Review | Cu-Cu, Young Bloody
On his fifth faux-pop full-length, SUNY Oswego's Cu-Cu redefines the standard for terrible music
Cu-Cu, Young Bloody
April 16, Self-released
Not Recommended
Every day, the Internet allows untold thousands of up-and-comers to self-release albums, self-promote on social networks, and claim some modicum of blogospere fame. But if there's one thing Cu-Cu's latest album shows us, it's that not everyone deserves that exposure.
Cu-Cu is the stage name of SUNY Oswego senior Miles George, and Young Bloody is his fifth full-length effort. Let's not mince words: It is a demonstrably terrible album. Cu-Cu sings atonally, repeats vague, boring lyrics about high school, and plays instrumental parts that sound identical
Cu-Cu calls his work "something between a DEVO concert and a birthday party with a clown wrestling a magician." The DEVO rip-offs certainly pervade, but his songs lack any type of magic, drama, or conflict. In fact, his composition chugs forward without pause, droning for painfully long periods of time on a single track. On seven-minute epic "White Boy Surrounded," his lyrics never wrap around the instrumentation — they play independently, an '80s synth line repeating ad nauseum behind disjointed vocals. In the same song, he mumbles
On other songs, Cu-Cu follows a similar formula. Many of the tracks start and end the same way, with distorted, almost shoegaze-y guitars or drums filling out the intro and swelling into the lyrical line he takes. On tracks like "A New Band Is Hired," the keys and guitars sound almost like a poor man's Airborne Toxic Event. But The Airborne Toxic Event are known for their melodrama, and Cu-Cu's lyrics never achieve that type of poetry. He expounds blandly on themes of loss, social alienation, alcoholism and other stereotypical issues of affected-youth folk-pop. He establishes no scenes, despite drawing from a lyrical tradition
This, of course, is a harsh analysis, and someone will doubtlessly make the argument that music is a matter of taste or that no album could truly sound this bad. Sociologist and former rock critic Simon Frith argues otherwise. In his essay "What Is Bad Music?" Frith attempts to objectify music's "goodness" or "badness" with a series of theoretical models. In one, he says musical incompetence, genre confusion, or "banal or ridiculous subjects" can all make a song bad. Young Bloody manages to hit all three — even Frith has no
George deserves some credit, though. After all, the Internet is a venue of both opportunity and risk. It allowed Cu-Cu to self-release a free album that few people would hear or acknowledge otherwise. But it also opened that album up to criticism and comparison. Thousands of no-name college artists drop free albums every day, which makes Cu-Cu look worse than he might in a vacuum. (Just play Young Bloody after Far from Here.) Furthermore, in the age of one-click downloading, it's all too easy to hear the strains of DEVO, John Mayer, and The Jesus and Mary Chain that Cu-Cu cannibalizes in his work.
"Music only becomes bad music in an evaluative context," Frith says in his
