skate-punk drums, and subtle, sample-based flourishes indebted to electronic music. The combining of x, y and z heretofore unrelated tropes is what many progressive albums (and many annoying meme albums) stem from. I’m thinking here of artists as disparate as Los Mirlos, Sun City Girls, Miya Masaoka, Deafheaven, Maison book girl, Brij Bhushan Kabra, etc. You get the idea. While SILLY might be less transnational in nature than most of the artists on this list (unless you consider the Pacific Northwest and Southern California as distinct nations), it exists as part of a tradition of music that, on paper, shouldn’t work, and yet, in practice, sounds as natural as Glenn Gould playing Bach.

What is this millennial attraction to incessant pastiche and intertextuality? Why combine these tropes, why regurgitate these references? At its worst, it’s done for the bona fides — “I know about this thing, I am canny because I recognize that this preexisting thing is worth paying attention to.” If I’m giving this model more credit, one could say it’s to pay homage to something you feel indebted to or that was influential to you. Either way, it’s a blunt tool and a closed circle — the meaning of the reference is that it is a reference and nothing more. For this reason, I’ve never respected things like 'Treehouse of Horror' or shirts that say the name of a micro brewery or politician in the Metallica font.

But there are things the millennial can do with pastiche and intertextuality other than brag, say thank you, or use them as an instrument in and of themselves (thinking about Girl Talk here). Sitting with your aesthetic preferences is a way of understanding yourself and how you relate to the world. One’s taste and how it manifests in one’s life is a continual expression of autobiography in its purest indexical form. Unpacking the tropes familiar to one’s experience leads to a further understanding of one’s location in the world, in culture, in the flow of time. Locating oneself, through a creative project, among various touchstones that hitherto have never been combined or connected in a work, stakes one’s identity out as more than just a listener (active listening is, after all, an act of meaning-making). Pastiche and intertextuality turn an act of passive introspection regarding what one has been exposed to, what one has loved, into an active exercise in agency. Authenticity is defined both as being part of a tradition but also creating in a way that is unique and true to one’s self. SILLY makes clear that this split definition of authenticity does not have to be paradoxical.

In SILLY’s hands, the borrowed tropes are not vapid signifiers or convenient placeholders. They are earned but not owned — because who can be said to own “oompah” style drumming? Unlike a reference deployed in order to stake one’s claim on something outside of one’s practice, SILLY knows that styles necessarily exist within a continuum, with the players cycling in and out throughout history. (I don’t mean to discount cultural practices that are part of rightly gatekept traditions — not every player should be “allowed” to subsume every style!)

One of the conceptual questions posed by this album is related to how one can express oneself while wearing borrowed clothes and speaking borrowed language (is there such a thing as un-borrowed language?). The album explores and lives in this question and its contradictions, and it does so in its content, not just by way of a lyric, review, or press release. Up until now, I have painted the album as a theoretical exercise. I should make clear here that, unlike many new so-called avant-garde works, SILLY is not wholly (although it embodies it to a degree) an example of Sianne Ngai’s aesthetic of the “interesting” in which a work’s primary aesthetic operation is an appeal through text addressed to the viewer that explains why it is worthwhile:

“…the interesting could thus be described as an aesthetic without content and, as such, one ideally suited to the historical emergence of the modern subject as a reflective, radically detached, or ironic ego.... It [has a] temporal orientation that, in conjunction with its semantic blankness, arguably makes interesting so useful as a syntactic placeholder, enabling critics to defer more specific aesthetic judgements indefinitely. Interesting thus becomes particularly handy as a euphemism, filling the slot for a judgment conspicuously withheld. But in addition to replacing or postponing aesthetic judgements, we also use interesting to facilitate our return to the object for judging at a later moment, like sticking a Post-It in a book. As if founded on a ‘feeling of incompleteness’ that makes it anticipatory as well as recursive (what’s anticipated is precisely a return), to call an object interesting in this regard is to make a silent promise to the self: come back to this later.”

Oompah, slowcore, and IDM do not function solely as interesting or arbitrary formal combinations on '0 Views.' This album is not a novelty. There are very real and present artistic, personal, and emotional stakes to SILLY’s use of preexisting tropes. The project takes a measured and equanimous approach to the Millennial Irony Problem that still remains largely unresolved for many artists working today. The album does not fully revel in winking detachment to itself. It does not say “if you don’t like it, you don’t get it.” Nor is the album attempting to suppress irony by way of a cloying earnestness. It is neither fake nor saccharine — having written songs for decades, the material is ultimately Hughes’s most soul-searching, real, and “about making music." Irony is the elephant in the room, but the album is neither rejecting it nor beholden to it — it is simply included in the palette as a tool among many others.

Oompah here is not a joke or a bit. Its inclusion is an experiment in taking the hallmark of an emotionally stunted musical tradition and grafting it to the world weary writing and construction of an adult artist. It is the reckoning of childhood with maturity — it is the developmentally arrested millennial experience in redux.

I’m not here to tell you how “epic” it is that This Former Podcaster Made An Album That’s Slowcore Meets Skate Punk Meets Plunderphonics, because it doesn’t matter. What matters is that Hughes realized oompah drums add a propulsive urgency to his stretched out, uniquely structured guitar chord progressions. He realized that oompah can be a glue that keeps the listeners attention from drifting. He understands that in an era where every project is made in a DAW, every project is an electronic music project, and can lean on digital editing as a lead instrument, front and center, instead of attempting to hide it. His deployment of electronic music techniques gives simple gestures like edits or punch-ins a distinctly musical characteristic.

For proof of this, look no further than track one. By consistently, and almost immediately, pausing and removing, and then restarting, the oompah, “Play Dumb” reveals how integral those drums are to the album’s central rhythmic logic. Simultaneously, upon hearing the removal, you realize that the album functions perfectly fine without that incessant rhythm, but takes on an entirely different emotional heft and aesthetic. The distinct drum style is not an arbitrary addition, it has a calculated role in making SILLY function the way that it does. Hughes deftly shows us how a simple gesture such as ridiculously fast drums can flip a mopey, obtuse guitar line on its head, and give it a wholly new, vibrant, and still very much listenable quality. Experimentation brought SILLY to this place, but the experiments were conducted behind the scenes and are not the record itself.

Hughes has killed the audiences, music critics, and label bosses living in his head. Instead, the album allows him to make sense of his lifetime as a lover of music and a glutton for awkwardness. To paraphrase the great Mod Sun, Hughes has removed the bone of embarrassment from his body, but he keeps it close by. It is an exciting lateral leap from Blink-155 and its jaded denouement, 155, in that it is similarly an introspective journey that is available for an audience to follow but not forced on anyone. From where I stand, the growth is that unlike the two podcasts, which grew increasingly antagonistic toward their audiences, SILLY dispenses with audience altogether.

By shedding the insecurities related to views and reception, Hughes has been able to create a different type of critical document. If the podcasts were at times limited by their own necessary reliance on the music of others, SILLY is Hughes’ emotional and artistic response to not just the music and the sub-100 view YouTube covers addressed on said podcasts, but also to the culture of obsession with litigating the ‘90s, and the culture of cringe that we find ourselves enraptured in when we go on the computer. Thus, the album is not merely standing still and commenting. It is moving forward into the unknown.

“The plane will crash/the boat will sink/the building will burn down/Whatever’s left that doesn’t change/I’ll be here, regardless.”

When it’s no longer a question of who hears it and why, there is true artistic freedom for the palette to be anything and everything that it has to be. This album has defined start and endpoints, but is a call for future musicians to shed their fears and embrace all that there is and can be. If all struggle musicians are “temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” waiting for all the success owed them by society, why not be honest and make the music that only you can make? Why try to fit into a mold of someone else’s making? After all, aren’t we all just bozos on the bus?

We live in an age in which Marvel releases the same movie and the same video game every six months. The critical question posed by this model seems to be: when we live in an age of feudal devotion by fans to preexisting intellectual property, how bad does any given iteration truly have to be to not be successful? When all large businesses must now show quarterly growth instead of simply profit, investing in untested IP is far too great a risk to indulge. Did Marvel learn this behavior from the hardcore punk scene? Even so-called underground and experimental labels are more concerned with follower counts than recorded material when it comes to signing new artists. But we also live in the age of social media, where fandom is born and bloated at random by the algorithm. In this age, newness can spread like ad-space selling wildfire, unfettered by questions of SEO or optimal ROI. So I ask again, why be an IP regurgitation factory when there’s just as much chance of your music being successful if it takes risks?

I think here also of a different model of highly corporatized, boardroom-sanctioned works. The world of K-pop, to be certain, relies heavily on a casual recycling and mishmash of global aesthetics particularly in its visuals. Perhaps it’s because there’s an ROI safety in the devotional idol fan culture, but unlike Marvel movies, the actual music of K-pop utilizes exaggeration and extremes — and risks! — not just in its aesthetics but in its actual songwriting. In a lot of highly successful K-pop, there is an embrace of complicated melodic and chordal movement on top of breakneck party beats and, at times, abstract and unusual textures. I’m not sure if I’d go so far as to say this is artistic innovation but it certainly doesn’t sound like any other music. All I’m saying is simply this — you can abandon the idea that in order to be “successful” you have to play it safe, especially because you’re probably not going to be successful no matter what.

SILLY establishes early on with its title track that it’s on some level “about” making one’s work known to the world, an act that in 2024 is spoken of as part and parcel of the act of making itself, I guess because of social media. Hughes is of course a compulsive poster — I think of him as the Jandek of X: The Everything Site. And yet in the production of this album, there was a very real sense that it might not get released and was solely for Hughes’s edification. I’m glad that it grew from an experimental proof of concept into a studio project (that I consider myself grateful and humbled to have been invited to participate in to the small degree that I did), and then into the finished product you now behold and which did, in fact, get released. But this initial tension did bring me to a question that has been haunting me: is there a difference between releasing your music to no one, with no illusion that it will have an audience or a Stereogum article, and simply not releasing your music at all? And if so, what is that difference? Artists create works to explore the questions that haunt them, or sometimes even to pose questions that they can’t figure out how to phrase with words alone. This album answers the previous questions by simply being released. It will not be critically acknowledged, nor commercially successful. Everything else that it does though, is the answer to the question.

- September 2024, Chicago, IL