Simple Reflections on Chanel Beads

I’m finding it very difficult to form any strong opinion about Your Day Will Come. I’ve witnessed a great deal of hand wringing about whether or not it’s overhyped, if it represents the basic-ification of an aggregation of internet music microtrends from the past decade and change. Seems like it is. It’s the streamlined, algorithm-ready version of Dean Blunt. Doesn’t bother me much. No hot takes. There’s no hot with which to take. This music isn’t very provocative. It’s not offensive. It’s not subversive. It’s pretty palatable.

What’s maybe interesting is how its obvious influences are a little more unseemly. James Ferraro’s Skid Row took a disarmingly passive approach to joining audio from news reports on the brutalization of Rodney King with bloodless synth funk. Dean Blunt’s The Redeemer was vacant, affectless, the references to religious salvation menacingly apocalyptic in contrast. The entire Hippos in Tanks cohort generally had a kind of strangely nihilistic lack of perspective on their own content. That’s what made it feel like it was the raw material of the internet. There was a thoughtlessness, a lack of discernment, a lack of interest in judging what is and is not appropriate. It seemed like it was simply happening in front of you, in spite of you even, in a manner that took you hostage, robbed you of your critical faculties and autonomy. That was a pretty scary feeling when I was 15. I liked it.

Chanel Beads is the Kidz Bop version of this. On a historical level, I actually find that pretty interesting. It’s always interesting when something that was once fringe cultural detritus gets brought closer and closer to the center of mainstream sensibilities over time. I like watching that process. Seems like Chanel Beads are part of that slow movement. I’m not super interested in the music, but it’s the same kind of curious feeling I get watching mold grow. It’s a natural process, cool to witness. There’s probably a terminally online 15 year old somewhere right now whose thinking “oh damn, this Dean Blunt is a little too dark and nihilistic for me. I’ll just stick with Chanel Beads.” That’s Chanel Beads. It’s that thing edgy millennials liked, but now with more obvious hooks and even less content, souped up and Tik-Tok ready. The easy-listening version of underground music.

Sometimes it emulates trip-hop: brooding, atmospheric pop over boom-bap drums that sounds fitting when you’re walking around a major city. Ok, sad kids shuffling around Chinatown at 1:00 am is the target audience, makes sense. I find trip-hop to be pretty bland, contentless music. I have a soft spot for Tricky but Portishead is so boring it actually stresses me out. But Chanel Beads simulate the vibe pretty accurately, so if that’s a vibe you like, you know, maybe you’ll like this? Sometimes it’s emulating that ambient-folk approach that Grouper and Alex G made popular. Organ Tapes energy. Ok. I like juxtaposition. They’re playing an acoustic guitar, but the voice is autotuned. It’s a juxtaposition. I’m not sure they’re contributing much to this tradition, but it wasn’t unlistenable either.

That’s sort of the whole Chanel Beads experience isn’t it? Neither here nor there.

Mercifully short. 27 minutes. None of the tracks go on long enough to get on my nerves. The lyrics are vacuous, I read as much as I could find online–references to doing molly, graves, stuff about relationships, all of which are pretty devoid of insight or character. At the same time, the human voice is used nicely as an instrument, that touch of autotune on the vocals not so extreme to make me roll my eyes and think “Oh lord, more post-Drain Gang garbage”, even though this is “Post-Drain Gang” garbage. It’s not pop music but it’s not Sheer Hellish Miasma either. Sort of just hangs in the balance. It’s remarkable how something can be so well put together, so pleasant to engage with, and simultaneously have so little to offer, feel like such a let down. It’s just a curation of historically important post-millennial “vibes,” a laundry list of cool internet music tropes. And that should be kind of a victory lap for all of that bizarre, fried, “this is your brain on midi” shit that Chanel Beads are so clearly cribbing from, right? So why does everybody keep complaining?

Maybe because people operate under the delusion that if you advocate for something to have more mass cultural, populist appeal, the populist version of said thing will be identical to the idiosyncratic, subversive version you fell in love with. Ultimately this logic doesn’t hold any water. In a world where very few people agree about anything ever, why would something that has to appeal to as many people as possible also be able to retain all of the strangeness and irreverence that drew a small group to it in the first place? The process by which an aesthetic approach arrives at mainstream acceptability is a process of refinement. Little by little, the edges get sanded away until it approaches the closest thing possible to universal comprehensibility. This isn’t some inherently bad or sinister process, and it doesn’t even preclude strange artistic visions from becoming popular, but there is definite loss as a result, and sometimes what you get on the other end looks more like the vague husk of the thing you originally found so stimulating.

I think this is what’s happened to Chanel Beads. Very few people thought this braindead internet aesthetic was going to have such an influence as to produce a version of itself that actually is kind of catchy and easy to have on in the background. Sure, I look back, and I mean, of course it was going to happen. But still, it feels pretty quick, right? For that shit to get canonized and have people just sort of doing it over again but with more obvious hooks? It’s like the Velvet Underground being sort of the fringe of popular music, singing about BDSM and heroin, and then Jonathan Richman comes along a half decade later and it's the same-ish sound but he’s singing about how he loves his parents! All the VU’s edge has been evacuated. And it’s not like it’s been replaced with something outright terrible. I don’t want to take a massive shit on Jonathan Richman or anything. He seems like a nice Jewish boy. But he’s no radical. And even the Modern Lovers weren’t hitmakers. But just like Chanel Beads, they represented a step in the evolution of a sound from abrasive to more digestible.

Maybe the absence of radicalism or even really visible ambition is what frustrates people so much about this release. This would feel like more of an aesthetic victory lap if any of the ideas presented here were pushed even an inch further. It’s like the record is protecting itself from all of our imminent stupid hot takes and online discourse by just showing up and disappearing before it can embarrass itself. With streaming algorithms bringing popular music towards a singularity of inoffensive listenability, I’ve noticed a lot of people, myself included, clamoring for something that aims just a little outside of what we think is possible and/or tasteful. Even Cowboy Carter, probably the only major record this year with explicit ambitions to subvert some aesthetic traditions, didn’t really do as much as I’d hoped musically, in terms of taking a hatchet to Country as a genre. Most of the time it leaned a little too reverent and tasteful, the truly bonkers moments of experimentation feeling restrained, undercooked. I was hoping Beyonce might make a spectacular mess that proposed something fascinating, but in fact, she could have shit the bed even harder and been better off for it. The same can be said of Chanel Beads. It sounds like Dean Blunt but never once risks making any of Blunt’s joyous missteps. Cowboy Carter and Your Day Will Come never really sound fried enough. They actually sound claustrophobically Safe.

But still, there are things to admire about this album. The duo’s use of software instruments– paper thin fake violins and woozy ersatz electric basses–is smart, deployed carefully and skillfully, going past irony towards something a little more beautiful and soulful. I’ve loved the scant moments in the past 10 years when we’ve heard those sounds infiltrating mainstream popular music in a deliberate and nuanced fashion, and I see the very catchy, disposable pop of Chanel Beads as part of that slow march towards the center. The brief flashes of compositional novelty using those sounds make me wish even more that this record had been executed with less restraint, less of an anonymous disposition. It could all be even more ambitiously fried, more shit-the-bed stupid. If it were, I think we’d all be more readily celebrating its arrival.