making love to the cry of Cbat, the robot dolphin
the finger of fame gave the pop music industry another reminder of why its core purpose (the promotion and selling of records) is increasingly irrelevant in this ’ere internet age.
ever the fickle fonderer, it really could molest any musical artist at any moment, in ways no one can foresee, all for the purpose of serving The Timeline.
not that it is a bad thing necessarily, as DJ Hudson Mohawke has discovered. a decade-old song of his, Cbat, went viral recently thanks to a Reddit post in which a 25-year-old user going by the name u/TylerLife ‘admitted that he enjoys making love to the rhythm of [it]’, but is peeved that his partner took over two years to tell him she hates it (MixMag).
please read this and then listen to the song. you are not prepared for the song pic.twitter.com/MZTlNfFJDC
— cait.bsky.social (@punished_cait) September 2, 2022
social media unanimously ripped it out of him, except me, because i do not judge. you can listen to the track to see for yourselves whether the song suits your *ahem* purposes.
Hudson Mohawke, on the other hand, has been rewarded with millions of streams of his songs on all platforms, raising his profile in ways he never could have expected (mainly via countless TikTok parodies). judging by his reactions to the story, HudMo appears self-aware enough to acknowledge the silliness of whole affair, coining the episode ‘the dumbest timeline of all’ for a song that sounds to some like robot dolphin sounds.
but in streaming terms, any publicity is good publicity: in the last week i have listened to the rest of the 2011 release that Cbat comes from (Satin Panthers), revisited his earlier work, and will probably listen to his latest album at some point too, that just happens to have come out last month. Cry Sugar is better for sex, so he says in jest, allegedly. you may wish to take that claim with a pinch of salt: Hudson Mohawke has a, well, somewhat perverse approach to melody, one that pits him in the small but prominent electronic world of Scottish DJs as a kind of Wario figure against Calvin Harris’s Mario. his technicolour productions suggest a commendable attempt to balance the garish and tacky with a glitchy kind of funk for the dancefloor and have maximum fun whilst doing so. he definitely owns a wardrobe full of kimonos he wears to studio sessions.
most of all, the Cbat story proves that you really can’t predict what Art people get turned on to or by. it reminds me of a conversation i had long ago with an artist who was guarded about his output. he was vehemently against the idea that his music should ever be misinterpreted by audiences, as if he could — through sheer force of will — prohibit such blasphemy himself.
i thought this naïve at best, nigh impossible to do successfully, and — given the potential for beneficial outcomes — narrow-minded, and in any case, do you know the meaning of every song you’ve heard? i don’t — i often get lyrics wrong — and i don’t care. and who would [regulate] the pleasure a listener gets from (mis)interpreting a song?
Trombaleese. https://t.co/MiGUnESWou
— James B (@piercepenniless) August 27, 2022
i doubt i would care if i were on the other end of the cultural exchange either. well, i’d try not to. if i had released a tune that ended up getting used for a purpose outside of its original intention, i’d like to think that i (and my big fat royalty cheque) would simply laugh about it all the way to the bank. HudMo appears to have taken a similar approach, according to his Spotify account.
hudmospotifystrokegame.jpg
but i must concede one point to my old friend: the potential for bad outcomes is also a big enough threat for every artist to have a tolerance threshold for misappropriation of their work. what if one of your songs became associated with something you thought abominable, like a politician’s electoral campaign?
well… then i’d take the money! while condemning the move, of course. and threatening legal action over any lack of payment. what did you expect? it’s the capitalist way, baby! Cash Rules Everything Around Me, i’m only here for the CREAM.
anyway, expect Cbat to get played at a future presidential rally where the main theme happens to be about abortion, for the us army to use it as a torture device for prisoners of war, for scientists to play the song to actual dolphins to see it does indeed turn them on, and for the rest of us… well, by the time you’ve read this article, there will almost certainly have been a rise in the number of streams of Cbat from Spotify sex playlists, to the owners of which HudMo would be right to ask: ‘who is being perverse now?’