The Trap Internationale

The Face is no more - again.

Which is sad.

But they've also taken down their website, leaving no trace of pieces written in its second incarnation. 

I think I only did the one - but it was one I thought was one of my best in recent years.

So here it is below: a piece about trap and its internationalization. 

They didn't use the "Trap Internationale" headline, which is understandable but I did mourn the loss of the idea of this being a pan-global counter-revolutionary movement. Irresistible to listen to even if it manifested a "principle of hopelessness" (to twist Ernst Bloch's "principle of hope"). 

This is the true musical expression of everything that Mark Fisher critiqued in Capitalist Realism (did he not in fact say something like "hip hop is the problem" - or was that just on the blog?).  

Well, Capitalist Realism does actually more or less kick off from 1996 comments of mine about the neo-Hobbesian ideology of realness and "the Real" in gangsta rap and the darker strains of jungle and drum 'n' bass (techstep etc).

"Principle of hope" is Bloch's term for a subcurrent of utopianism that informs a whole range of human expression, from literature and art to fairy tales to religion to music to...  All of them contain some sense that the world could be different, better, re-enchanted... 

Perhaps the word for trap is not counter-revolutionary but counter-utopian...  although it finds a profane utopia in the privatized dream of fame, glory,  luxury.... a  pornofantasia of excess and dominance... 

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Trap world: how the 808 beat dominated contemporary music

The Face, November 18, 2019. 

“Cookin’ up dope with a Uzi.” Gangsta gritty yet cartoon-absurd, the image of stirring a crockpot of crack with the butt of a machine gun is just one of the memorable lines racing by in "Bad and Boujee", a song by the Atlanta trio Migos that reached #1 in Billboard in January 2017. The ​“boujee” celebrates a nouveau riche notion of high class: cash flashed on the most flagrant status symbol brands like Porsches and Pateks. But as Migos’s Offset gloats at the start of the song, ​“We ain’t really never had no old money/​We got a whole lotta new money though.” The video shows the group hanging at a fast food place, their girls laden with exquisite finery but dining on KFC and Pot Noodle. The track itself, produced by in-demand Atlanta producer Metro Boomin, sounds simultaneously street spartan and luxuriant. The voices – the loping, forward-tumbling flow that Migos patented – hypnotise and hook the listener. As addictive as the drugs they claim to sell, "Bad and Boujee" has now been streamed around 1.5 billion times on YouTube and Spotify.

The sound is called trap and it has dominated popular music all through the 2010s. Migos and their peers – rappers like Future, 21 Savage, Playboi Carti, 2 Chainz, and Cardi B and producers like Metro Boomin, Zaytoven, Southside, Mike WiLL Made-It – mostly come from either Atlanta or other Southern cities. But their beats and flows and production tricks have proliferated across the globe.

This decade trap has infiltrated pop music, from Katy Perry’s baleful 2013 smash "Dark Horse" to songs on Miley Cyrus’ Bangerz album (executively produced by Mike WiLL) and more recent hits by Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish. Trap has also inspired mutant underground and street forms, from the EDM substyle (also confusingly called trap) of slamming instrumentals like Baauer’s 2012 viral monster "Harlem Shake", to entire subcultures like drill. The latter, a morose form of trap which peaked as violent crime increased in Chicago, went on to inspire a generation of UK drillers. Mediated by the hallucinatory hellscapes of Chicago drill as pioneered by Chief Keef, the UK version is essentially a South London chapter of trap. But the productions by beatmakers like Carns Hill have a British stamp, with trace elements of jungle and UK garage in the oozy bass and looped piano grandeur (interestingly, the London sound has inspired a burgeoning Brooklyn drill scene, with UK producer 808Melo producing most the tracks by breakout rapper Pop Smoke). The gangster nihilism has a local character too, with lyric after lyric fixated on knives and stabbings. Dripping and splashing in UK drill means blood on pavements, unlike in American trap where it signifies looking incandescent with money.

Trap is a sound, a worldview, a life-stance. But before all that it was a word: the name for the place where drugs are sold. Often an abandoned house, the trap typically has a single entrance/​exit, making it a more secure fortress against attacks by rival gangs. ​“Trap”, because it’s a lure for addicts, but there’s also the submerged implication that the lifestyle of dealing is itself a trap: money simply too good to quit, despite the cumulative costs of paranoia and the subliminal spectre of early death. Trap also sounds like the right name for this sound, its clipped, staccato feel resembling the snappy quality of the genre’s sharp snare and hi-hat patterns.

The term was popularised in the 2000s by Atlanta rappers T.I., Young Jeezy and Gucci Mane – whose 2005 LP Trap House was the first of 13 albums and mixtapes by him to feature the word trap. Like those earlier Southern black sounds that took the world by storm – jazz and blues – it started as a lowdown sound with a disreputable aura: the soundtrack in strip clubs and other places where gangsters go to relax and squander their spoils.

As trap has risen to mainstream dominance, its emphasis has shifted away from ​“work hard” (the grind of drug selling and turf-protecting) to ​“play hard”. According to Alex Tumay, a recording engineer who has worked closely with Metro Boomin and the freakily inventive rapper Young Thug, and was involved with Travis Scott’s early music, this is just a different facet of trap’s obsessive authenticity: ​“The topics in trap have a lot to do with honesty. The more successful they get, the more they rap about where they are right now” – the post-gig all-night hotel party, the top-shelf liquor and drugs and women, rather than the tense monotony of drug selling.

 The sound of trap has evolved too: from the barebones bombast of the 2000s to the sinuous and slinky ooze that, in the hands of artists like Travis Scott, becomes almost a form of ambient music. The abiding cornerstone of trap is the beat. Its roots go far back, all the way to ​‘80s electro and the Roland 808 drum machine. Where New York rap followed the path of sampled and looped breakbeats, the South stuck with programmed rhythms. When the party-oriented, shake-that-ass sounds of Miami bass and New Orleans bounce fused with gangsta rap lyrics, trap was born. You recognise trap as a sound, or an influence, from the hi-hats, which run at double-time (or even faster) to the 75-beats-per-minute of the hard-hitting kick drums. There’s a coiled tension and snake-like hiss to those rapid, intricate hi-hat patterns, while rat-a-tat snares conjure a military, parade-ground feel. Today’s trap producers don’t use hardware drum machines anymore, but they create that same dead-and-dry grid-like sound within their computers. On the most fundamental level of function, the bass-boom, the ear-tickling hi-hats, and the louche swagger of the music make trap the go-to party sound of the 2010s.

 The other crucial component of trap in the 2010s is the lush weave of Auto-Tuned vocals draped over the bass-booming groove. Pitch-correction technology like Auto-Tune has blurred the border between rapping and singing. ​“A lot of people who aren’t inherently singers could explore different melodic patterns,” says Tumay, whose engineering forte is vocal processing. ​“Auto-Tune gave them the confidence to do it. The technology has given us a lot of new melodies, new cadences.” Instead of applying Auto-Tune to their vocals after the fact, MCs like Future use it in real-time; hearing their processed voices through headphones in the studio booth, they’ve learned how to push the effect to extremes. With Young Thug, Travis Scott and Migos’s Quavo, the voice becomes like an instrument, spiralling into blissful trills and moans that sound as ornamented as Arabic music and oddly religious in feeling, at odds with the profane subject matter of the songs.

 Although funny, outrageous images and contagious slang fills these songs, trap is not as oriented around narrative or sustained flights of lyricism as the more self-consciously literate forms of rap – the tradition that runs from Rakim to Kendrick Lamar. The crooning MCs of today are more about texture than text. Some old guard rappers and rap fans bemoan this as a decline from the glorious heights of yesteryear, but it’s more the case that invention and personality have moved into a different area of expression. Take the ad lib, one of the most exciting features in trap. A sort of ​“backing rap”, where a second MC repeats a keyword from each line, interjects a complementary catchphrase, or emits a sound effect or a noise suggestive of exertion or ecstasy, the ad lib has brought an almost choral quality to trap music, an interweaving of vocal parts that in the hands of a trio like Migos can be as swoon-inducing as classic doowop.

 As the selling of drugs has dipped into the background of trap, the drugginess of the sound has come to the fore: hip-hop staples like weed and codeine-laced cough syrup have been joined by prescription drugs like Xanax and Percocet. All of these drugs, and others like Molly (MDMA) are endlessly namechecked by MCs but more crucially they shape the woozy glisten of the sound, whose rippling electronic motifs often recall IDM artists like Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada. As Tumay says, it’s the birth of a new kind of psychedelia, but one that’s far bleaker than its ​‘60s predecessor: Xans and Perkys are pain-killing and anxiety-deadening drugs. Lil Uzi Vert’s emo-trap hit "XO Tour Llif3" features the plaintive couplet ​“Xanny, help the pain, yeah /​Please, Xanny, make it go away” and pivots on the catchy hook ​“all my friends are dead /​push me to the edge”. Trap is the supreme manifestation of what cultural theorist Mark Fisher called ​“depressive hedonism”, that hollow feeling of numb ennui as you pour expensive liquor down your throat while sporting a mansion’s worth of jewelry on your wrist. Having a spiritual void has become the ultimate status symbol in rap.

 As if to seal trap’s displacement of rock as this era’s preeminent music of rebellion and dissolute excess, in the 2010s rappers hijacked the concept of ​“rockstar” and made it their own, and the fans moshed accordingly. Hence Post Malone’s dirge-like Rockstar, the gloriously impudent Black Beatles by Rae Sremmurd and Future calling himself ​“Future Hendrix”. This decade, rap fashion has referenced rock star aesthetics, with artists ditching baggy attire for leather jackets, skinny jeans and merch which features heavy metal graphics. Trap today supplies what the Stones and Led Zep once did: a fantasy of life without constraints. And millions of fans across the world can’t get enough.

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 "Pull Up" is a trap tune that came out in 2018, a few years after Bad and Boujee. But it was made half the way across the globe from Atlanta by the Slovakian rapper Samey, with guest MCs Ego and Yzomandias (from the neighbouring Czech Republic). Released on the leading Central European trap label Fck Them, "Pull Up" has the trap sound down: it bounces irresistibly, and Samey’s chorus hook is a potent earworm. But where American trap videos feature sleek sci-fi cars, flowing champagne, and scantily clad girls at poolside parties, Samey’s video can’t quite match its aspirations. They’ve got hold of a car with the requisite suicide doors, but the backdrop is a grey Bratislava cityscape of flatblocks and road beneath a freeway flyover. Despite gold teeth and chains and lots of ink, the crew’s clothes don’t reach Migos levels of futuristic flash.

 “Yzo is the original /​Yzo is not a remake” asserts the bouncing Czech MC Yzomandias. That is neither completely true nor completely false: the inspiration is overwhelming American and specifically Atlantan, from the flows to the slang (references to ​“guap” or money). Academics have an ugly word, ​“glocal,” to describe this syndrome: globalised entertainment formats colliding with native cultures. Yet simply through the translation process, the cadences of the Slovakian and Czech languages, and the rappers’ reserves of verve, it comes out different. Despite clear intent to emulate and a ravenous desire to pull it off, "Pull Up" is not quite the real thing – and all the better for it.

 A few years ago, I went on a trip that passed through several different European nations, during which I met up with a series of old friends. The conversation invariably turned to our kids and what they were into musically. The answer, no matter the country, was always ​“trap!” And it was during these conversations that I learned that every single territory had its own local version.

 In France, PNL are huge stars with their mournfully sonorous fusion of trap and variété. Reggaeton-trap fusions pervade Latin America. You can hear trap coming out of cars or bazaars from Morocco to the Indian subcontinent. But nowhere is trap stronger than in Central Europe. Poland’s SB MAFFIJA label scored 137 million streams during the first six months of 2019 while the rapper Taco Hemingway partnered with pop singer Dawid Podsiadlo to fill the country’s sixty-thousand-capacity National Stadium. Trap squads like MO฿฿YN and MCs like Szpaku Szpaku and Kaz Balagne bypass the radio and TV to reach hordes of fans direct through YouTube and Instagram.

 In the Czech Republic, the leading label /​trap collective is Milion+. According to music critic Miloš Hroch, their sound is ​“transnational in its nature and core, with no trace of the local in their music videos, just the language of luxury brands and antidepressant pills”. Hroch points to the rural outfit Opak Dissu as an example of Czech rap that is rooted in lived realities rather than ​“straight outta Atlanta” fantasy. Opak’s ASAP Jarda once told Hroch that he believes ​“copying America here is bizarre. Half of Czech rappers live at their mom’s place and the second half is at the University. For me traplife is about going to the factory everyday and my roots in the village. We rob that [Atlanta] sound but we fill it with our stories.”

 There’s also the Roma rapper Dollar Prync, whose lyrics deal with small-time crime – robbery, street scuffles between gangs – and life as a member of a minority treated with prejudice and discrimination. His song Okamura Skap disses the xenophobic Czech politician Tomio Okamura: ​“Gypsies, Russians, Vietnamese are sharpening their knives on you – Okamura, die”, he spits, denouncing the stereotypes peddled by far-right politicians that immigrants are parasites sucking up social benefits. ​“Meanwhile you motherfuckers are fucking millions into your own pockets.”

 In Italy, the outfit Dark Polo Gang became the vortex of a debate among rap fans and critics. Decried as a mindless decline from rap’s glory days by some, they are celebrated ironically by others as simulation-trap given unexpected substance thanks to genuinely impressive beats by producer Sick Luke. Dark Polo Gang’s videos for hits like "Cono Gelato" hover in a zone somewhere between mimicry and parody: a miasma of gold grills, SUVs, and hand guns stuck down the elasticated waist of swimming trunks.

 Damir Ivic, a historian of Italian rap, says that his country’s first wave of homegrown hip-hop rap in the ​‘90s, known as the ​“Posse movement”, had a more quirky native character. ​“It was quite different from the rest of Europe, encapsulating reggae, ska, and patchanka – for a few years we felt like there was a cohesive alternative scene.” But he argues that the new breed of trap-inspired rappers like Dark Polo Gang, Sfera Ebbasta, and Young Signorino has ​“nearly zero Italian flavour” and consists of ​“tattooed youngsters moaning about success and/​or drugs and/​or being wasted” just like their emo-tinged, fashion conscious counterparts in Sweden like Yung Lean. As in some other countries, Italian trap has triggered mainstream media concern, especially following the death of six kids at a Sfera Ebbasta concert. Pickpockets used ammonia or other caustic sprays to create panic and make it easier to rob people. An emergency exit collapsed in the stampede. ​“Suddenly a connection between such a tragic accident and the ​‘evil-ish’ soul of trap music has been made,” observes Ivic wryly.

Euro-Trap also gets criticised by fans of conscious hip-hop who bemoan its apolitical hedonism, its sexism and materialism. A raw, non-ideological anti-authority stance can be found here and there: Austria’s Yung Hurn’s "Fick Die Polizei", which needs no translation, comes with a video woven out of hand-held footage of rioting anarchists, burning police cars, and tear gas. But Hurn has also put out more standard trap-themed tunes like "Ferrari", "Stoli", the salacious "Ponny" and "Skrt Skrt", the latter titled after Migos’s famous ​“tires skidding” ad lib.

 “We are speaking the language of today’s youth,” said Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican reggaeton-trap artist who featured in Cardi B’s huge hit "I Like It". A genre born in black America embraced by young people across the world and a sound that indicates a rebellious attitude, trap has indeed become a kind of pop Esperanto. Esperanto translates as ​“one who hopes” – the language was invented in the hopes of fostering universal brotherhood.

Yet trap, beneath its brash self-confidence, is based on a disillusionment in which hope for collective advancement is not a form of audacity but delusion. Trap sees life as feral – something captured in "Bad and Boujee" when Offset describes his gang as ​“savage, ruthless”. In this war of all against all, you’re either a victor or a victim – and the social odds are stacked against you becoming one of the winning few rather than the ​“losing” many. As visions of life go, it’s bleak and it’s depoliticising. The fact that it resonates so strongly all across the world – particularly in the formerly Communist countries of Eastern Europe, those that have adjusted most harshly to American-style free market economics – is revealing.

 If trap became the defining sound of the 2010s, it’s because it captured the pathologies of our era – the glamour of money, the lure of fame as an individualistic escape route, the decadence of self-medicating hedonism – and welded them to the ultimate party soundtrack. It’s fitting that the decade’s dominant and most addictive sound should derive its name from the place where drugs are sold. The irrepressible and inexhaustible generation of new flows, fresh slanguage, and startling production tricks collides with a stock set of themes and a beat that is instantly recognisable. Trap as the changing same, as a music that keeps reinventing itself even as it serves the base function it always has, is a fitting metaphor for our times.

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That's the piece as originally run on the Face website. But there was a different harsher ending originally:

 As Lil Uzi Vert, guesting on “Bad and Boujee”, put it: “You know we winnin' / Yeah, we is not losin’”.  It’s a grim, depoliticizing worldview, and by glamorizing it, trap is helping to make the rest of the world steadily more like America. 

At the moment, trap – indisputably the sonic vanguard of mainstream pop – is locked in a vicious cycle: the desire of the underclass to become overlords. MCs could hardly be more explicit in their declaration of this deadly intent. In her #1 single “Bodak Yellow”, Cardi B talks about leaving behind stripping for rapping just like her spouse Offset talks about leaving behind trapping for rapping: “I don't gotta dance, I make money move… I'm a boss, you a worker, bitch, I make bloody moves.”

Listening to trap is paradoxical: immense creativity, flair, flamboyance, life-force, slamming right up against a deadening set of thematic constraints, somehow magically rewriting and re-rewriting the stale script into inexhaustible freshness. An absolute wealth of brilliance, an utter poverty of imagination.  Rae Sremmurd may rap about being  “Black Beatles”, but we’re a million miles from “All You Need Is Love” and “Imagine.” 

The politics of trap revealed themselves, unfortunately, on the earlier Sremmurd single “Up Like Trump”, released in 2015. Swae Lee raps about reading Forbes like the Bible, Slim Jxmmi describes himself as a “money fiend,” and in the video, a Donald mask-wearing figure parties with the duo on the open top of a bus riding through Times Square. Speaking to Complex magazine at the time, Lee declared, “Donald Trump is cool…. I’m like, ‘That’s a cool motherfucker.’ He’s rich as fuck.”  In a Guardian profile after their role model was elected, the duo defined Trumpism as “owning businesses, being bossed up” and seemed to have no regrets about making the song. 

Rejecting party politics for apolitical partying, Jxmmi said that “young people wanna rage”. Sremmurd and their fans are about “living lit” and banging “our heads against the wall”. It’s a fitting cap to the trap decade: a President whose taste runs to nouveau riche glitz, who runs the White House like a Mafioso. 

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Around this time, I did three other pieces that summed up the 2010s - one on streaming, another on 'conceptronica', and a third on ambient and New Age. The latter had a paragraph in it about trap that got cut out and adds to the analysis here:

 Beyond the boom in blissed-out soundscapes, the 2010s has seen a sort of ambient-izing of other genres - including some that would seem to be politically and philosophically about as distant from New Age values as imaginable, such as trap and its variants such as UK drill. Lyrically, it’s toxic masculinity a-go-go: the same old shit of egomania, misogyny,  commodity-fetishism, and violence. Yet the music has an ambient quality, draping glistening wooze over the hard beats-and-bass, with wistful melody-riffs looping endlessly in a way that recalls the more idyllic kinds of Nineties IDM. In many ways, trap is one of the last bastions of minimalism on the radio. 

You could call it Ambien music, after the sedative-hypnotic prescription drug, given the way that the trap MCs incessantly reference pain-killing, anxiety-deadening drugs like Percoset and Xanax. Although ostensibly taken as illegal highs, you have to wonder why this genre is so thoroughly steeped in affects like numbness and indifference, why its MCs seem so glazed and oddly passive.  Auto-Tune etherializes rappers like Quavo from Migos, Rich the Kid, Playboi Carti (with his famous “baby” voice) and Young Thug to the point where they sometimes seem barely-there:  angelic boy-men whose ego-boundaries are melting in the drug haze.  The generic nature of the beats and the restricted range of timbres… the relative indistinguishability of MCs, which is further exacerbated by Auto-Tune… the repetitious themes and tropes and vocal tricks…  these are not bugs but features. Trap is designed for immersive and inattentive listening, purpose-built to slip back into being background music, a soundtrack to driving or chilling. It achieves its effect  through accumulative homogeneity. 

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On a different post about trap, the commenter Luke had some interesting thoughts about mumble rap and a new male subjectivity in hip hop:

Regarding the dichotomy between 'conscious' hip hop and mumble rap, it is a necessary distinction, but I like to think of mumble rap as 'unconscious' hip hop not because it is anti-woke or anti-progressive, but in the psychoanalytic sense. If conscious hip hop is superego music, and the majority of other hip hop ego music, mumble rap is id music. From all the non-verbal sounds, the adlibs, the mumbling and so on, to those problematic lyrics which often come across as more the product of free association than conscious boasting.

To which, I replied: 

I like the idea about it being 'unconscious' rap, stream of unconsciousness, letting fantasy and the id come out to play.  The ecstastic blurry moans and gurgles and the tourettic ad libs, they seem to release psycholibidinal energy in spurts and spasms, it's very much some Kristeva semiotic material being let loose, strings and blobs of jouissance....  the babyvoice Playboi Carti just makes the regressive tendency manifest

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Even more thoughts on trap here  and here 

Searching for the Sound of Now (published as The Songs of Now Sound A Lot Like Then)

New York Times, July 17, 2011

by Simon Reynolds

ONCE pop music was something by which you could tell the decade, or even the year. But listening to the radio nowadays is disorienting, if you’re searching for a sound that screams, “It’s 2011!”

Take the biggest hit of the year, Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep.” The song is basically 1960s rhythm-and-blues tightened up with modern production. Everything about “Rolling” — its melody and lyrics, Adele’s delivery and timbre, the role played by the backing vocalists — gestures back to a lost golden age of soul singers like Etta James and Dusty Springfield. Then there’s Cee-Lo Green’s “F*** You,” a hit from last year that’s still on the radio, and which moves a decade nearer the present through being steeped in the ’70s soul of acts like the Staple Singers.

Elsewhere on Top 40 radio you’ll hear a lot of brash, pounding songs that sound like ’90s club music. Recent smashes by performers like Black-Eyed Peas, LMFAO, Kesha, Pitbull, Taio Cruz, Jennifer Lopez and Britney Spears recall the “hip house” sound of hitmakers like Technotronic and C&C Music Factory, or mid-’90s trance anthems by Paul Van Dyk and B T. It may require a mental exercise to bring out the true weirdness of this development: Imagine how peculiar it would have been if in the early ’90s the charts were suddenly flooded with music that sounded exactly like ’70s disco.

Figures like Lady Gaga and groups including the Black Eyed Peas reach even further back and throw ’80s flavors into the ’90s Eurohouse mix: the resemblance between Madonna’s “Express Yourself” and Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” was widely noted on its release this year. “Just Can’t Get Enough” by the Black Eyed Peas references Styx’s “Mr. Roboto,” while their song “The Time” borrows its chorus from Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes’s “(I’ve Had) the Time of My Life.”

Much of this déjà entendu dancepop is exciting in its crass, energy-drink-blast kind of way. So why does the aural overfamiliarity matter? Well, up until the 2000s pop decades always had epoch-defining sounds. Two or three (sometimes more) genres would emerge to achieve dominance or, at the very least, prominence in the mainstream. Musical styles usually build on the past to some degree, but these genres always took their sources in striking and fresh directions, and they often wrapped the music up in subcultural garb, with a distinct fashion element, new rituals and dance moves, and so forth.

The ’70s generated heavy metal, punk, disco, reggae and more. The ’80s spawned hip-hop, synthpop and Goth. The ’90s had grunge and the techno/rave/electronic explosion. But the decade and a bit that followed the turn of the millennium has produced — well, what exactly? Hip-hop and R&B have built incrementally, at times imperceptibly, on where they were at during the ’90s. Emo is a tuneful and melodramatic merger of pop-punk and Goth. True, if you venture into the musical left field, you will find various underground genres that can claim at least relative freshness: grime and dubstep in Britain, the post-indie sounds of Animal Collective and similar bands in America. But their effects on mainstream pop music has been minimal.

Those who don’t have much personal investment in the idea that popular music should always be pushing forward probably won’t be especially troubled by the current pop scene’s muddled mix of stasis and regression. But those whose expectations have been shaped by growing up during more fast-moving and ever-changing pop decades — which is basically all of them to date except for the 2000s — are likely to be perplexed and disheartened by these developments. In particular the innovation-obsessed ’60s and the cyber-optimistic ’90s instilled an ideal of pop music as herald of the future, a vanguard sector of the culture that was a little bit ahead of the rest of society.

The fading of newness and nowness from pop music is mystifying. But in the last couple of years a concept has emerged that at least identifies the syndrome, even if it doesn’t completely explain it. Coined by the co-founders of cyberpunk fiction William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, “atemporality” is a term for the disconcerting absence of contemporaneity from so much current pop culture. This curious quality can be detected not just in pop music but in everything from fashion to graphic design to vintage chic.

A prime example of atemporality is the fad for photography apps like Hipstamatic and Instagram, which digitally simulate the period atmosphere of pictures taken in the ’70s or ’80s, using the cameras and film stock of the time. Instant-nostalgia snapshots are part of a culture-wide fascination with outmoded technology and “dead media” (Mr. Sterling’s term) that encompasses everything from the cults for manual typewriters and cassettes to the steampunk movement’s fetish for Victoriana to the recent movie “Super 8.”

Mr. Sterling sees the time-out-of-joint nature of today’s pop as a side effect of digiculture. One of the curiosities of the futuristic-seeming information technology that we now enjoy is that it has dramatically increased the presence of the past in our lives. From YouTube to iTunes, from file-sharing blogs to Netflix, the sheer volume and range of back catalogue music, film, TV and so forth that is available for consumption is astounding.

We can access all this stuff with incredible speed and convenience, share it and store it with minimal effort. But a potential downside of this sudden “affluence” is a flood of influences that can overwhelm the imagination of young musicians, who are absorbing five decades of pop history in a frenetic jumble. Their attention is also being competed for by music from outside the Anglophone rock and pop traditions, everything from West African guitarpop to Soviet New Wave music to Ethiopian electronic funk from the 1980s.

The musical omnivorousness that the Internet has encouraged and enabled is one reason atemporality is even more pronounced when you listen to alternative radio stations, which specialize in music by bands that consciously aim to have broad taste and to develop unusual portfolios of influences. Listen to KCRW (89.9 FM), the NPR-affiliated station in Los Angeles whose programming often wanders between genres and decades, leaving listeners to wonder if a particular track was recorded in 2011 or in 1981, or in 1971.

A few weeks ago the station played a gorgeously dreamy tune whose rippling, dewy-with-reverb keyboard part and yearningly melodic bass line seemed uncannily redolent of late ’70s Fleetwood Mac. Was this actually a lost Mac song circa 1977’s “Rumours”? Or was it an offering from one of the growing number of contemporary indie bands influenced by ’70s soft rock? The song turned out to be “Roscoe” by Midlake, a group of 21st-century soft-rockers from Denton, Tex. But it was a remixed version made by the British outfit Beyond the Wizard’s Sleeve with clear intent to bring out further the Fleetwood Mac-iness of the song. And then, to show they were in on it, the programmers at KCRW followed “Roscoe” by playing “Rhiannon.”

That 1976 Fleetwood Mac hit is the kind of staple tune you’d normally hear on a classic rock station rather than KCRW, whose sensibility is like a slightly more adult version of the online hip music magazine Pitchfork. And this shows how atemporality has not just jumbled up the decades, it’s eroded the barriers between genres. The iPod shuffle is the era’s defining music technology. One result on the radio dial is the rise of formats like Jack FM that seemingly mimic a middle-aged man’s iPod in shuffle mode: a restless drifting that nevertheless stays within defined taste limits.

The iPod shuffle and similar digital platforms for music listening have a contradictory result: on the one hand it serves to erode the historical divisions between kinds of music by its decontextualizing effect, on the other hand it enables fans to avoid entirely music they don’t like. So the programming on Jack FM (whose slogan is “Playing what we want”) slips back and forth between ’70s and ’80s, Old Wave and New Wave, with occasional excursions into the late ’60s (Hendrix, Creedence) or the ’90s (Sublime, Smashing Pumpkins). It’s a world where hip-hop and techno-rave never happened, but also where ZZ Top and the Clash are no longer on opposing sides.

Does the atemporality of so much modern pop music mean that when in the future we listen back to early-21st-century pop, we won’t be able to identify a sound that characterizes the period? Fans often identify periods of pop by their production hallmark. So they’ll talk (usually to complain) about ’80s drum sounds. If there’s a modern equivalent, it’s the superhumanly perfect vocals featured in so much current pop and rock thanks to Auto-Tune, the pitch-correction processor made by Antares Audio Technologies.

The slickness of Auto-Tuned singing seems to have a similar aesthetic quality to the design of smartphones and MP3-players and other hand-held gadgets, or to the C.G.I. effects in modern Hollywood blockbusters and the glossy hyper-real imagery in video games. Auto-Tune vocals even seem a bit sci-fi. Which is why in one Black Eyed Peas song Will.i.am sings, in heavily processed tones, about how he’s got “that future flow/that digital spit” (not a reference to saliva, but to rapping). Take away the Auto-Tune sheen, though, and there’s little about Black Eyed Peas records to indicate they weren’t made in the ’90s. The same applies to other recent dance pop smashes by the likes of Taio Cruz, Kesha and Lady Gaga.

Pop music in the 2000s may not have made any huge strides on a formal level (the way songs are written, grooves constructed and so forth), but on this cosmetic level of the digital gloss that’s been applied to the vocals you could say that it does sound of its time. (Which is also why the rasp of Adele and Cee-Lo Green is a deliberate throwback to the era of vocal grit and grain, a bid for “timelessness.”)

For better or worse Auto-Tune is the date stamp of today’s pop: it will date badly, and then it will go through all the stages of starting to see charmingly quaint, cute, cool. Who knows, at some point in the near future it might well become a revivable sound, embraced first by early adopter hipsters who will hunt down “vintage” Auto-Tune plug-ins in the same way that they currently collect antique synthesizers and old-fashioned valve amplifiers.