Label
Live From Earth
LFE018
- Millennial techno takes on a hyper-digital age.
- Millennial pink, in its inoffensive, muted tone, was the visual zeitgeist of a generation. When the Barbie movie was released in 2023, that pink was brightened to a blinding magenta, as the grinning platinum blonde protagonist played by Margot Robbie gamboled toward a feminist awakening. The music video for "Plastic Pleasures," the lead single from Nene H's new EP, ISSA SCAM, deploys similar hues. Nene H and Bubblegun pose against a backdrop of glossy candy pink materials, their toned forms scantily covered in amaranth and baby pink.
Buccal fat removal, eyebrow lift and cheek filler are just some of the cosmetic procedures that Bubblegun considers in a vacuous drone. The pinks on set are as bold as Gen Z, the Tik Tok generation openly embracing plastic surgery while often cavalierly documenting their experiences online. The visual depicts the contradictory nature of the Barbie effect. As Jessica Defino wrote in a Substack post, "If the Barbie production 'speaks directly to women… about the impossibility of perfection,' as the New York Times Magazine insists, its products speak directly to women about the importance of attempting it anyway."
Issa Scam is the Berlin-based artist's attempt of cultural commentary on an image-obsessed and hyper-digital age. Her breakneck techno might not always offer such topical discourse, but it usually has a conceptual bent. Her raging 2019 single "un violador en tu camino" borrowed vocals from an anti-rape protest in Chile. And in 2021, her debut album, Ali, explored her cultural identity as a Turkish-born, Berlin-based woman, as well as the grief she felt after losing her father.
What's different here is the satire. On "Fix & Break," speedy techno circles Bubblegun's rapid-fire list of various mental health interventions—yoga, meditation, ketamine, ECT. Later, she rhymes words like neurosis and prognosis. It lands a bit too on the nose, like a millennial coworker making inappropriate jokes about a zoomer colleague's transparency around mental health. But self-mockery is the point here. "The Rise Of Monsters" opens with filtered automata bemoaning "inauthentic and cringy millennials on TikTok," before driving forward with a slithering bassline and rhythmic claps. Taking it up a notch, "Me Trolling You" starts with a jungle break so fast that anyone would work a mean sweat during a short attempt to dance to it. It slips suddenly into a Eurodance bassline that sounds like a natural companion to a tossing sea of Kandi bracelets.
"The Fall Of Old World," with its title presumably referencing a bygone pre-digital age, before Amazon, Instacart, Uber and the rest of the conveniences that fuel the ever-quickening pace of the first world, moves at a sludgier tempo than the other songs. Springy percussion bounces across the walls, and a thudding bassline marches toward an uncertain future. The horizon probably sounds something like the fantastic "Gen MF Z," where licks of bubbling acid intercept pitched-up vocals. What's the scam? In a time where the job market has cooled, young people struggle through a loneliness epidemic and, in the face of a dismal climate crisis, Gen Z are more likely to save for beauty enhancers than they are a retirement fund, it would be easy to say it's the prospect that we should seriously work towards any future at all. In fact, I'm pretty sure I watched a Tik Tok about that last week.
Tracklist01. Plastic Pleasures feat. Bubblegun
02. The Fall Of Old World
03. GEN MF Z
04. The Rise Of Monsters
05. Me Trolling You
06. Fix & Break feat. Bubblegun