A fictional band called HUNTR/X just topped the charts, and while some parts of the musical elements are human-generated, the band, the songs, and the movie from which the band originates all indicate that acceleration into a global, mediocre, and homogenized sim world is palatable for huge swaths of the world audience.
The hit song, “Golden,” is a sterile masterwork in modern musical homogeneity. The hooks, the bridge, and musical acumen are all risk- and invention-free. With a few minor tweaks, it could be a country song. Remix it, and it plays in dance clubs in NYC or on a seniors’ cruise ship. In viewing some of the social media response — and this is the disturbing part — it actually is being played in most of those milieus and venues.
Monoculture.
The hit song has logged about 6 billion listens across all platforms. The scope is unprecedented.
Unlike the entirely fake AI band Velvet Sundown, which made a splash earlier this year, the HUNTR/X band is — so it would seem — technically real, at least in the sense that humans actually sang and played physical instruments. We have a lot of precedent for fictional bands or musicians situated in shows and movies making a leap into their own form of quasi-independent success. “John Denver and the Muppets: A Christmas Together” was a major hit, as one example, where most of the human talent was disguised behind puppet masks. (John Denver excepted.)
The HUNTR/X and “KPop Demon Hunters” episode seems a far cry from the Jim Henson universe. Befitting the demon theme, there’s something darker, less human even than puppets in operation.
The “Golden” lyrics, even though they’re human-voiced, are little more than warmed-over, plasticized, girlboss pablum circa 2009. Consider: “Put these patterns all in the past now / And finally live like the girl they all see / No more hidin’; I’ll be shinin’ / Like I’m born to be” … because they (the female heroines and listeners alike) are actually “hunters, voices strong.”
The film, “KPop Demon Hunters,” sounds like something that could blister the mind, in the best possible ways. One imagines possibilities for spiritual depth, adventure, action, grand human emotional stakes. None of that is actually on offer, however. It’s all so lacking in genuine nutritive value that it’s tempting to chalk it up to a now-familiar pop culture emptiness and move on. After all, the movie/song hit combo is nothing new. Packaging a band and song with a movie was a successful recipe in the 1980s.
Take a crowd favorite, “Top Gun,” for which no less a musical talent than Kenny Loggins was brought on board to create the audio accompaniment, hit single “Danger Zone.” If we take the average ticket price in 1986 when “Top Gun” was released, we get an estimate of about 48 million viewings. “KPop Demon Hunters” is clocking 158 million unique streams so far. The hit song has logged about 6 billion listens across all platforms. So the sheer mass of psychic real estate under contract is jarring in scope. It’s maybe irresponsible to dismiss it all as “silly.”
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Photo by David Benito / Contributor via Getty Images
The scope is unprecedented. What we’re seeing with HUNTR/X is a convergence of social narrative lines wherein feminism, global corporate homogenization, and the technological preoccupation of minds are congealing into a sort of foul stew, and while it’s been brewing long enough that it seems maybe innocuous, consider again the terrifying size of the audience. Hundreds of millions of people are very content to liquefy their brains, subject their children to husk-like personages devoid of traditional signifiers of soul or spiritual value, and generally just ride the wave provided to them without any consternation as to their mental or psychic diets.
What HUNTR/X may be signaling is the next instance of market bifurcation. On the one hand, we have the feedlot model, where the entertainment is just that — slop, served in tremendous quantities to non-critical, careless audiences. On the other, maybe we are gifted for our trials levels of curated, niche, analog, the old ways that we thought were impossible. Such markets are necessarily very small. They are purveying the highest-quality human-made art and entertainment, and their contributors have to be content with the absence of scale and combinations of audience attention that made possible works like “Top Gun” and “The Muppet Movie.”
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