Switched on Pop - Gucci Gang and the Neural Substrate of Subjective Time Dilation

Episode Date: March 22, 2018

In which Nate tries to convince Charlie that Lil Pump's SoundCloud Rap hit "Gucci Gang" warps the perceptual present. Featuring: Lil Pump - Gucci Gang Gustav Mahler - Der Abschied / Das Lied von der Erde Franz Schubert - String Quintet / Adagio Conlon Nancarrow - Study for Prepared Piano 21 Check out Jonathan Berger's article on musical time in Nautilus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app. Download the eater app at eaterapp.com.

It's free for iOS users. Good evening, Charlie. Hello, Nate. So at the start of every semester, I have my music students do this assignment where they analyze the last song they listen to. Oh, fun. I like that. I wish I got to do that.

Oh, I guess I do it every week. It's great because not only is it a good exercise, I think, for the students, But for me, I get to go inside the minds of a bunch of 18 to 21 year olds and hear exactly what they're listening to, which is always very illuminating. That is a Pandora's box, man. You don't want to open that door. You know, there'd be some things that surprise you. A lot of Billy Joel in these playlists. Oh, cool.

But of course, there's also a lot of 2018 music that I might not be privy to. And the song I want to talk today about is an example of one of those. Lay it on me. It is Gucci Gang by Little Pump. Oh, big big head. Uh, really? What makes you say that, Charlie? I guess everything about the sound of the song, especially the lyrics, and I just not bought into this little pump.

Okay, so before we spend this Little Pump, 17-year-old SoundCloud rapper from South Florida with an $8 million. record contract and a private jet. And this song is his ticket to the big time. Let's have a listen to Gucci Gang. Is there right out, Gene? Low Pump. Yeah. Gucci Gang.

Oh, big head on. Yeah. Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang. Is there a point at which you stopped liking it? Yeah, just about when Lil Pump comes in. So, Charlie, you had a reaction to this song before. I had even gotten the second syllable of Gucci out of my mouth. Yeah.

And I'm curious because the place I want to start our exploration of this track today is in your reaction to this song. I'm curious what you feel when you listen to this song. And not just like emotionally, but like physically, how do you react to hearing Gucci Gay? I find it musically dull and I guess derivative, but lyrically repugnant. I mean, it celebrates flagrant luxury consumption and hard drugs with misogynist overtones. The song sort of puts out a message of a resigned acceptance that if you're disillusioned with the world, then you should probably just try to look after yourself become one of the top 1%

and radically consume luxury goods. So that's my take and why I'm like, blah. Wow. Scathing. Scathing. Out of the gate. All right. Wretched.

This is perfect because for the rest of this episode. episode, I am going to try and convince you not to like this song, but to maybe understand why someone else would like this song. I really don't like the position that I'm sitting in now because I feel like I'm just like a frumpy old person who doesn't understand youth culture. The way we are going to get into the heart of this track is to start with the music. And so we'll actually kind of push the lyrics to the second half. Let's get into the music. And I want to think about the music of this song in terms of time. You were so cheesy.

I'm down to do that. And as I said, when I went back and I listened to this the second time, I was like, oh, the first five seconds of this song, there's something there. And that's exactly where we're going to start, Charlie. I'm inspired here by an article by one of my old professors, Jonathan Berger at Stanford University, who wrote this brilliant article in Nautilus magazine how music hijacks our perception of time. I think that's exactly what's happening in Gucci Gang.

Okay. Little Pump and his beatmakers, Big Head, and Janiels. I think I'm pronouncing that right. Have hijacked our perception of time. Okay. In the beginning of this song, we have a number of simultaneous temporal planes interacting. Okay.

Simultaneous temporal planes. Wait, do you mean like simultaneous temporal West Jets? In order to hear them, thank you for your patience. In order to hear them, we need to... There was a reference on the song. Jets, planes. West Jets. I know they kicked him off one of their planes and now they deserve...

I'm trying to disrupt you. Okay. What are these different temporal planes? I will not be stopped. In order to hear these different temporal layers, we have to break down the intro into some of its constituent parts. Okay. That's it right now, do you know.

First 16 bars, like them. That's cool. Okay, so let's pick out some of these features. Let's start with the piano that kind of seems to be the center of this piece. Okay, so here's our first kind of temporal plane. Okay. We can hear that this piano part suggests a certain speed, a certain tempo. It's kind of a head nodding.

tempo. So that piano with its kind of head nodding beat, as you said, that's kind of our lowest level, our slowest layer of tempo. All right. Okay, now let's pick out another sound in here that we'll just call the spacey synth sound, for lack of a more clinical terminology. Now, if we throw the implied beat behind here, we'll hear that it's a little faster than the piano section that we listened to earlier. Yeah, okay. So it's a jog, be. We're jogging now. Yeah, moving at a rate two to one, twice as fast as the previous. And then we want to pick out one other part layered in here, and this is a high piano part.

Okay. And if we hear the implied beat from this faster temporal dimension, it's going to sound something like this. Okay, so now we're running. Yeah, okay, right. We've gone from a nod to a jog to a flat-out run. each one of these discrete parts suggest a different

kind of temporal flow and they're all related to each other at even ratio so we kind of have this pyramid we have the kind of slow head nodding tempo at the bottom we have the nice like trot tempo in the middle

and then we have the fast run at the top I like that we're using mixed metaphors let's say nod is walk okay right let's get this all into some kind of bipedal arrangement here. You're totally right. Okay, so what? So that's walk, trot, and run?

Perfect. Wait, humans can't trot. Oh, Charlie, you're killing me. Okay. Okay. Walk, jog, and run. Great. Okay.

I'm satisfied. Okay. So now that we've got these three temporal levels in our minds, now we can sort of talk about how composers manipulate time. Like, what does that even mean, really? And in order to understand that, we have to get a little bit into neuroscience. Okay. I did manage to muddle my way through the paper published in Frontiers of Human Neuroscience called

the Neural Substrates of Subjective Time Dilation. Ooh, say more please. Yes. Okay. What they're trying to assess in this article is this strange cognitive phenomena in which an object moving towards an observer is subjectively perceived as longer in duration than the same object that is static

or moving away from you. What? Yeah, take a minute to let that sink in. In other words, when they show subjects five images and four of them have just a static image and one of them has an image like a disc moving towards the viewer, even if the total duration of each of those images

is shown for the same amount of time. The one that is moving towards them is perceived to take longer than all the other static images. Okay. Okay, so this is just maybe one small example of this thing called subjective time dilation that we don't experience time the way a clock ticks by, right?

That is, we don't experience time on this Euclidean sort of like totally regular scale of all events being perceived like relative to some equal benchmark of duration. This is like Einstein's theory of relativity applied to perception. Yeah, yeah, precisely, precisely. Oh, okay. A much more sort of colloquial way to say this, I guess, would be something like time flies when you're having fun, right?

Time moves in different ways for us, and that's part of our enjoyment of aesthetic's experiences, and especially of music, which is the most temporal of all the arts. So back to Lil Pump. Back to Little Pump, yes. When we listen to Gucci gang and we hear these different temporal layers at once, we get to experience the composers here sort of playing with our perception of time. Hmm. Disassociating us from that normal, you know, regular stopwatch kind of perception of time

and into this more subjective, like warping and stretching and diminution of time. So you're saying that you're basically getting drunk off of listening to this song. Yeah, or perhaps, you know, taking a hit of lean. I don't even know what that is. I'm so lame. It's codeine and cough syrup and something else, I think. Oh, wow. That sounds terrible. No, but you're exactly right. That is part of the point of this, I think, is to make you feel a little woozy, like a little uncertain of your temporal bearings. Ooh, wow. Okay. That's cool.

And Little Pump and Bighead and Gneels are far from the first composers to latch on to this idea that music can sort of warp our perception of time. I did think that this kind of sounded like a future beat, but I'm feeling you're taking me back further in history than things from just last year. No, you're absolutely right, Charlie. We need to go further back. It is time for classical masters, specifically the masters of musical time and suspension. Yes. Mahler and Schubert. And in that spirit, I'm actually going to suspend time for a moment and we'll listen to those

masters on. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you.

Okay. Ready? Do not sugarcoat something for me. No, no. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us.

New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. be after an ad break. Nice transition. Thank you. See you there. We're back. We've been discussing time dilation in the music of Little Pump's Gucci gang. But in order to really appreciate this technique, Charles, I think we need to go back and we got to spin some Gustav Mahler. Oh, some classical masters. Let's listen to Mahler. Okay. If you really want to hear a composer manipulate our sense of time, let's go to Mahler's Das Lied van der Erde, his song, cycle that ends with this heartbreaking piece called Der Abshit or the Farewell. Oh, the Farewell. That's sweet.

This sounds like the Star Wars Desert scene. So similar to Little Pump's Gucci Gang, we have two temporal levels here. Okay, yes, that's similar. The low brass drums, they're doing this very slow, almost dirge. And then on top of that, just the solo oboe doing these much faster rhythmic patterns. Together, it really warps your sense of where any temporal home is. Oh, yeah. And by the end of this piece, you're kind of left wondering,

okay, was that 30 minutes, you know, the duration of the actual piece, or was it 30 hours, or was it 30 seconds? I'm not really sure. Mahler has suspended time here. The only layer which is missing would be the trap hats in order to update it to the Gucci Yang sort of style. We're going to get there. We're going to get there.

Let's shoot over now to another romantic composer. Franz Schubert and his piano quintet. The Adagio movement here is another great example of music that seems to be kind of frozen in time. That's really pretty. With this piece, it's so kind of disorienting that Jonathan Berger, who wrote that article I mentioned in the first half, actually interviewed professional musicians who perform this piece and asked them how long they thought playing this movement took.

And it actually took them 14 minutes or something, but they estimated that it took twice as line. They were like, oh, that's probably 30 minutes or so. So even the people who play this music for a living, day and day out, can kind of get lost in the temporal mystery of these pieces. And Charlie, you mentioned the trap drums in Gucci Gang?

Yeah, that... That's the final element here. Now, I don't have, you know, Mahler and Schubert were not like busting out trap drums in the back of their orchestras for better or worse. But there is a composer from in that, you know, Western art tradition who I think is relevant here because in Gucci gang, the trap drums are like the final element, the final temporal element. They dance between all of these different levels, the slow, the medium, the fast. They kind of connect it all together and by constantly. switching between them, keep our brains sort of guessing where we're actually situated. Right. And the thing in that trap drumming is that the high hat is inconsistently moving

between different subdivisions of the beat from eighth notes to 16th notes to triplets to triplets double time and just kind of moving all over the place. The snare drum sometimes hits on the two and four as you expect standard beat and sometimes it's kind of all over the place. And likewise, the kick is kind of all over the place too. And it keeps you, suspended in disbelief. Absolutely. I couldn't have said it better, Charles. Let's listen to actually the very end of Gucci Gang now,

just to get a sense of how all those elements, 808 kicks, snare drums, and highhats all kind of operate on these three different temporal layers. Gooch gang, Gucci gang, Gucci Gang. Yeah, if you just try to count down beats on that, one, two, three, four, almost nothing lands on the downbeats. It's all over it. It's just dancing. Totally.

And moving from kind of these slower patterns to quicker patterns. to quicker patterns back and forth. And a composer, I think, who we can look to as sort of a forbear of this, would be Conlon Nankaro. And before I tell you anything more about him, I just want you to listen to one of his pieces, Charlie. And I just have a simple question, what are we listening to?

All right. We're listening to four out of tune pianos. Good guess. Incorrect. Any others? It's not prepared piano? You're getting warmer. Is it being played by a human being?

That should be your first question. Oh, that's what I was actually going to think next. It sounds like it's some sort of MIDI controlled electronic instrument. Okay, so all of your guesses are totally worthy and totally wrong. But in between all of them lies the correct answer. This is a piece for player piano. Oh, for player piano? Yeah.

Right. So I said prepare piano, which is when you put weird things between the strings to make the piano sound strange, like putting a marble on the string and it bounces around. Sure, screws. Yeah, exactly. Right. But this is a player piano. What's a player piano? A player piano was one of the first mechanized instruments that would play music on its own. You'd put a sheet of paper with little dots in it into the piano and they would scroll

and as the different dots were played, almost kind of like a windy boxes that kids have. Yeah. The piano would actually play itself. Yeah. You're doing great. It was a huge innovation in the creation of popular music because all of a sudden people all over the world could be playing the exact same song on their piano. Yeah. Think of Westworld for those who are familiar with.

with that show. That's a much easier way of saying it. Yeah, yeah. Before the jukebox was the player piano. Right. And in a way, this composer, Conlon Nancaro, an American composer who became a Mexican citizen and composed many of these studies in the 50s and 60s while living in Mexico on these sort of hacked player pianos, basically, we can see as sort of the forbear to the

trap drumming that we're hearing on Gucci game, because this is exactly what Nankero realized you could sort of exploit with these impossible instruments, these superhuman instruments. These instruments that can do things that humans can't do, can play with precision and speed that humans can't. I got to hear this again. Yeah, totally impossible. I don't know how you would play that by hand. And what Nankuro realized, I think, that the SoundCloud rappers of today are still trading on

is that our ears are similarly titillated by this, like this kind of superhuman precision that shapes time in ways that we can only grasp at, you know? Like, that's what we're hearing in these trap drums that are literally placed in a perfectly arranged matrix so that every time we hear them, they are just like so perfectly, tick-tick-tick-tik-tik. I mean, I can't do it. Composers have been manipulating time

with whatever resources at their disposal since, you know, the days of Gregorian chant. Yeah. Now, let's bring it back to Little Pump once again. Okay. Because, again, like, why does this matter, this sort of, like, temporal play and time dilation and warping of the perceptual present? Like, why does that matter?

Okay, again, one thing is that kind of psychedelic pleasure that we were talking about earlier, right? That's sort of, like, dissociative glee of sort of, like, losing your sensory bearings. But then there's also this togetherness that comes from. that there's a sort of equality in that state does that make any sense i think that's what my students are responding to is that in the temporal flow that's engendered you know just by the two minutes of this song it's not a long song it's two minutes in a few seconds at all and yet within it are these whole worlds i think of temporal exploration i think that like provides a sort of play space for people It brings people together.

My favorite thing about what you just said is that you asked a question in a very professorial way, answered your own question. I'll give you an ish. You'll give me an ish. I'm there for the first half. Absolutely. I am a bit lost in the way that it disorients me temporarily. And I think that is beautiful. I like that beat.

Maybe sometimes the classical references might seem silly. but I think that a lot of the instrumentation and effects that they're using almost sounds like harpish pianoish. Like there's a kind of orchestration happening to it. So I'm actually even hearing those kind of classicalish sounds. So I like that you made those references. Like all of that's connecting for me. Where I don't think you've got me yet is how is this creating a sense of like communal togetherness? I'm not catching you there.

That's perfect because it brings us back to where we started Gucci game, right? In some ways, the most offensive part of the song, I think, us is the inanity of that chorus. Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang. A phrase repeated 53 times over the course of this song. Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang, spread their ass on a new chain. In the simplicity of this lyric, I think it sort of becomes a mantra of sorts that

anyone can in tone. This is very inviting music as just by dint of the fact that anyone, can sing along and anyone can sort of imbibe this chorus. I don't know. Yes, I get what you're saying and it's really hard for me to turn onto the song given all that I said in the very beginning. It doesn't make me excited that a major record label wants to support something with just such a retrograde message around sexual politics and abusive relationship to hard drugs. I'm not that interested in it, especially that it's clearly targeted to a super young audience. I can't poke any holes in your reticence, but I can ask, do you have an appreciation of why

those same young people might gravitate towards this song? Oh my gosh, absolutely. Beyond the sort of attractiveness of its risque lyrics. Totally, yeah, absolutely. You're on point. There are some cool stuff in here, and I really would love to hear more about how other people hear it and why it's meaningful and fun for them. So with that, all you teenagers out there, we know. We got a lot of teenage listeners. It's great. So with that, anyone who's a teenager or

teenager at heart, why not, who is a fan of Gucci gang or not? Just tell us, reach out to us at Switched on Pop. Wait, what's our thing? It's contact at switchedonpop.com. And you can find us on Twitter at Switched on Pop, though I think only people over 30 use Twitter at this point. So do we need to Snapchat? You know we can't figure that out. We're far too old. There's a Facebook, facebook.com, you know, slash Switched on Pop or whatever. You can find us there. And we'll definitely, we'll get back to you. We love hearing from you. It's really fun. Charles, I have exhausted for now my thoughts on Gucci Gang to, I'm sure, your extreme relief. And all that's left is for us to roll credits. I too am exhausted. Let's do it. Switched on Pop is produced by me,

Nate Sloan, and he, Charles Harding. We have an excellent. editor and mixer. His name is Bill Lance and a designer that we think is just absolutely wonderful. His name is Luke Harris. We're a proud member of the Panoply Network. You can find our episodes there on Apple and on Spotify or any other podcast player if you're choosing. We haven't asked for a while, but if you do listen on Apple, please leave us a review. It really does help the show. It means a lot to us. We really love hearing what your thoughts are, what you like, what you want more of, what you want less of.

We will listen to you and make better and better shows. Amen. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode. Until then, thanks for listening. Thanks for listening.