As Pride Month comes to a close, the 60 Seconds Entertainment Tab looks to our favorite LGBTQ+ creators. I look, specifically, to hyperpop, an increasingly popular genre forged by LGBTQ+ creatives which can claim some of the most innovative music of the past decade. The best and defining release of this genre is 2019’s 1000 Gecs, a product of the visionary minds of Laura Les and Dylan Brady.
Acclaimed critic Piero Scaruffi called 100 Gecs “a Frank Zappa of the autotune age,” an apt comparison. The cultural insanity of the 2010s can be rivaled only by the 1960s, and with this album 100 Gecs, like Zappa, respond to the chaos of their time by mirroring it. Unlike Zappa’s albums, which came during rock’s invention, 1000 Gecs is a synthesis of scores of styles from the last 30 years. 90s pop-punk and ska merge with niche influences from the 2010s dubstep and nightcore scenes, layered with trap/drum’n’bass percussion and whirling samples. On 1000 Gecs, the complexity and lunacy of the arrangements of the 60s and 70s are compressed like a .zip file into an unfathomable onslaught of sound, each two-minute song containing enough detail for ten, with all (except for the completely indecipherable interludes) following a corrupted pop formula of abstract verse, oddball chorus, and deranged outro.
Its 23-minute runtime is the only length that would make sense, because in that time 1000 Gecs summarizes the logic (or illogic) of the 21st century: chaos and exponential momentum introduced to a computer. But perhaps the most confounding element of this album is that these robotic sounds are all focused on a common heart. Songs like Ringtone have the importance of human connection at their core, and the album ends considering the difficulty of sustaining relations in the modern age. With their lyrics, Les and Brady, in a final grand display of irony, resist the isolation that the sounds they create were bred from.
1000 Gecs is the Uncle Meat of the 21st century, not prolonged and improvised but sliced up and stacked on top of itself, equally chaotic and satirical, but with a distinct human element.
Rating: 7.5/10