Pop Liturgy, Chainsmokers Podcast, Classical Virus
Good day. In this tenth issue, we recommend a critical survey of Pop music, considerations of commercial music optimization, and a polemic on the signification of classical music online.
Recommendation: Mikey Enwright - “POP EDITS”
For whatever reason, I haven’t really been in the pop music mood recently. I usually have a pretty high appetite for it. I visit the charts and “most streamed” sections of various platforms more often than record stores and SoundCloud pages. I enjoy calculating what’s a hit and what’s not—and the clarifying terms that pop music uses to dictate various technological, structural, and cultural shifts. I use listening to pop music readily as a specific annexing of my own emotions and ideas.
The constant cycle of new pop music has its own teleology. It streamlines convention and intrigue along core musical premises: production, melody, rhythm, narrative, and visual culture’s relationship to the sonorous. It’s beautiful that our society has created such an illuminating artform as a mirror to our culture. If Jacques Attali theorized that noise has served an “annunciatory” or prophetic function within society, foreshadowing major political and economic shifts (debatable); then, pop music forgoes prophecy for the Boeotian Narcissus staring at his own reflection from a dark pool. I firmly believe that pop music plays this reflective role very efficiently, even if we might not like what we see.
All this said, I haven’t really wanted to listen to much of it as of late. I slid off the beat for a few months after the new Addison Rae and Sabrina Carpenter albums last summer. I can easily see “poptimist music criticism” first up on the “out” column on everyone’s “in and out for 2026” lists in a few weeks. My thinking kind of paused after 2020MG colleague Alexander Iadarola published a wonderful essay on Rae and Playboi Carti, which summed up a lot of salient threads of popular music analysis for me. The previous decade, and century, really, have concretized the promise of pop music; subculture and pop culture have often collided and found value within each other, bonding into a current of vibes, adjacency, and influence. Like the image reflected in Narcissus’ mirror: it just is what it is.
I discovered Mikey Enwright’s music through commissioning a mixtape from the artist Embaci for ISSUE Project Room in 2020. She included one of his tracks “O Emmanuel” on the tape and I was hooked from there. Enwright is an extremely prolific producer, publishing tracks frequently on his SoundCloud and Nina Protocol pages. The tracks are buoyant and radiant. At first, they reminded me of D’Eon’s oeuvre and expanded series “Music for Keyboards,” a few volumes of which were released on Hippos In Tanks almost twelve years ago. I always loved that series, but Enwright takes this harpsichordian approach and baroque sentiment and softens the attack overall, giving his tracks subtlety and concision—as synths percolate and pop with a spherical shape and velvet texture. It’s addicting, impactful, brilliant music.
Amongst Enwright’s archive, I found a link to a Google Drive (since removed) entitled “POP EDITS,” which I’ll link here for posterity. The folder contains edits and renditions of pop songs: Justin Bieber’s “Changes,” Charli xcx’s “Constant Repeat,” Gunna & Lil Baby’s “Drip Too Hard,” The Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way,” Rihanna’s “Work,” and more. Each track is beautifully interpolated into Enwright’s production vocabulary, reconstructing the tracks wholesale, but leaving acapellas that are filtered into sweeping arcs and aligned to his ascension-oriented progressions. He lets these tracks’ best moments repeat and churn into euphoria. There’s a stunning edit of Taylor Swift’s “…Ready for It?,” a track that on its own is pretty bad— appropriating half-hearted Yeezusian distorted kicks and swagger, but containing a luminous core melody that’s kind of lost within the original track’s architecture. Enwright’s version extracts that moment—one that I would often skip to as one of the lone shining moments on Swift’s Reputation album—and gives it a proper moment to breathe. There’s also a rendition of Post Malone & Swae Lee’s “Sunflower,” a hit that broke out as the lead song from an animated Spiderman movie in 2018. Enwright’s edit features a jaunty, Graceland style bounce that opens up into a jazz piano breakdown inflected with bends of fretless bass. The Google Drive link is a treasure trove of these kinds of special moments, all containing genuine musical insight and creativity. I highly recommend that you listen to each and every one.
Underpinning a lot of Enwright’s music is a kind of “sacred” subtext that simultaneously enshrouds and uplights his work. This character exists across his many published tracks, and expresses itself throughout “POP EDITS.” On “Eternal,” he repeats the line “I wanna feel eternal light,” a short lyric from Oklou’s track “God’s Chariot”; or, his version of Nicki Minaj’s “Super Bass” has a generosity that exaggerates its sweeping chorus: boom, badoom, boom, boom, badoom, boom, bass becomes a kind of Agnus Dei. The holiness emphasized within Enwright’s music, a kind of studious religiosity that finds a new valence when infused into the pop vertebral structures he’s exploring, has brought me back to the promise of pop music.
In Justin Bieber’s words on “Changes”: “People change, circumstances change, but god always remains the same.” Mikey’s music, and these pop edits, make me feel that way about pop music—and I am drawn back into its liturgy.
—Nick James Scavo
Recommendation: Invest Like the Best with Patrick O’Shaughnessy [Episode 430] - The Chainsmokers
The title of this podcast is “The Chainsmokers - Music & Markets,” and, to be honest, it’s extremely accurate. The electronic duo is known for such hits as “Closer” and “Something Like This,” but they also co-founded the Mantis VC firm, which manages a portfolio of investments spanning AI, cybersecurity, and healthcare. In this interview, the Chainsmokers discuss their artistic process and investment strategies in equal measure. We learn that Alex Pall and Drew Taggart kickstarted their career by synchronizing their artistic output with trends identified through the Hype Machine blog aggregator, and that their early stage investment in the soda company Poppi has 30x’d in value. It’s pretty interesting. As a side note, I really liked a song they released this summer called “White Wine & Adderall.”
About 16 minutes into the podcast, Taggart brings up AI in a compelling passage:
How do you define success in an age of abundance of art? How do you define success with us, where we’ve had a bunch of songs [with] over a billion streams, we’ve had chart-topping songs, but what is the one thing that we do that no one else can do? Can that even be replicated by AI? Can that be replicated by another person? Because when that person does it, it will be them doing it, and it’ll be at a different time, and it’ll look different, and it will feel different.
When you think about AI, you can’t be scared of it, because it’s just gonna hit different, for better or for worse at some point. We just gotta focus on being the most Chainsmokers as possible.
I don’t really know what every bit of this means, but it’s sort of stuck in my head. I suppose it comes down to two core ideas: whether it is possible to replicate something singular, and the notion of being the most Chainsmokers as possible. I will leave you with this for now and see if I have more to say in another week.
—Alexander Iadarola
Recommendation: Critique of dark academia and classical music’s optimization
Over the past month, a theme has been percolating in some of my recommendations about the algorithmic circulation of music content and, in particular, the way that the figure of “the composer” and composition is deployed and signified in these channels. I recently wrote about a young easy listening composer named Rue Jacobs, whose style of production and self-promotion I appreciated for its conscientious laziness. His young composerly oeuvre falls in nicely with the contemporary paradigm of beauty and derangement (which I explored in my writing last week about Charles Ives), where the iconoclast and autodidact have new and incredible resources for musical production. This week, I’m exploring a counterpoint to that more optimistic view.
Jack Callahan sent me some instagram videos of Joshua Kyan Aalampour: a 24 year old “self-taught classical composer and pianist. Self-studying math, physics and art” with 1.3 million followers. His account is a mixture of “dark academia” interiors, bespoke and laboriously stylized hand-written scores, clips of Joshua throwing back his tailcoat over the piano bench to offer melodramatic eight bar phrases of simple classical harmonic progressions.
He introduces each video excerpt with soy-faced glee: “I just composed this melody and it’s stuck in my head now!” he exclaims before doing a hammed-up Bernstein vocalization and then pounding away at his octave-doubled melody over what is essentially the Succession theme song progression. Sprinkled into the young polymath’s feed are videos of him speed-talking in a 20 second reel about his proprietary stock trading neural net – graphs and figures flying off and on the screen: “I built a trading algorithm using algebraic topology. It was consistently profitable for the last five years even when the market was bleeding in 2022. The way it works is I modeled the market as a weighted graph of stocks, ran a laplacian diffusion on recent returns, I took residuals to estimate local mispricings…,” and so on. I don’t know what that means – in part because of my ignorance about the subject, but more significantly, because of the impossible pacing of his presentation, such that the content and purported value of the information is clearly secondary to its function in illustrating the excellence of its author: the self-taught, the virtuoso.
For me, this evokes a musical nightmare consistent with depictions in the movie Tar, which follows the self-destruction of the maestro in her elitist hubris – where the brutal virtues of modern mastery are the very same characteristics that perpetuate her disgrace and fall to the lower rungs, where her only recourse is conducting symphonic concerts of the Monster Hunter OST. From within such implosions of aesthetic and institutional authority, I imagine a sequel, with a figure like Joshua, emerging from the shambles as a euphoric and unknowing vulture, descending on the still-living corpse of classical music to poach its tusks and practice his whittling. Anyway, I strongly believe in using all parts of the animal.
Despite my polemic, I have no beef with his kind of classical exercise from a musical standpoint, in fact I think it’s valuable and nice (it’s exactly what music department students are asked to do in the Harmony course curriculum to experience the basic rules of western harmony - not that this is a metric of musical virtue in-itself), but Joshua’s striking promotional affect forces an absorption of this music in the broader milieu of content optimization and cynical professionalization. Auto-playing his many compositions, the pieces are pretty and inoffensive, but trade in the most culturally perverse aspects of classical music: the conceit of superiority and a melancholic value proposition, that even the worst “classical music” is more enriching than the best Pop music. Critique of this orientation is made more complicated as Joshua’s boundless self-importance and intimation of discovery, invention, reclamation and excellence appear entirely and innocently authentic, despite these banal transgressions.
Returning for the second week to a quote from Charles Ives:
“Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ear lie back in an easy chair. Many sounds that we are used to do not bother us, and for that reason we are inclined to call them beautiful. Frequently—possibly almost invariably—analytical and impersonal tests will show that when a new or unfamiliar work is accepted as beautiful on its first hearing, its fundamental quality is one that tends to put the mind to sleep.”
Joshua’s rote romanticism reminds me of the OpenAI trend of Studio Ghiblifying camera roll images into warm Miyazaki-like renderings. And I think Joshua’s music owes a lot to the incredible, classically styled soundtracks of Joe Hisaishi. But the open-ended question of this music, its signification of “the composer” and methods of algorithmic optimization leave a frayed and uncanny picture of the role of any sort of literate craftsmanship in the reappearance and recirculation of historically-minded aesthetic discourses. The ear deserves a good sleep, and the “easy chair” of beautiful music is a fine place to nap, but if the future for autodidacts like Joshua is bound to this form of smooth-brained cognition, there’s good reason to fear increasingly REM-less, dreamless nights for music.
Invoking a more hopeful influencer, deshaunmcole (a “very kind person who predicts anything that will happen in the future,” with video hits including “A normal size amount of MONEY is coming your way,” counting from 1-40, and “the Philadelphia Museum of Art will become a college in the near future”), the musical and literary form of development, so central to classical music, depends on a dialectic that asserts the theme as first, a static prediction of the character of the idea, followed by a series of re-contextualizations that in essence disprove, and perhaps synthesize that initial theme. Expanding on this formal principle, the vitality of western music and its epistemologies is rendered moot when the output is simply a reflection of a predictively stable group of premises. Development depends on the ability to shape “wrong predictions” into a whole, textured subject of its own order, without becoming determinative. With that said, I recommend exploring such earnest development. Beethoven spent his entire life repeating the procedure: this, not “this:” Amen.
—Alec Sturgis