Shagadelic Pessimism, Dostoyevskian Phonk, Electric Light
This week, on 2020MG, we recommend the shagadelic and dialectical potential of Burt Bacharach, the existential and commercial inevitability of phonk, and the industrial anthropology of brightness as a sensorial force.
Recommendation: Burt Bacharach, “Living Together”
As promised, I’m working on a review of my trip to Lincoln Center this past weekend for the premier of David Lang’s the wealth of nations, in follow-up to my critique of Bang on a Can and classical music’s post-minimalist complacency. Spoiler: I really, deeply disliked the piece. So much so, that laboring to express why and in what ways is something I need a little more time to process. Internally, at 2020MG HQ, I’ve been referring to Lang as Dr. Evil. This week, as a bit of an interlude, I recommend Burt Bacharach, embracing a Powersian turn in the hopes of restoring my stolen “mojo.” Yeah, baby… yeah…
I love Burt Bacharach. As a composer, he produced some of the greatest, most musically efficient, harmonically and formally interesting standards in the epilogue of the American songbook. The classics like “Walk on By,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” and so many others (especially in the hands of Dion Warwick) are infinitely listenable and inspired containers of human relationship stories and kitchen-sink dramas that lend extra emotional depth to the existing poetic repertoires of soul and mo-town songs through their high-cropped, groovy formalisms and harmonic refinements. Bacharach often interjects the easy-listening dimension of his music with playfully gratuitous passages of rhythmic and textural complexity, and esoteric variations that excite the form without compromising its character, without spoiling its accessibility and emotional utility, or burdening the listener with its appeal to sophistication.
I recommend all of Bacharach, but in particular his epic easy-listening suite from 1973, “Living Together” (linked above). As far as easy-listening is concerned, it’s a surprisingly challenging listen. It has more in common in scope and emotionality, and in terms of its gestures of high refinement, with Steven Sondheim’s esoterically groovy musical theater, than with Sergio Mendes.
Why Bacharach, right now? Beyond the fact that the world still seems to need “love, sweet love,” and that my depressing experience at the NY Philharmonic demands a heavy prescription in the form of a hopeful musical antidote, I think Bacharach represents a cultural time and place that we look back on with a forlorn nostalgia. In the 1960’s, there seems to have been a profound sense for and popular experience of history as a force, a felt sense of collectivity. I won’t belabor any particular point about the revolutionary actions of the decade, except to point towards how these may have impacted the sensations and romantic perceptions of everyday life and the mundane.
Aren’t Bacharach’s tunes an incredible, intimate reflection of the general, lived sense of (healthy?) grandiosity that one might feel, assuming and pre-coding future nostalgia into the significance of being “here, now?” Terrible things happened in the 60’s. And indeed, terrible things have happened since. There are many stories about this cultural progression away from optimism - the failures of ‘68 - charted in post-modern theory, neoliberal critique, techno-pessimism, and so on. I suppose my return to Bacharach here, is infused with a personal query about the place of individual, mundane feeling in the formation of some imagined collective desire for hope beyond reason. What is the function or place for romantic cultural ideation in a time that is by general consensus, deeply un-shagadelic?
I’ve been revisiting Eric Lott’s incredible book “The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual” in which he presents a broad, refreshing, no-bullshit inquiry into the cultural, theoretical and political settings in which the gestures of critical, boundary-challenging thought have become increasingly detached from the material and social conditions that once gave such gestures urgency and efficacy. My depression around David Lang’s the wealth of nations, is in many ways, something that stems from my assessment that the existentially embarrassed, calculating progressivism of our art and institutions represents a far more dangerous and defeated form of cultural dissociation than the goofy prescriptions of free love and free expression that we often lampoon (and sometimes celebrate, see A. Powers, et al.). Fundamentally, the question of freedom has never been more complex to identify and relate to than in the technological and geopolitical moment we now inhabit. I don’t know that we as individuals, or as collectives, are equipped with the appropriate feelingful mass-cultural technologies (i.e. music) to respond to the moment we find ourselves in. And so, I recommend listening to some songs that, at the very least, propose something hopeful - maybe grandiose - but at least expressive of a peaceful confidence and acceptance of the forms from which they came.
Have we simply hit one too many times in a long, politicized game of liberal arts blackjack? Where, or who, is the dealer - when we’ve busted many times over and continue to ask for more? I don’t think the game has changed all that much. A new hand, please.
Like a grain of sand that wants to be a rolling stone
I want to be the man I’m not
and half the things I really haven’t got
and that’s a lot
There’ll be joy and they’ll be laughter
Something big is what I’m after now
Yes it’s what I’m after now
-Burt Bacharach - “Something Big”
—Alec Sturgis
Recommendation: LONOWN & riserayss “worry (slowed)”
There’s nothing like an effed up algorithm to make you feel like the world is changing right before your eyes. The incessant proliferation of phonk music and its various shapeshifts and remixes have soundtracked the last six years or so; phonk has found its way as the perennial backdrop for short-form video slop. Alex wrote about this a few issues back with UdieNnx, HXVSAGE, Duduzinho - VISION (Slowed), alongside reflections on creatine, short-form bodybuilding content, and metabolic activity within the oddly emotional, “cosmic” palette of the genre’s sound. I’ve found LONOWN and riserayss’ “worry (slowed)” alongside video montages of Timothy Chalamet’s portrayal of Paul Atreides walking with a defiant stomp before yelling “I point the way!” as explosions, spacecraft, and hard stares are cut in sequence to the slowed rhythm. It’s wrenching stuff, and I want to take this week to get into the aesthetics, psychology, and form of this music a bit.
The DNA of phonk music originates in 80s/90s Memphis underground hip-hop, whose recent resurgence (for years now with Three 6 Mafia) was a key feature of summer 2025. In NYC, we had the “godfather of Memphis rap” DJ Spanish Fly at MoMA PS1’s Warm Up, a highlight for us. Montez Press Radio also threw a banger party with Spanish Fly, Tommy Wright III, and Le Chat at Sugar Hill Supper Club—also a summer highlight. The productions of these artists, specifically on Spanish Fly’s “Triggaman” and “Hear See Say No Evil,” clearly display the aggressive, distorted 808 cowbell which became the vertebrae of phonk music—as well as its general DIY production, darkness, and grainy, sinister, lo-fi aesthetic. By the late 2010s and early 2020s, phonk had mutated into a high-energy subgenre tied to car culture with Russian and Eastern European influence, accompanying streetglow drift videos and slowwalking drivers enveloped in a misty, Need for Speed atmosphere. The sound has become less hip-hop and more electronic/EDM-adjacent. In 2026, phonk has become established both as a de facto soundtrack for viral TikTok videos—from self-help meditations to AI vibes reels—and has also found its way into broader TV commercials. Even the New York Times has proclaimed phonk as “the sound of the doomscroll generation.”
I’m curious about phonk as a “commercial” form of sound in a continuum following 1980s muzak, and 2010s millennial whoop glockenspiel commercial music—both of which displayed an inherent optimism featured heavily in liminal and/or third spaces and commercials. Muzak, specifically, manifested as “elevator music,” “weather channel music,” and “hold music,” provided an optimism intrinsically related to capital. It provided a sense of ease and expertness linked to a bravado of 1980/90s stable corporate cashflow as a frame one could walk into. Commercialized millennial whoop indie glockenspiel music evolved to evoke a sense of independence and bright strength, establishing a stranglehold on TV commercials and HGTV fixerupper reinvention—a form of capital you couldn’t necessarily walk into, but build yourself. Even today, we hear this sound palette wholly embedded in the Home Depotistic atmosphere of setting up and buying your life, with your own independence—yet another form of aspirational capital.
Phonk is an evolution of the capitalized soundform, inverting these previous forms of optimism into a distinctly pessimistic space steeped in interiority. The message phonk provides is that you can recreate your life as a dark self-reinvention, submitting into a newfound strength in a Dostoyevskian, ascendent sigma mindset—but only ascendent when defined in comparison to the fall. It captures Fyodor’s epithet that “you have betrayed yourself for nothing,” from Crime & Punishment, only to existentially rise up from the ashes. As feed-fodder, phonk creates a dark telos that everyone, as capitalized subjectivities, must be ready for war—igniting an inner flame to push through the darkness of everyday life and global catastrophe simultaneously. It’s a brutal worldview. In contrast to muzak and millennial whoop capitalized commercial music, phonk’s palette is weathered and dilapidated. Damaged. Hope exists only in the fall, and in the climb back up.
LONOWN & riserayss’s “worry (slowed)” is a masterclass in this shitass feeling. It recalls early Tri Angle Records (Holy Other, Forest Swords), and manages to still capture a bloghaus spirit, a digital crate digging of the algorithm—the kind of track you might have been downloading on Gorilla vs. Bear in 2010. I’ve hesitated to really talk about music explicitly as a political economy on 2020MG so far, after decades of pained discourse about music as such, but the spectre of phonk really drives into the political and economic underpinnings of our enframed musical present—aspirational but sad-sack in presence. This is capitalized music at the horizon of our moment.
I listen to “worry (slowed),” and feel an indescribable darkness, and can’t look away. The world’s shittiest goosebump pricks up on my arm. It’s all a bit overwrought at this point, isn’t it?
—Nick James Scavo
Recommendation: The consideration of brightness
Mayakovsky visited New York City in 1925, and recounted his experience in My Discovery of America. He noticed many different types of light on Broadway:
The street-lamps, the dazzling lights of advertisements, the glow of shop-windows and windows of the never-closing stores, the lights illuminating huge posters, lights from the open doors of cinemas and theaters, the speeding lights of automobiles and trolley cars, the lights of the subway trains glittering under one’s feet through the glass pavements, the lights of inscriptions in the sky. Brightness, brightness, brightness…
Chapter 7 of David E. Nye’s American Technological Sublime explores “The Electric Cityscape,” and he describes Broadway in 1925 as “a literal universe of signs.”
Yet no sign was ever seen alone; each was a part of an overwhelming impression produced by the constellation of city lights … The electrified landscape’s meaning lay precisely in the fact that it seemed to go beyond any known codification, becoming unutterable and ungraspable in its extent and complexity … But the electrical sublime was not a mere extension of the geometrical sublime, with its olympian assurances to the observer that he could turn the city into a concrete abstraction. The electrical sublime eliminated familiar spatial relationships. In the night there were no shadows, no depth, no laws of perspective, and no orderly relations between objects.
The final sentence in the above series of excerpts seems to overstate the case just a bit, but we can appreciate the affective dimension of what it communicates even as we question the plausibility of the elimination of the laws of perspective.
Earlier in the chapter, Nye describes the genesis of the electric sign. He quotes a General Electric bulletin for salespeople:
Circulating advertising, because it can go to the easy chair by the reading lamp, may be leisurely, argumentative, and thorough in the lesson that it teaches. Display advertising, because it cannot move and because it must do its work on moving people, must be very simple, striking, and impressionistic.
Nye describes a transition from methodical argumentation to a mode of communication focused primarily on the senses. Less the production of reasons, and more the transmission of impressions. Back in January, we considered examples of highly saturated 2010s pop utilizing language in a surreal, intensely impressionistic manner. Katy Perry, “Firework”: “Do you ever feel like a plastic bag … Baby, you’re a firework.” Icona Pop - “I Love It (feat. Charli XCX)”: “I crashed my car into the bridge … I don’t care, I love it.” Benny Benassi ft. Gary Go - “Cinema”: “You are my cinema / I could watch you forever.” At the time, we wrote:
These lyrics are hard to write about because they make the listener deal with a form of irreconcilable sense-making. They are exclamatory in nature, clearly, and characterized by sheer eventness. Something very important happens, but that something could also be nothing: a terrifically bracing passing thought, but one that passes nonetheless. It’s less an overwhelming instant than a sketch of its void: tremendous feeling evoked by the ringing out of its lack of substantiveness.
Now seems like an appropriate time for a refrain: Brightness, brightness, brightness…
—Alexander Iadarola