Metabolic Activity, Splitting-Apart Hexagram, Cringe Dialectics
Hello. We celebrate our twentieth Issue of 2020MG this week. We recommend a physiological analogy with music, an exploration of the I Ching’s music philosophical resonance, and an inquiry into dynamics of our present Dark Age of cringe.
Recommendation: UdieNnx, HXVSAGE, Duduzinho - VISION (Slowed)
Creatine could be helping a longstanding confrontation with afternoon fatigue. I thought the crystalline substance was in my protein shake mix but it wasn’t, so I bought some. I stopped consuming that protein shake mix because it was gross. The decisive factor might also be Xanthium 12, prescribed by my acupuncturist. I recently started taking Vitamin D – could it be responsible for alleviation in the possibility space? Reading this over, it seems obvious that I should have a more coherent conception of these supplements’ holistic interrelationship. It could be none of these things or a hundred other things.
I watch short-form bodybuilding content creators because the videos are aesthetically bizarre, and because I want to develop lifting technique. They can also index shifting tides in American masculinity, often insidious for obvious reasons, that one wants to track. There are certain songs that I would only ever encounter through shortform content, and this is one of them. I might hear it in a dramatic forearm day montage, or in soccer edits, which is a sport I don’t understand. It wouldn’t be implausible to hear it in a chess edit. Spotify includes it in a “cosmic phonk” playlist, which is not a genre I know well. The song moves between these different places.
Music is frequently positioned as good for weightlifting in bodybuilding content. It is peculiar to think about a sound wave or set of sound waves as facilitating the biosynthesis of muscle molecules, promoting metabolic activity. Cells rearranging themselves. Things go on inside of the body that you can’t see, but number goes up. Functionality over beauty, or interest.
Here is the first verse of the Beach Boys’ “Vegetables,” from Smiley Smile:
I’m gonna be ‘round my vegetables
I’m gonna chow down my vegetables
I love you most of all
My favorite vegetable
— Alexander Iadarola
Recommendation: Loosely conceptualizing the Hexagram in the I Ching (Book of Changes)
This week, I’m going to attempt to loosely conceptualize the figure of the hexagram in the I Ching (Book of Changes) in my own way. I’m drawn to its figuration as a poetic and conceptual unit that connects to some overall thinking I’ve had on music, chance, and time. A hexagram in the I Ching is a symbol used for divination and philosophical reflection made up of six horizontal lines, stacked from bottom to top. Each line is either: Yang (an unbroken, or solid line) or Yin (broken, an open line with gaps). Because each line has two possible states, there are: 2⁶, or 64 possible hexagrams. Each one represents a distinct life situation, archetype, or dynamic pattern of change. I’ve included the unicode of a few of these figures below.
䷀䷁䷂䷃
I won’t be diving into the actual systematization or other specific divinatory or ephemeral criteria of the I Ching hexagram system. I claim no expertise in the theological or text-specific philosophical aspects of the I Ching. More personally, I have memories of Alec fifteen years ago at a coffee shop, rolling dice into a saucer of scattered danish crumbs with the I Ching open as he was notating something for a piece he was working on. Maybe I took a course or two in college in Asheville, North Carolina where we read excerpts from it. Perhaps my greatest exposure to it is through reading how John Cage consulted the text heavily throughout his compositions. Otherwise, I’m finally at a time in my life where I feel my own personal draw to reading the I Ching—and I’m encountering it at the ground level here in 2026.
I’m also still re-reading through The Boulez-Cage Correspondence. In a letter from John Cage to Pierre Boulez on May 22nd, 1951, Cage details his compositional processes throughout his works: String Quartet in Four Parts (1950), Works of Calder (1949-1950), Six Melodies (1950), his Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1950-51), and finally his piece Sixteen Dances for Soloist and Company of Three (1951), written for Merce Cunningham. Boulez had written to Cage admiring his Music of Changes (1951), dedicated to David Tudor, a piece for solo piano that was in his words “certainly my favorite of anything you have done.” The piece’s composition involves applying decisions made using the I Ching, after being given a copy by composer Christian Wolff (Wolff’s father had published a translation of the book at around the same time).
In response to Boulez, Cage writes: “At this point my primary concern became: how to become mobile in my thought rather than immobile always. And then I saw one day that there was no incompatibility between mobility & immobility and life contains both. This is at the basis of the manner of using the I Ching for the obtaining of oracles. I interrupted the writing of [Music of Changes] to write my Imaginary Landscape No. IV (1951), for 12 radios using exactly the same ideas. Every element is the result of tossing coins, producing hexagrams which give numbers in the I Ching chart: 6 tosses for a sound, 6 for its duration, 6 for its amplitude. The toss for tempo gives also the number of charts to be superimposed in that particular division of the rhythmic structure. The rhythmic structure is now magnificent because it allows for different tempi: accelerandos, ritards, etc. The radio piece is not only tossing of coins but accepts as its sounds those that happen to be in the air at that moment of performance.”
Extending this idea of what “happens to be in the air at that moment,” in some writings on the I Ching, psychiatrist and psychotherapist Carl Jung writes:
“We must admit that there is something to be said for the immense importance of chance. The jumble of natural laws constituting empirical reality holds more significance than a causal explanation of events that, moreover, must usually be separated from one another in order to be properly dealt with. The moment under actual observation appears to the I Ching more of a chance hit than a clearly defined result of concurring causal chain processes. The matter of interest seems to be the configuration formed by chance events in the moment of observation, and not at all the hypothetical reasons that seemingly account for the coincidence. Chance ingredients make up the observed moment. Thus it happens that when one throws three coins, these chance details enter into the picture of the moment of observation and form a part of it—a part that is often insignificant to us, yet most meaningful to the I Ching. Causally, it would be a banal and almost meaningless statement, to say that whatever happens in a given moment inevitably possesses the quality peculiar to that moment. This is not an abstract argument but a very practical one. There are certain connoisseurs who can tell you merely from the appearance, taste, and behavior of a wine the site of its vineyard and the year of its origin. There are antiquarians who with almost uncanny accuracy will name the time and place of origin and the maker of an objet d’art or piece of furniture from merely looking at it. In the face of such facts, it must be admitted that moments can leave long lasting traces.”
In other words, the hexagram is the exponent of the moment in which it was cast, understood to be an indicator of the essential situation prevailing in the moment of its origin. Taking the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance—an interdependence of objective events as well with the subjective psychic states of the observer. This character is clearly within Cage’s conception of radio waves, or even musical vibration in air in general, as what “happens to be in the air at that moment,” as resulting in a form of music.
I’d like to take these two accounts from Cage and Jung, one in Cage’s compositional and philosophical process, the other from Jung’s more literary and cultural review, to figure the hexagram within music as a time-based medium. Chance, now fully scientifically extended into the nature of reality by the advances of research and quantum mechanics, appears as “dissonant” to previous models of causality and science as Jung outlines above, as it problematizes the “observed” in general. The way in which a simple casual passage of quantum light chooses to randomly go into one position rather than another, is an intellectual miracle. The choice of 0 as opposed to 1 in binary code, in the whole of computation, is a string of miraculous event-ness. And so too in music, as its own exponent of our temporality, we see a poetic miracle of its physics, and our resulting interpretation of that moment of listening. Cage clearly elucidated this throughout his letters and sparrings with Boulez. Somehow, I find both comfort and drama by trusting chance’s radical, untrustworthy swing of natural information in this way. And I trust music for this reason, too.
The hexagram itself can also be understood as a binary sequence (like quantum light, like binary code), as it can be reduced to the binary of either broken (yin) and unbroken (yang) lines in its constitution. Here, we also see Cage’s “mobility and immobility,” we see the scientific crisis of “the observed and observer,” we see the yin and the yang, I also see this tension in the Boulezian Amnesia recommendation I wrote in a previous 2020MG issue a few weeks back, and Boulez’ own contradictions between music and text.
Grateful to find the I Ching in this particular moment in 2026, and within all of these tense binaries, I see the emergence of a particular hexagram as I flipped six coins, ䷖, hexagram 23, or, “splitting apart.” And I hear music.
—Nick James Scavo
Recommendation: Katerina Lomis, Jacob Collier, and the Dark Ages of Cringe
I’ve been thinking about embarrassment for a while. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the decaying social/historical structures that supported music’s capacity for generative elements of “failure” in the past, leaving openings for non-deterministic musical aesthetics. I consider embarrassment an important, productive part of the creative emotional spectrum. How can you explore novel combinations of ideas and sounds, if perfection - or, control over the reception of work - is the prerequisite for participation and presentation? If you happened to attend any of mine and/or Nick’s YA computer music sets at the Bar & Grills of North Carolina (we discussed this at length on an episode of our Flavortone podcast), or the early teen battle of the band performances I was involved in, you might appreciate that I experienced relatively little musical embarrassment myself, coming up. It seems younger generations have a more difficult needle to thread.
There has been some general, ongoing discourse about the way Gen Z’s digital nativeness has been compounded by an inheritance of millennial hipster taste wars. Brad Troemel’s “Hipster Report” gives broad, and concise insight into this cultural milieu and its history. As Troemel outlines, the arts and culture wars of the aughts and tens have only escalated in these Turbulent Twenties; and, the viral punishments of failing to negotiate unstable aesthetic projects upon the high-wire of optimized hyper-commercial media platforms has resulted in a sort of cringe Cold War amongst disparate corners of content creation (including music). Musicians of all kinds have come to stockpile the proven traditional genre signifiers and the archetypes of authentic cultural forms, which successfully connote a certain historical spirit of music - presenting its forms with cartoonish, professionalized confidence, and yet deep social and intellectual paranoia.
While this phenomenon has a certain rhyme with prior historical interactions between mass cultural production and subcultures, it seems obvious that those correspondences have become increasingly compressed in their capacity for dynamic social meanings and practices. One obvious consequence of this climate is a deflation of young (and older) people’s confidence and desire to participate in and present art in a way that is casually exploratory in the realm of concepts, and their combination - a form of intellectual play that requires some basic element of social trust. One side of this reactionary cringe spectrum is, simply, non-participation. The other extreme, (examples of which I will recommend below), feels almost radicalized by the arid cultural conditions - mustering a caricature of professionalism in order to defend and iterate upon smooth-brained expressions of otherwise hollow musical signifiers. This zone of cringe death-drive is where I recommend looking this week.
One recent addition to my growing collection of case studies on this topic is the young TikTok vocal virtuoso and songwriter, Katerina Lomis. She is a talented singer and a skilled musician, but listening to her content is difficult for me on a number of levels. Her music contains an aggressive, grating combo of twee, jazz-pop affectations: “cursive singing” - the gratuitous bending of vowels and consonants that renders lyrics in a self-satisfied sort of baby-talk, die babyspracht-lied, if you’re nasty (see Camilla Cabelo’s “I’ll be home for quismoiss” clip); extreme, fast tempi and buck-wild, showy vocal melismas, whose only purpose seem to be stupifying the listener with a near-constant, compulsive utilization of her multi-octave vocal range; and, big-swinging lyrics that make me very uncomfortable (like, I should not be seeing this) in their wry presumptions of mature life experiences and poetic depth, delivered with a confident smirk and exhibitionist flair.
I was once a teen singer-songwriter, and maybe that’s one of the raw sources of discomfort for me in hearing such full-throated work from someone so young, and who projects such self-confidence under impoverished musical circumstances. I suppose I can relate, and like Matthew McConaughey in Intersteller, I cry out through the wormhole of my own life experience: “Don’t let me leave…! No! No! No!” In fact, it makes me cringe (in, and about myself) to so openly describe what I do not like in a talented and creative young person’s music. And, while Katerina’s songs are just so obviously not for me, and I know that, it still makes me uncomfortable to listen to. Why does that matter? It hits this damaged nerve for me around the question of healthy embarrassment. If we only present work that meets the optimal “mastery” quotient, that does not mean that we all become maestros: instead, we begin to excel in the optics of mastery.
I’ve been collecting case studies along this line here on 2020MG. You may have read my piece about Joshua Kyan Aalampour a few weeks back, in which I conduct another (heroic) take-down of the young, dark academic’s work and ideas. You may also have read my piece about the young easy listening composer Rue Jacobs, in which I celebrate his rare, understated style. For me, Rue is a welcome example of someone who synthesizes these optics of mastery with a sophisticated avoidance of the cringe deathdrive tendency. But the White Whale of this cringe dialectic for me is unquestionably the great one - the Leonard Bernstein of cringe: Jacob Collier. (My “Cringe Cetology,” is forthcoming - you will enjoy this illustrated monograph).
Jacob Collier is probably the most appropriate target for some kind of categorical critique here, because he operates at the highest level of musical virtuosity, commercial success, and transcendent shamelessness. Collier’s GRAMMY-winning arrangement of “Flintstones” is at once a masterpiece of his trademark “negative harmony,” and a condescending pops monstrosity. It is, however, awesome, terrifying and sounds incredible. Its ambition is sickening. Its playfulness is pathological and practically antagonistic (in a backwards way, I can relate to and enjoy this). There are insane melodica solos, and beatboxing over rhythmic modulation as the circle of fifths implodes into, and around, the beloved cartoon theme song. It is a Yabba-Dabba Doo time of the highest order - an order which, perhaps, should never have been created. Within its intense complexity and behind its playful facade, the composition dominates the listener in every conceivable, musical way - amounting to a “toxically positive” thesis about the premises and potentials of music in-itself, as if to say simultaneously: “look what you can do with music!” but really, “look what only I can do.”
These are fairly innocuous propositions, assuming that the emotional freedom from shame that Collier represents is - in some way - an existing, shared condition supported by social trust, and not purely an affordance of individual excellence and virtuosity on the level of “Flintstones.” It suggests a “bootstrap” music economics: you have equal opportunity to embrace your freedom from embarrassment, so long as you are already talented, educated, masterful, and resourced enough to produce high quality work. The implicit arguments beneath Collier’s MO strike me almost as a form of musical/emotional evangelical swindling (in the classic virtuoso way): the abundance of my musical genius is so great, that I invite you to become overwhelmed by your own inadequacy, submit to your humiliation, and buy my albums and tickets as your only form of access to any optimism, whatsoever, about what makes music great. This is the object of my deeper concern within this broader conversation: the disempowering compression of all music’s and all people’s inherent and dynamic beauty. We need to advocate for some nuclear deescalation.
Returning to Katerina Lomis, I was moved by a recent video she shared, in which she broke character, dropped her swaggering affect and spoke vulnerably about how, while she presents a joyful and confident version of herself online, she also struggles with difficult emotions and self-esteem. The fact that this needed to be said at all, communicates something about the stakes of presentation - and in some way, confirms the dehumanizing force operating behind the music and Katerina’s fraught experience with its mediatization. Because all of this context is available (not just for Katerina, but for almost everyone releasing and presenting work), it makes it all the more difficult to sift the problematic musical ideology from its vulnerable producer. For me, that makes it all the more important to try and do, as we risk slipping beyond the horizon of meaningful participation into accepting a musical life of shared, yet alienated and unresolvable cosmic narcissism.
So where does that leave us? As content aggregators of a dwindling past, like dark age scholars of the Greeks. Safe to study, collect, translate; and unacceptable, nearly demonic to presume new deviations in creativity. What would Hildegard von Bingen do (WWHVBD)? And in what revelations, what books and intonations will the seeds of our renaissance be found?
—Alec Sturgis