We’re already over millennials. It’s time for Generation Z. And, in this respect, they have an identity trait that is particularly interesting: the attention deficit. Classic tasks that have always required a minimal amount of attention now seem to be impossible: watching an hour and a half long movie without breaking the narrative flow by looking at their phone once in a while, sitting down and reading without doing anything else, listening to a whole album instead of putting Spotify on shuffle… And all of this comes from, without a doubt, the way in which this new generation obtains information: in the era of the hyperlink, any text you read will include a great number of links that will turn your attention to a network of parallel texts that will lead to a horizontal way of reading, hardly ever to reading vertically in depth. And so, how isn’t our attention-deficit going to increase even further in all of us, not only in regards to the Gen Z?
PC MUSIC, MUSICAL ATTENTION DEFICIT
Have you ever thought of how the brain of a person belonging to Gen Z sounds like from the inside? Well, stop asking yourself, because the only way of finding out is by getting to know the PC Music record label.
You don’t have to know about neuroscience to sense how the human brain’s internal configuration is changing (and will eventually change even more) due to this new way of obtaining information. And, in fact, if you want to know how the brain of the newer generations sounds like, the only thing you have to do is to listen to PC Music, the collective that was born in the year 2013 when A.G. Cook decided to take what was called vaporwave (that vapour pop that came from Soundcloud) and not only brought it to the dance floor but also absolute madness.
In the first songs released by Cook in this new label, the imagery created was being drawn with tons of clarity: extremely accelerated beats that reminded us of that ‘90s happy hardcore, rave melodies tinged by a type of anxious pop, distorted voices with a shot of chemical optimism… That’s what PC Music sounded like in 2013, and that’s what it continues to sound like here and now, when its sound amasses a legion of fans that have seen names from the first wave like Danny L Harle or Hannah Diamond that grew to reach the level of famous collaborators like Sophie (who can almost be considered as part of the family), Oneohtrix Point Never or Charli XCX.
In fact, you couldn’t understand PC Music to this day without the aforementioned artist. In the end, Charli XCX decried to abandon her pre-fabricated pop diva career that was being built for her by the music industry to launch an EP as surprising as Vroom Vroom, that took the teachings of PC Music and applied them to a strange radio formulaic yet fascinating pop. That first contact kept growing until it evolved into Charli, the album hat many are using these days to talk about how the future of pop will sound like.
In other words: without taking part of PC Music and by working under other labels, Charli XCX has been the artist that has known to capture their universe and take it to a more massive audience. A.G. Cook’s productions have helped her tons, obviously. However, whilst this seed was transforming into a jungle, the core nucleus of the collective continues to deejay in festivals and release tracks (they’re not too fond of the album format) that continue to be like picking the brain of a 15 year-old kid, and listening to how it sounds like from the inside.
