Herb Sundays 137: 1010Benja [season 8 finale]
Kansas City-based savant with "Very musical stuff that has a peaceful enthusiasm. Songs that help the listener to feel vital"
Herb Sundays 137: 1010benja (Apple, Spotify)
Art by Michael Cina.
"Very musical stuff that has a peaceful enthusiasm. Songs that help the listener to feel vital" - 1010benja [season 8 finale]
In a recent blog post which maybe I just dreamed, Hit Em style, or that was deleted, Simon Reynolds (Herb 32) quietly admitted he thought he had coined the term poptimism, a fact I don’t intend to explore more, but wouldn’t be surprised by given his penchant for sublime tagging. Twenty years on from its creation, and ten from its mainstream acceptance, the term and the concept still makes waves, a concept then deemed a necessary move for journalism both to reconnect Pop to the discourse, and in service of Pop’s inherent contemporary quality.
But Pop isn’t just about the idea of songcraft or accessibility, it also is a proxy for the stakes of winning and losing. Year-end lists, like award season nominees, tend to get sifted down to only a handful of titles, its our need align around something, and creative a coherent conversation. In my internet circles, and probably yours, apart from Kendrick Lamar, Charli XCX is the “winner” of 2024, both critically and commercially, though she wasn’t the biggest seller of the year by a long shot. The success is warranted (indeed “Guess” produced by The Dare (Herb 83) was one of the most thrilling things I heard at the gym this year), and is very much about the storytelling.
In wrestling parlance, the actual winner of the year financially across the board was the “face” (a good, virtuous person) Taylor Swift. Charli’s campaign as an insurgent but relatable villain or “heel” (Kendrick as David to Drake’s Goliath was similar) was the better story for media, with Charli presenting herself as someone too real or messy for the mainstream, though being on a major label for a clean decade. This canny movement echoed ‘90s strategies that worked wonders, by bifurcating lanes such as creating Alternative Rock (even though largely comprised of major label bands), young fans felt on the right side of history, backing something their parents would hate, but could easily purchase locally when demanded.
Across industries in 1996, in the culturally responsive world of pro wresting (as
(Herb 129) might suggest) the WCW’s New World Order storyline was positioned as a fake takeover by a now “bad” Hulk Hogan (spoiler alert, he was always bad irl) where Hogan and his nWo crew assumed a dominance over the league itself, beating up the boss on air, in a move which the WWE would adopt in order to win back momentum. The concept was a form of faux culture jamming, or a revolution borne from the inside.
The truth is that the house always tends to win in Pop, especially since disruption is usually coming from inside (Drake is arguing this as I write). It helps if the story is as appealing as Charli delivering a marketing powerpoint to outsmart her corporate bosses in an origin story that reads like a direct-to-video teen Disney plot: “in the spring of 2023, she presented her team with what has been described as the “Brat Manifesto,” a mood board and binder full of PDFs and notes for “Brat,” a full year before the album was released. Therein lay the master plan for the endless Brat Summer.”
In her Subway Takes appearance this year, Charli utters the kind of invincible truth that sent people like me into hysterics. Charli, keenly declares “music is not important” as shorthand for the breadth of her omnivorous aesthetic interests. For Charli and her Pop brethren, music is only part of the story, elemental to a brand package of micro gestures and sub-narratives, both lyrical and implied. I say this without derision, as they are correct in this assertion, the fans have demanded it. Indeed music is a relatively inexpensive brand asset to drop, build a world around, pair a color or look to, indeed the ideal delivery vessel.
Charli cooly namechecks the Velvet Underground/Lou Reed as an apex of pop/non-pop, another great move, not a million years from the Lady Gaga and Jeff Koons collab for Artpop (2013), or Kanye and Murakami/Kaws, where Contemporary Art has been appropriated by Pop music, but clearly maintains the more valuable association. Charli’s execution so far suggests she will succeed in bringing anyone into her orbit.
How I perceived Charli’s comment, after my late Gen-X knee-jerk annoyance subsided, is not that music doesn’t matter, but that music simply isn’t enough on its own to penetrate mass culture, simply unable to pummel the world with alone. To do that, you need a mass media-backed narrative (“brat” as buzzword), celebrity association (Charli’s MCU level amalgamation of other industries, rolling up Chloë Sevigny, Rachel Sennott, Julia Fox, etc.), and a battery of well-made “assets” (to use music industry speak) with which to roll it all out. In short, a loot drop that almost no independent artist can wield. The game is not a fair fight, unsurprisingly.
But before you say “wHat aBoUt CiNdY LeE” I’d argue the album and campaign represents comfort food for us who grew up on the thrill of discovery, but is a non-event outside our circles, which is fine, and by no means an insult to its inherent quality. By geo-fencing the campaign slightly, and gatekeeping its adoption, it created an art event that felt somewhat outsider, portending something rarified. There is no contemporary platform in music that could mimic the feel-good Web 1.0 of GeoCities as a basecamp, the album needed this friction to even be formally recognized.
Indeed the glamour of “indie” has moved from music to film/TV, with A24 wielding the kind of mass cultural reverence a legendary label like Sub Pop would have 30 years ago (and still warrants), and no independent music label or band carries a mainstream awareness even close, much like the dominance of Rockstar Games a decade back or cursed Miramax in the ‘90s. The culture game has simply moved to a different arena, music is an aspect of its offerings. Now a full roll-up of all of these touch points is necessary to hit mass adoption.
After the chaos of 2016 onwards, our dopamine needs and delivery receptors demand literal sex (hawk) and violence (luigi) to raise the needle to true pop levels, maybe similar to a post-Vietnam War ‘70s. Sincerity alone can’t deliver the payload necessary for mimesis and virality. Maybe this is ok, and maybe it’s time to reclaim music as something sacred and niche, something closer to jazz potentially. Wishful thinking.
Looking at the year in more “underground” pop, artists like ML Buch (Herb 101, one year ago) and Mk.gee and others playing with songcraft continue to find new routes back to the river, with pleasing results, even starting to gatecrash the party again (Mk.gee got an SNL spot this year, celebrity fans etc). We may be on the precipice of some new stuff seeping through.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
But as we stare down perhaps the most damaging American administration to climate change, civil liberties, wealth inequality, public health, and more, its tempting to want to get back to the campfire, to find some communal feeling that a Charli has provided us this year. Something people can agree on. On the musical consumer side, there’s a longing for more, for example what
wrote about music discovery for Esquire:Personally, I’ve noticed that when the platform serves me a new song I like, I tend to feel mild enjoyment rather than a fiery passion. More often, I feel numb from the overall monotony and repetition. As it turns out, what I want after listening to Angel Olsen has less to do with genre (spare me your generic contemporary indie band!) than dynamism (give me something that burns a hole in my heart!).
There’s a lot of articles abound blaming the culture system for its failure to excite. Writers like Kyle Chayka bemoan algorithms as the flattening of things, or a homogenization of culture, and there’s also the idea that culture has stalled wholesale. What I think critics are romantic for is the memory of a simpler time for consumers where music had ample cultural space and loads of marketing surface area (videos, glossy music mags, mindshare) via all media, a consensus. As
wrote for The Atlantic, calling out this false flag:Part of the fixation on cultural algorithms is a product of the insecure position in which cultural gatekeepers find themselves. Traditionally, critics have played the dual role of doorman and amplifier, deciding which literature or music or film (to name just a few media) is worthwhile, then augmenting the experience by giving audiences more context. But to a certain extent, they’ve been marginalized by user-driven communities such as BookTok and by AI-generated music playlists that provide recommendations without the complications of critical thinking. Not all that long ago, you might have paged through a music magazine’s reviews or asked a record-store owner for their suggestions; now you just press “Play” on your Spotify daylist, and let the algorithm take the wheel.
The idea that music isn’t as good as it once was, or that there’s to much of it, is as
might say a “skill issue” or a frustration around the confusion of what to focus on. As we’ve traded out gatekeepers for platform authority, we get less left-field outcomes I agree, even though we are awash in recommendations. The perception of “too much” also presumes that more artists shouldn’t have access to the marketplace, which seems counter to what the internet was for. I wouldn’t want to go back to that era as a label or artist, personally or professionally.
So what does this have to do with Herb 137, 1010benja? The enigmatic Benja, a late ‘10s breakthrough, scored a coveted Best New Music designation from Pitchfork for his 2024 album Ten Total. While there were less than 50 BNM’d albums by my count, the album failed to stick to the wall of their best 50 albums of the year, a result most likely of no one claiming the album for the recall, not sticking to the wall culturally, unrelated to quality. Looking at pandemic-era Pitchfork “rising” recipients (like Benja and Buch) easy to see how a whole moment for indie artists lost momentum and only now are resurfacing.
Interview Mag also loved the Benja album and said: “The Kansas City-based 1010Benja has been one to watch for a while now. But he only just released his debut album, Ten Total, last month. After garnering some attention with his 2017 single, “Boofiness,” and his 2018 EP, Two Houses, Benja disappeared for a while. He dropped some singles intermittently, but now, seven years later, he’s reemerged with an album-of-the-year contender.”
The signal strength of good reviews and good will has never been weaker, and by no one’s fault. As
stated (and Herb 123, Benja fan agrees) “if you want to create a monocultural event, start a war.” Yet with all the hand-wringing about the algo as a substandard method of discovery, I’d counter that we never should have expected it to be our cultural lodestar, because it seeks heat, not beauty.On his major label deal, Benja said: “Well, it’s always an issue of whether or not you’ll be given the budget. It’s part of the dance. In a corporate sense, I’m nobody. The price tag on my head is not very high, so it can be hard sometimes to get even your basic stuff. Getting visuals done for this album, for instance, because I’m still kind of an unknown artist. I had zero budget, maybe a few hundred dollars. I had to make it all myself. I had my son film some stuff on the phone. I had to teach myself how to do all the editing. If you’re not born into some legacy art family, you’ve got to prove every single thing that you get.”
Benja was poised for a breakthrough that didn’t happen in 2024, which he shared the details of on social media, bemoaning the state of the artist/label dynamic today. The album is a smash, to me and for many though. Benja’s voice has that honeyed star quality that people my age might recognize as radio friendly, maybe the other side of ‘00s r&b of another of 2024’s alt-pop heroes, Erika de Casier.
As music fans search for new stars, it may be more satisfying to eschew the campfire/water cooler, and find some local acts they can support. The blame is often placed not only on the DSPs but on artists themselves, chastised for posting too much music. The truth is that this number will only increase, with AI, UGC remixing, with everything else. Shaming it won’t fix the hole in our hearts for a monoculture of yore.
Much like thr stack of New Yorkers piling up next to your bed, theres an inherent guilt attached to not keeping up, but we can accept that there’s no shared ground worth keeping up with most of the time. The reality is that you must give up to start over, absolve yourself of the culture baggage of yore. No one’s coming to save your taste. Start a new account, delete your profile, assume a new identity. Only then can you be born anew.
