I heard the swiftologist use a word that really caught my attention this week, which is Hyperslop.

I heard the swiftologist use a word that really caught my attention this week, which is Hyperslop. I wanna isolate the word from his specific music critique and talk about the word Hyperslop in today's day and age and where this might go as a genre. I think he described it really well, calling Hyperslop a "perfectly produced nothing." And I think it's a really fascinating characterization of music in a time where AI generated music tools are being sold to us as inevitable. I think most interestingly, he's characterizing Hyperslop as a genre that even human artists could belong to. But I would go so far as to say that to create Hyperslop, the content must be in some way spiritually AI. There's already so much of technology's influence in the sounds that we hear today and the genres that have been created, including Hyper Pop and including the original use cases of Auto Tune, which by the way originated from oil drilling technology. And I think it's all very fascinating. So today, I wanna talk about the word slop and the genre hyper pop, the two of which seem to make up the etymology of hyperslop. And I wanna talk about the origins of Auto Tune and why I don't think slop music will have the same arc as auto tune, going from hated to totally accepted. Let's start with slop. The word slop traces back to the 1700s first meaning soft mud, then food waste in the 1800s, and then pig slop, and then just rubbish, a product of little to no value. But then last year, it became an AI word. It was the Miriam Webster word of the year. And it's now defined in the dictionary, the word slop, as digital content of low quality that is produced, usually in quantity, by means of artificial intelligence. But since slop as a characterization of AI is still fairly new, it's kind of fun that we're watching this word evolve in the meaning that it can take on in real time. I've been noticing that slop is being used as a characterization for video writing, music, even behavior like work slop or food, even the slop bowl. That all call back to what everyone seems to hate so much about the AI age and the AI technology itself. But they don't necessarily have to be characterizations of things that are themselves AI. Slop is a quality, judgment now. And it makes us call to mind something that we think AI could do. And that description of anything, is not particularly flattering. Like I said, spiritually, AI. Take the slop bowl, for example, because I don't think that word came up to to mean anything related to AI at all. But now we can kind of see how these two things are closing in on each other. If you take the food that Sweet Green serves or Cava serves, these known slop bowl places they have so over optimized getting lunch into perfectly portioned scoops of toppings over rice or lettuce so that we can optimize the lunch hour and get back to our desks faster. The creation of AI and the applications of AI so far have been a continuation of the over optimization of things that might not have needed to be optimized. A reduction of friction to the point of zero and to the point where our brains need to stop clocking in to do anything at all. Things that take little time to make, take little time to understand. Might either smooth our brains over a little bit or be made to serve a slightly smoother brain all can characterize slop. Before I get into hyper pop, I wanna talk about another technology that affected music that was really hated and rejected at first, which was auto tune. The reason I immediately thought about auto tune when I first heard the word hyperslop is because whenever you try to criticize AI music, a tech bro will pop out of nowhere and say, well people hated auto tune at first too. Auto Tune came out in 1997. From the math that was designed to help find oil underground. The founding engineer was not a music producer, but he worked for Exxon. And at Exxon, engineers would send sound waves into the earth, to measure the audio reflection, and figure out where oil was in order to drill in those places. He processed that massive amount of data from those oil audio reflections. This engineer used the same mathematical formula to create auto correlation. Cause when a friend of his joked that he could use that technology to help her sound better as a singer, he actually realized that could. When Auto Tune was first released, it was meant to help a singer's pitch sound better and more on pitch than it might have been in actuality. When the speed on the tool was set to zero, it would create that robotic jumping sound that we can characterize as auto tune today. It was first used in those more extreme speeds closer to zero on Cher's Believe. And at the time, the producers denied using Auto Tune because it was still very embarrassing to be seen or known using something that was going to make you sound better than you actually were. But over the years, obviously that's changed. There's so many artists that we know about, when we think of their signature style, and it wouldn't be the same without Auto Tune. T Pain, Kanye West, Travis Scott, Don Toliver, so many iconic artists who talk about using Auto Tune. And when we talk about hyper pop, a lot of hyper pop is openly using auto tune and digital music production. We would probably call AG Cook and the late brilliant SOPHIE the godparents of hyper pop. The genre. So the TLDR is that these digitally created sonic advancements happen. Technologies like Auto Tune, they originally get rejected and then artists like Kanye West or AG Cook come around and make them cool and allowed it to evolve into all these different sounds and all these different genres and all these different artists that we love. So the question is, why would slop or HyperSlop be any different? Because at first glance you could argue that everyone was against Auto Tune initially for being uncool and embarrassing. And that's kind of the same thing that's happening with slop related AI generated sounding music of today. I could be wrong, but I still maintain that this is going to be a very different technological wave. First I would argue that the cultural baggage around using AI is a lot heavier and unlike SLOP, has a lot deeper of an origin than the resistance around Auto Tune. People didn't like Auto Tune because they thought it made them seem uncool. They thought it made them seem unqualified to be artist. But imagine if the entire world had been rallying around (despising) oil drilling at the time that Auto Tune became available, and around the same time oil drilling was uncovered as the reason that the Auto Tune technology could exist. That's sort of what AI generated music feels like to me, or at least the closest comparison. Whether or not AI generated production or vocals could help a few musicians out, the sentiment around AI carries so much more weight than whether a few songs could be made well in this new technology. That's just a generous take. On the other hand, Auto Tune was able to be used as an instrument itself. Take Kanye, for example. He made Auto Tune his own. Because Auto Tune was just an effect over his creativity and his artistry. He applied it over his emotion, his musical style, his life experiences. Whereas hyperslop is a spiritually AI by product, regardless of whether it's human made or AI made, I think by definition, takes on that it's an amalgamation of past creativity, and is combined with maybe something present, but something that is present and meaningless. With No origin and no inspiration to speak of. Something that might show up one day, very fully formed, but with no way to explain why it was made the way that it was, or how it was made the way that it was. Will new sounds come from AI and from a new hyper slop genre? Especially as AI continues to drain people's critical thinking skill, where even using it as a tool. Might just be atrophying our brains? Is there a world in which something that was made on the basis of being a derivative generator, could it ever create the next 808's and heartbreaks? I think most importantly, could the sentiment ever flip? With how loaded slop is and how much it harkens back to AI, with how aware people are of meaninglessness, because they're on guard for things that Are made by AI. And with all of the heaviness that that carries, all of the things that this technology seems to promise, that it wants to take away from us, our jobs, or making just a few people super wealthy and otherwise ruining the economy or the planet or the sociability of our generations. Could we overcome all of that in order to experiment with this technology enough to find a new music genre that we find value in? I guess we'll see, but I don't really think so. At least not right now, and at least not until the sentiment of AI as a whole meaningfully changes. And I really don't know when we're gonna see that happen.