by Kevin Barry
And he rolled a few photos for me to look at. First came the sole of a boot stuck in mud. Next came the interior – a long room behind the windows that contained lines of cages made of rusted tin bars.
What are those?
Cages for holding pigs. There were no old desks. There was no school. A farmer informed me this morning that it was a blooming creamery and after it closed, the new owner brought in the pigs.
Oh.
I was wrong, he said, forgive me.
No problem.
He took his camera to his eye to read the images.
So where are we for today? I asked him.
That’s a good question, he answered.
I turned the key. We sat there for a few moments with the engine running.
Smile, he said.
He turned the camera on me.
Pretend I’m not here, he said.
Okay.
In the flash I disappeared into the dark.
A second later we took off.
Maybe, he said.
Earworm
Julian Gough
I met TigerBalm on Star Wars Day, in one of 4chan’s manga forums. May the Fourth be with you. We sparked straight off. But a bunch of newfags kept making Bin Laden jokes I’d already heard twenty times on Twitter – it had been the anniversary of his death a couple of days earlier – so we swapped over to Skype and talked till dawn, my time.
We got our big idea that first night. He had a head cold, and sneezed something horrible onto his keyboard. It was so gross, I switched off video while he cleaned up. I’d had a Blondie song stuck in my brain all day, and while I waited, I sang the chorus, ‘Haaaaangin’, on the teeeeele, phooooooone, uh . . .’ He told me he hated Blondie. I told him I hated sneezes, and that every time he sneezed, I’d sing. He tried not to sneeze.
We were already thinking of working together, to build something. Game? App? Virus? Some kind of hack? But how could you do something truly outstanding? The world was full of better coders than us, with more resources. The sun was coming up, I was about to shut down for the night, when I realised, he’s humming my song. Heh. And then he sneezed again.
He sneezed the idea into being, it went off like an explosion in my head: hackers build viruses, but they only affect computers. Nature builds viruses, but you can’t spread them over the Internet. But a song is a virus that you can transmit, over the Internet, to human beings. And I was off . . .
*
TigerBalm was in Washington, DC. I was in Rathenow, one hour west of Berlin, and a couple of decades behind it. Soon we were talking every night. He kept me up late, but that was cool. My father didn’t like me going out since my brother had been arrested. Unfuckingbelievable, that they arrest the guys protesting against the Nazis. This is not Germany’s most enlightened town. The neo-Nazi dickheads I went to school with didn’t even know what it meant. It annoyed the police, that was enough.
I was trying to get the money to relocate to Berlin, but that’s hard in a town with no decent jobs. I’d been trying for three years, but I couldn’t seem to save, I spunked everything on equipment. Hard to resist, with the deals I could get from Broiler. Broiler was one of the few guys I’d got on well with in school. Not that he was there often. He took the train to Berlin most days, like a job. Stealing his way down a list. You just told him what you needed, negotiated a price. He could steal anything. He was a legend in Rathenow. So my bedroom filled up with computer gear, until I could hardly get in the door.
*
TigerBalm couldn’t see it at first, song as virus. He didn’t really get the manipulative genius of bad pop. I mean, Rebecca Black, ‘Friday’, I found that song hypnotic. It was terrible, a real piece of shit. And yet, ‘It’s Friday, Friday . . .’ I loved it. When everybody was crapping on her, and putting all those brutal comments up on Youtube, I was so angry I bought the single on iTunes. I think it was the first time I paid for music. But I had to, it was a vote for . . . Ach, I don’t know. Her innocence. Her stupid, totally commercially exploited and ruined, look-at-me, love-me, why-do-you-hate-me, all-American innocence.
That song, man. Because it was so crudely done, you could see, incredibly clearly, what they’d tried to do: mechanically build a perfect song out of parts of old hits. Like Frankenstein, trying to assemble a perfect man from the organs of dead criminals. Jolting it to life with electricity. They’d failed, horribly – ‘Friday’ was an ugly monster – but imagine it done well . . . Even with ‘Friday’, a lot of people pressed play again, straight after hearing it. For the wrong reasons, sure. But I started to wonder if you could write a song that forced you to press play again. That left you no option. Like a wire in a lab rat’s brain, BAM, pleasure, hit the button, BAM, pleasure, hit the button . . .
Me and TB would argue about this shit. We’d started spending a lot of time together. Two loners who wanted company, it worked out pretty good. We’d have these epic Skype video calls – four hours, six, eight – where we’d maybe talk twice. Mostly just work away on our shit. It was a lot more fun than listening to my father crying in the next room. Sometimes, I’d play something loud through the big Harman Kardon speakers I’d bought off Broiler, just to see how long before TB was humming it, singing it. I’d take notes.
I started to buy old vinyl 45s at the Flohmarkt in the Optikpark on Sundays. Made a rule: they had to have been number one in some country, any country. And I took my father’s vinyl out of the cellar. Kind of weird, listening to them again. Reminded me of Mum, and my dad before the accident.
I found I really liked some of their songs now, songs I’d hated back then. Listening to ‘The Winner Takes It All’, I couldn’t believe I’d hated it so much. All our arguments over Abba came back to me, and I closed my eyes. I wished I could go back and say sorry.
The Christmas I’d told my parents their taste in music sucked, because they wouldn’t let me play Rammstein on our hi-fi after dinner. Stormed out, slammed the living-room door, thumped up the stairs weeping. My mother had followed me up to my room. The argument had all been in German till then, but when she came into my room I swore at her in English. ‘Fuck you,’ I said. ‘You can’t stop the music.’
As soon as I’d said it, my eyes prickled with embarrassment, I felt a hot, sweaty wave of blushing across my face, down my back, it was such a stupid, American, fake thing to say. But, simultaneously, I meant it.
I’d never sworn at her before. Argued, sure, but never sworn.
She lost it, but she didn’t know how to lose it.
She grabbed the iPod off my table and then kind of stood there, shaking, stuck. She wanted to smash it, but it had cost too much. She couldn’t overcome a lifetime of conditioning and make the big gesture. I laughed at her and said, ‘Go ahead. I’ll just download them all again.’
She put it down carefully on the bed and walked out.
It broke something. She wasn’t really my mother after that. She was wary, sad. She never again told me what to do. Even when I wanted her to.
She died a few months later. We made it up, kind of, before she died, but I never took it back, never said sorry.
The winner takes it all.
The loser standing small.
Some of my tears fell onto my keyboard, and I had to use cotton buds to dry between the keys.
I put on one of my dad’s, the Rolling Stones – he didn’t like modern music – and a whole summer came back. Fishing on the Havel. Holidays in Blossin, in a hut in the forest. The communal dining room. The kids’ disco. Rain on the roof.
You can’t always get what you want.
And I realised there were variables I couldn’t control. The memories embedded in songs – they’re different for everyone. But there are general principles: summer hits encode summer memories – kisses, freedom, sunshine. Obvious, but a breakthrough. Before, I’d been trying to build the perfect song from scratch. But the stuff I built didn’t trigger anything. What I needed were samples that were rich in memories. Songs from hot sum
mers, and Christmas number ones . . .
I built the information into the database.
And I started to study catchiness. That was the key. Buggles, ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’. Listen, I’d say, they’ve put the internal rhyme on the same dropped note, listen: ‘In my MIND and in my car / We can’t reWIND, we’ve gone too far . . .’ and this, even better, ‘Pictures CAME and broke your heart / Put the BLAME on VCR . . .’ And the way ‘heart’ rhymes with the ‘Rrrrrrrrr . . .’ in VCR because by dragging out the VCRrrrrrrrrrr, you are satisfied at some level that the final ‘t’ will arrive eventually. So that rhyme continues through the song forever . . . Hey, what if you layered these unresolved rhymes, so that you had a dozen running by the end of the song, would that be catchy or what . . .
I got a little obsessive maybe.
TB hated this subjective shit, though, and tried to prove me objectively wrong. He built a mathematical model of the three-minute pop song. It took into account everything, and its relationship to everything else – notes, beats, chord changes, key changes, rhymes, metre, but a lot of subtle stuff too, which is important but doesn’t get talked about. Echo, the depth of the reverb. Hell, listen to Prince, ‘Kiss’ – totally dry, no reverb on anything, amazing . . . And TB’s model mapped the height of the vocal relative to the bass drum. The pitch of the vocal relative to the snare. The lag between drum and guitar. Because ultimately it’s not about the notes, the beats. It’s about the relationships.
The Rolling Stones were really interesting. The drums follow the lead guitar, and the lead guitarist doesn’t keep strict time. I’d throw TB’s data into an old Linux program for visualising data relations and graph it. ‘Satisfaction’ looked like a drunk coming home from a party. The analogue relationships – the ‘mistakes’ – gave the recordings their power. MIDI had fucked that up by mapping music onto a grid. Every element in a separate box. That put an upper limit on how catchy your song could be. My next breakthrough was finding a way to make the samples aware of each other, so they stretched and flowed together. And suddenly the samples sang and swayed.
Now to get the right samples.
To trigger the right states.
*
A traditional sample was no good: it was just a slice of everything playing at once. The brilliant piano run you wanted, plus the shitty vocal and tinny drum machine. So we had to strip out the other instruments, then repair any damage. Even with most of it automated, it was painstaking work, pulling a clean Robbie Shakespeare bass line out of an old Grace Jones track.
But TB was getting interested now, despite himself, because his mathematical model of the pop song kept proving my naive theories right, instead of wrong. We dug into the research that showed different kinds of music triggering different physiological reactions. But the data quality was surprisingly poor. Most studies treated the music as a crude generic input – it was ‘classical’, or ‘pop’, or ‘rock’. We needed much, much more detailed, fine-grained data.
So, he accessed a virtual brain, in the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and we demoed our samples on it. Did our own research.
And, bam. Yep. Oh, it was beautiful. The right beats, frequencies, certain sequences of notes, switched specific areas of the brain on and off like we’d pushed a button. So, okay, songwriters had always done this stuff. A key change, coming into the last chorus, makes the listener’s heart beat faster. But their approach was hit or miss, if you’ll pardon the joke. Intuitive. They didn’t really know what the hell they were doing. With this data, we could automate and optimise the process. Build the perfect pop song from the ground up.
Up until now, I’d had to deal with resistance from TigerBalm. He had exams, and strict parents, and this was taking up a lot of time. I mean, his real name was Cicero, which gives you the whole family picture. Also, like a lot of black middle-class geeks, he’d rejected accessible music along with the whole hip-hop-and-basketball stereotype. A serious dude, Stockhausen and bleeps. But, now, as we finished analysing the samples, TB changed his mind so suddenly and totally I thought I heard the static crackle in his hair. It was like a hard reset.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You’re right. It works. So, let’s build the ultimate pop song.’ He pushed back his chair and started to call up samples on his other machine. ‘A mathematically perfect three minutes. We can back-engineer it from all this data. Just reverse the algorithm. Instead of putting in the song and getting a read-out, let’s set the read-out to maximum pop, select samples and tracks that meet the criteria, optimise their relationships, and output the song.’
So we did it.
And, you know. Holy. Fuck.
We listened to it. And then we listened to it again.
I was shaking by the end of the second play.
I tried to be objective, break it down. Okay, there was some Paul McCartney in there, some Tupac . . .
But mostly I just wanted to play it again. It made me feel fucking incredible, I thought I was going to have a heart attack. Like poppers.
Did I feel this good because I’d helped build this song, or because the song would make anyone feel this good? TB was lying on his bed, laughing hysterically. We need civilians, I said. We need to check . . .
My brother was visiting. I pulled him away from Halo 4, and into my room. A good test subject, with no positive bias towards the song, because he was really pissed with me. I’d had to unplug him to get his attention, and he’d been a few seconds away from getting his last Xbox Live Achievement. (Killing Frenzy, for those who are interested.)
I put my good Sennheiser headphones on him, and hit play. My fingers were trembling. After a few seconds, I started to tidy the floor behind him, to give my hands something to do.
Three minutes later, he was punching my shoulder so hard that I dropped a Rolling Stones 45 and it rolled under the bed. He kept saying oh my god, oh my god, shaking his head, grinning. He put it on continuous play and started listening again.
TB was watching my brother on Skype.
It’s a serotonin reuptake inhibitor, said TB.
Like Prozac?
Like cocaine.
*
We listened to it till we got sick of it. Took a week, but eventually it burned itself out, like a fever. As I was coming down off it, I thought: but what if you didn’t get sick of it?
TB did the research. There was an area of the brain that changed, after a couple of hundred listens. It got chemically saturated, and nausea set in. You couldn’t listen to that stimulus until the brain had recovered. And you weren’t as vulnerable to that stimulus, afterwards, ever – you’d been vaccinated.
It looked like we were up against a natural limit. I started to think about that.
*
Well, it wasn’t perfect. The perfect song should stay perfect, no limits. But meanwhile, as a test run, we released it into the wild. Which had some peculiar consequences.
For the duration of the fever – when they were listening to our song fifty times a day – nobody bought other songs. The music industry took a big sales hit.
They should have just toughed it out – people weren’t going to listen to our song for ever. But the record companies were jumpy because no one had claimed responsibility. I mean, it was the most popular song on earth for a while, and it was free, and they didn’t know who’d done it. And their legit sales were being hammered. I think they thought, what if they do it again? And again?
So, they freaked. They lobbied government, the security agencies. They wanted our song treated as a virus. They wanted its release treated as domestic terrorism.
TB had a friend, a former hacker, who worked for some new, bullshit, cyber-intelligence agency in Maryland. He warned us a serious shit storm was coming.
We stopped processing our data on stolen server time. I’d been using a hacked Siemens corporate account that used the big Amazon Cloud server farm near Hamburg. TB had been using his dad’s passwords to authorise time on some completely underutilised Depa
rtment of Defense subcontractor’s farm. Too easy to trace it back to us. We needed to crunch our data offline, and in-house.
We needed more equipment.
TB borrowed, from his so-much-money-he-didn’t-give-a-fuck uncle at Goldman’s. His dad would have coughed up, but he didn’t want his dad to get suspicious. Especially given that his dad was in the D of D.
I went and asked for my shitty old job back. They were renovating a street of Plattenbauen, across from my old school. Replacing the crumbling concrete balconies, gutting the 1970s interiors, one big ugly building at a time. No job for a geek with coder’s muscles. The other guys were nice, mostly, but we had no common ground. They believed what they read in the papers, and what they read in the papers was football and tits. It was lonelier than sitting in my room. When I’d earned enough, after three weeks, I quit with a fake back injury to protect my Hartz IV payments, and ordered some equipment from Broiler.
For weeks, I worked on blocking that little neural safety circuit. Jamming the switch in the ‘on’ position.
And then I found the combination. A Fela Kuti beat, with a modification of an AC/DC riff. And, let’s say, a secret ingredient. As they went in and out of phase, they set off harmonics. And the harmonics caused a regular, slow physiological reaction in the hippocampus, a chemical pulse that flushed out the toxins which normally built up and triggered the switch.
You couldn’t get sick of it.
When we tested it on the virtual brain, everything lit up. EVERYTHING. It was as though we’d found the right frequency of strobe light to trigger an epileptic attack. We ran the song on fast forward, a hundred times, two hundred, five hundred plays. The gimme-more area stayed lit up, even though other areas were burning out all around it. ‘That’d hurt,’ said TB, studying the depleted brain. Six hundred plays. A thousand . . . Still triggering the desire to press play.
‘Shit,’ I said, after a while. TB said nothing.
Another area burned out, somewhere at the base of the neocortex.
