Earlier this month, Light in the Attic released This Record Belongs To______, a compilation featuring Harry Nilsson, the Pointer Sisters, Donovan and others. It was inspired by a mix DJ that music supervisor Zach Cowie often gave his friends when they had children. Though available in all formats, the vinyl edition of This Record Belongs To_____ comes with a storybook from illustrator Jess Rotter. The label also partnered with Third Man Records to create a special mini turntable.

Many independent labels are engaged in a hearts and minds approach to getting young listeners to embrace it amidst the well-publicized vinyl resurgence. It’s a murky task for record companies — figuring out what they can do to tap into the purchasing power of a generation unaccustomed to paying for music, especially in physical formats.

In anticipation of Record Store Day’s Black Friday event, Ducker spoke with representatives from three labels about how their companies steer listeners to vinyl. Light in the Attic is reissue-focused and best known for making Rodriguez‘s music more accessible. Sub Pop helped lead both the grunge explosion of the 1990s and the mainstreaming of indie rock. Kompakt is the long-running Cologne, Germany dance-music outfit that’s been essential in the global house and techno communities. Each has a long history of embracing the format, and a distinct, well-informed perspective on how to help the next generation embrace turntables.

MATT SULLIVAN, CO-OWNER & FOUNDER AT LIGHT IN THE ATTIC

In developing the This Record Belongs To______ project, why was it essential that vinyl be a central part of it?

I feel it’s the best way to listen to music. It’s where you’re focused. It’s where it’s about the music and not background music. It just takes it so much deeper, regardless if it’s techno music or pop music or folk music. For me, there’s something about the vinyl experience that’s by far the most rewarding experience in terms of format. I don’t think anything comes close. I like CDs and I like digital music, but it just doesn’t have the longevity or timeless that vinyl does.

What do you make of young listeners, who don’t have the nostalgia for their parents’ or older siblings’ record collections, getting into buying music on vinyl?

It is a response to the internet. The internet can feel very soulless, especially when dealing with music. There are kids who are online, in their teens and twenties, they are intrigued by something that has a little bit more life to it and longevity and isn’t perfect. There’s something really nice about that, it’s warm and it’s natural. That would be my guess. Often people will send us ideas to reissue something and usually it starts with “Here’s an mp3 …” Or it’s a Dropbox link or a YouTube link. A number of times I’ll click it and I’ll listen to it and I’m usually listening to it on headphones while I’m working. There have been occasions where I’ll write back, “It was okay, but I don’t think it’s really great for us,” then maybe a year later or five years later or a day later, I’m in a record store and I see a copy, and if it’s reasonably priced, I might just buy the record. Then I bring it home and start listening to it on vinyl, and it’s just a different thing. I know how ridiculous that sounds. I want to put the record on and I want to be transfixed. It’s like walls go up and you’re really listening to this thing and it sucks you in. It’s such a beautiful thing to me.

As someone who runs a record label and makes a living off this, how do you cultivate in a new generation of young music consumers the desire to buy music on vinyl so they can hopefully have similar experiences?

A lot of it is giving context to it. We really try hard to reissue things that to our ears are timeless. Maybe it’s a record made 10 years ago, maybe it’s a record made 50 years ago, but it’s something that we feel isn’t about some current trend and it’s something that people are going to care about, and it’s going to hold up in 10 years, 20 years, 50 years, or 100 hundreds. That to me is important. Why should someone care about Donnie & Joe Emerson or Rodriguez or Big Boys in 2015? It’s explaining that the Big Boys were one of the first skate-punk bands, or that Donnie is an incredible songwriter and vocalist and the record is such a genuine piece of music regardless of what genre of music you like. That stuff is really hard. Sometimes the general public doesn’t get it, and other times they do. Sometimes we’re really surprised that people got it even better than we thought. Day to day, it’s not about reaching the collector. We feel these records or music files or whatever it is, have significance now, so people should give it a chance, listen to it.

What percentage of your sales is vinyl?

It depends on the release. If we have something like Rodriguez or Black Angels, it’s a little different, because those projects might have more CDs or might have more digital. As a whole, I would say for sales of this year, vinyl’s got to be 60 to 70 percent. We also distribute over 50 other record labels, primarily reissue labels, and that stuff is primarily all vinyl. I wouldn’t be surprised if our non-Light in the Attic distributing catalog sales are 90 percent vinyl.

Are those numbers still going up right now?

Sadly the vinyl market it totally oversaturated, and primarily with crap. You got all these major labels printing dollar records and they’re $23.99 in the stores. And they have no extra stuff; there’s no bonus tracks, there’s not even nice gatefold jackets, there’s no liner notes, there’s no involving the artist. It’s just a quick buck off of what they see as a fad. I mean, I love Billy Joel, but I can go buy a Billy Joel record for a dollar, two dollars, three dollars used that’s nicer than the reissue. Unfortunately that’s making it really difficult for people like us. Eventually things will shift back to maybe what they were years ago is my guess.

How does that trend affect you?

Say Amoeba, or any independent record store, only has so much money to buy product, only has so much stock they can have on hand, and they only have so much space. The sad exploitation of Record Store Day, of people just throwing out crap, is another unfortunate piece of the puzzle. It’s becoming a very oversaturated market. It’s really a shame. The worst part is that it’s made the production of vinyl a nightmare. We used to be able to get a record out quick. We’ve had records in the last year where a reprint has taken nine months. It’s insane. You work so hard to get this out there and build up interest on it, and then they sell out and you go for a reprint, but by the time you get those records, can you even sell them? And that’s all because the plants are printing these one-dollar records. There are plants starting up now who don’t even want to take accounts from major labels, because they don’t want to deal with it. We work with a lot of major labels and license stuff, and they’re trying to make a living too, but it’s quickly suffocating the entire system.

In 2015 it’s hard being an artist, it’s hard being a record label, it’s hard being a record store, it’s hard being a music writer. People just devalue music so much, it’s kind of amazing that vinyl is one of the last formats where at least most people care.

So what do you do when this trend dies out and things re-equalize?

We’ll be fine. In 2002 when I started the label, I co-released with Vampi Soul a reissue of the Last Poets’ second album. We probably printed a thousand or two thousand. We’ll survive. We are also widening our reach. We do a lot of film and TV licensing, working with outside composers on creating music for ads for TV and film stuff. There are other revenue streams out there, we just have to get more creative in finding them.

Would you suggest that other labels not put too much stock in their vinyl sales?

Yeah. You’ve got to take it as it comes. I would say eight months, definitely 12 months ago, it didn’t feel like the market was so oversaturated. So who knows where it’s going to be in a year.

Do you feel like consumers are frustrated?

I mean, I’m a consumer, I’m frustrated.

This is a huge problem that people are spending million of dollars trying to figure out. What is your company doing to try to make that emotional switch and get people to see a monetary value in music?

It might sound naive or cliché, but it’s not releasing a hundred records a year and hoping that one hits. It’s spending more time on things and putting quality into the world. If someone’s 12, 13, 14, 20, whatever, 50, 70 yearsold, that person may not know who Lewis is, or what Cubist Blues is, or Alan Vega, or Alex Chilton. It’s our job and responsibility to educate people about who these artists are, why they’re important, why anyone should care. It’s getting creative with it and trying not to preach to people and scream at people. It’s a constant struggle for anyone these days trying to do something creative and with some backbone.

CHRIS JACOBS, GENERAL MANAGER AT SUB POP

How does Sub Pop develop its approach to the vinyl market?

We try to be responsive or attentive to how things are selling and not make silly decisions so we’re not sitting on a ton of vinyl, or of any format. But in terms of market analysis, we don’t really do that. Our commitment or continued long-term participation to putting out vinyl records is largely based on our own emotional connection. Many of us who have been here for a while came of age listening to records even before the resurgence of vinyl that has happened over the course of the past five or six years. I talk to a lot of people I work with about this, but vinyl is freighted with this memory of the way you would listen to music. It’s less about what people talk about with the warmth or audio qualities of vinyl. It’s just about attention. If you can only fit 22 minutes of music of a side of vinyl, you’re doing little else during that time, and that’s kind of nice. So it’s definitely an emotional connection.

You talked about the people who work with you that grew up listening to vinyl, but what about your interns or the younger people you hire? Are you doing anything to actively cultivate an interest in vinyl for people like them?

We definitely have an interest in encouraging that and paying attention to what is happening with younger people now. We spend some time talking to those folks about how they’re participating or listening to music, and it’s super encouraging that kids who are in our office are getting together and listening to records together.

Where does their emotional connection come from? Is it just because they’ve heard enough through the years people our age and older fetishizing vinyl?

Some of it might be that, a singed nostalgia. But the talks that I’ve had with those kids, it’s kind of what you’d expected. They’re stoked about having a big, palpable, demonstrable connection to the bands that they really give a s*** about. They’re listening to music primarily through all the means that you would expect — streaming music, YouTube, or whatever — but the stuff they buy on vinyl, they have a bigger fan connection to. It’s the same way that you keep books around that you’ve read. It’s less because you might read it again, and more because it’s a demonstration of who you are. And I think kids are doing that with our records as well.

It’s an affirmation to themselves and to others of what they care about.

Yeah.

When I was growing up, mainly buying music in the 1990s, it was more about how many CDs you owned — especially to show that I really cared about a certain artist. So it’s interesting that now to show you really care about music, you carefully select which vinyl albums to represent it.

Yeah, you used to show you’re so invested in music that you’re willing to make moving a really terrible inconvenience. That’s how much I love music, it’s going to be awful every time I move.

Do you think younger listeners still think about their devotion in terms of quantity?

My sense is that it doesn’t seem to be that way. The notion of having an exhaustive music collection on CD or vinyl, I’m not getting that hint off of those kids. Because [digital] is so convenient. You can pretty much listen to anything you want from the history of recorded music, so the necessity to have everything at a room in your house or apartment isn’t there. I get the sense that’s less important than to be like, “I have this version of the Father John Misty album.” It seems like it’s more analogous to T-shirts, or whatever.

With Sub Pop’s take on selling vinyl, is it like, “Well, I guess this is selling, so I guess we’re going to make more of it,” or are you doing anything to push people in the direction of vinyl?

Sure. If there are enough people who are interested in buying some elaborate vinyl version of the record, like the Beach House record we did with the red velvet sleeve, and we do enough of those, it allows us certain indulgences. It appeals to our aesthetics, which I think are pretty common. You play to the strengths of the format, and what people like about it is its physicality and it’s bigness and it’s realness. It’s an opportunity to do more with those attributes.

When you do something like a Beach House velvet sleeve, do you get a sense that it’s Beach House fans who are buying it, or is it vinyl collectors who are on the lookout for anything rare or different.

It’s a mix. There are definitely vinyl collectors in there. We do this thing called the Loser Edition — which is the first pressing that is available through our online store, the record stores we sell directly to, and through the band — that is a different color. Our intent with that is that it’s all sold out on release day. We’re playing to people’s interest in those short runs and trying to encourage that participation. When I was in college before I ever got a job at Sub Pop, I was a subscriber to the Sub Pop Singles Club and one of the cool things about that was these limited runs of colored vinyl singles. Some of it is feeding this collector mentality, or this minor OCD that goes along with any form of collecting. Some of it is just because that was super cool to us when we were first buying records.

Are you doing vinyl for every Sub Pop release these days?

Now we do. Ten years ago we’d have to have a conversation about every record and figure out if it was going to be viable on vinyl, which is such a bulls*** tealeaf reading kind of process. That was when LPs were less expensive to buy in a record store than CDs, even though they were more expensive to make. It took a little while for us to get to the point where we were like, “Oh wait, we should probably make sure we’re not losing money on these records now that sales are picking up.”

Was there one release that turned it around and you realized what the potential was with this format?

I don’t remember any one particular release. It’s been a gradual shift. The stuff that led was the stuff that you expect, which was selling well in other formats anyway — the early Shins records and Iron & Wine records. A lot of that stuff was doing well on LP, even back then. It’s crazy now, our pre-order sales on our online store, the vast majority are on vinyl for any release. It used to be that during that pre-release period, we’d sell 30 percent LPs and the rest were CDs. Then it got to be half and half, and now 95 to 98 percent of the pre-release sales are LPs. And that’s across the board, for every release.

So you don’t do any market analysis, it’s all feeling?

There’s no reliably scientific market analysis. It’s more anecdotal. You talk to people at record stores and see where their heads are at. A real good indicator to me about how that stuff is going is a chain like Newbury Comics, where we continue to do exclusive color vinyl runs for those guys, because they’ll buy enough to make it viable. Those guys are pretty smart about what they’re willing to go out on a limb for, and they’re continuing to do that.

Do you think it’s important for people to listen to music on vinyl? Is that something worth cultivating?

I’m hopeful that people will, and not because of any inherent sound quality stuff, but because it’s carving out a space where you’re only paying attention to music. I think that’s important, obviously for self-interested reasons because I work for a record label, but because my relationship with music has been real valuable to me and I hope that people who are interested in it now have that same type of relationship.

JON BERRY, ARTIST/LABEL MANAGER AT KOMPAKT

Over the years Kompakt has maintained a commitment to vinyl, but right now, what percentage of your sales comes from that format?

Vinyl still remains a primary focus of our day-to-day business. We still feel like it’s a deeply intrinsic part of what we do. Of course the margins have dropped significantly. Vinyl sales account for approximately 20 to 30 percent of our annual sales turnover as a label, and also as a distributor. As a distributor we handle about 80 labels worldwide, and much of that is vinyl distribution.

Is that number going up or down?

It’s been stable through the last few years. I’ve been with the company for about 10 years. There was a steady decline happening due to piracy, there were also issues surrounding too much product in the market with a lot of distributors being irresponsible and signing on too many labels. So what we saw was this over-influx of vinyl in the market around 2006, which led to a few distribution bankruptcies, unfortunately. We made it through it, thankfully, and what we saw was a severe drop in sales. People, including ourselves, were used to selling between 2000 and 5000 copies [of a single] — now we’ll be happy if we do 500.

Does everything on Kompakt get a vinyl release or are you selective about that?

I’d say 90 percent of our releases come out on vinyl. We try to put as much as we can out on vinyl. Keep in mind that the foundation of Kompakt was built from a record store and we still have a record store in Cologne. So it’s really important to us that when we have a record, it is released on vinyl. A lot of the artists we work with demand that. It’s just one of those fundamental policies that we have, in a sense. Since plants are running at capacity, there are huge delays happening now with manufacturing vinyl. We have to think three, four or five months ahead at times about releases, and with the spontaneity of dance music, a house or techno producer typically doesn’t want to be waiting four to six weeks for a release to come out. We’ll have records come that we’ll just have to get out there, so they’ll be released digitally.

You mentioned that Kompakt’s history as an actual record store and the importance to the artists to have the music available through vinyl. Is that a purely emotional decision? Are there situations where you know that financially it might not make sense to put something out on vinyl, but you do it because it’s something you stand for as a label and it becomes almost a philosophical issue?

There’s many ways to look at that. Bear in mind that Kompakt’s four owners are all musicians and they all come from making techno and house music. There is this ingrained, fundamental necessity with a lot of producers out there that they need to have their records not just available digitally, but also on vinyl. It’s a real contradiction, because when you look at the market itself, 98% of the DJs that play out there today do not play on vinyl. So what is the reasoning behind this? It’s not a very easy question to answer. But even with the newer producers that are coming up, there is something ingrained in their minds that no matter even if it’s going to be a money loss, that we do need to have it available on that format.

Do you foresee that ever changing?

As long as there is demand, we’ll continue to do it. Fortunately, touch wood, it seems that there is a continued demand for the format. There’s many different layers to look at with the demand for dance music vinyl in the market today. You do have labels out there, such as Perlon, which have maintained a strict policy of not releasing their music digitally, ever. That means that they sell a lot more vinyl. Their records are anticipated in record shops much more and cherished much more, because they are only available on that format. Coming more from the business side in the company, I say to the guys, “Look, it really doesn’t make any f***ing sense to put this on vinyl.” And they just look at me like blankly, like, “Of course we’re doing it.”

You mentioned the demand factor, and as you’ve said, the vinyl market has currently stabilized, but there’s always a possibility that another major change will happen and the market could go into a downturn again. Is there anything you guys are doing to try to cultivate in fans the idea that vinyl is the ideal format to listen to dance music?

There was an interesting fact that came out that MusicWatch reported, that 54 percent of vinyl consumers in America are 35 years old and younger. I live in Berlin and I’m surrounded by a wealth of record shops. The market here is very strong with vinyl, it’s remarkable. Record shops like Hard Wax and Spacehall are just excelling in the format. We share a similar strategy in how we try to drive our fans and our customers to come by the record shops, and that’s by offering exclusive releases. Wolfgang Voigt has been quite prolific over the past couple years releasing a lot of records under his Profan imprint and also his Protest imprint as vinyl only that we only sell in our record shop and through our mail order or to select record shops that demand it. We focus on projects and releases that you’ll only be able to get through our record shops, which is driving our fans and other newcomers and younger audiences to come buy records from us.

What are your personal feelings on this? Do you still mainly buy vinyl or are you mainly digital?

I go up and down with it. I’ve had my fair share of moving and I’ve moved my record collection around a lot. I’ve sworn and kicked and cried at my record collection a number of times, so I’ve reduced my record collection down considerably. I’m much more selective in what I buy on vinyl. There’s this record shop in Berlin, Spacehall, I go there every two weeks, I go through the bins, I pick up a few records still. A lot of the records are records that I won’t be able to buy digitally, because they’re not available that way, or records that I know just belong on vinyl, because of how they were produced.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Flashing back to 2012, Harlem-raised rapper and singer Azealia Banks was riding high after the surprise success of her self-released single “212” and began talking about her debut album, Broke With Expensive Taste. Over time, release dates, labels and names of producers for the project changed. Again and again. A collaboration with Pharrell went nowhere. Her combative Twitter presence did little good for her reputation. At the start of 2014, she publicly asked Universal, the major label that she says had already spent millions on her album, to drop her, and it eventually did. By the beginning of November she was considered by most within the music industry to be a nuisance at best and a pariah at worst. And Broke With Expensive Taste still wasn’t out. Until it suddenly was.

On November 6, Banks announced via Twitter that the album was available on iTunes through the indie label Prospect Park. Not only was its release a surprise, so was the fact that most in the press and those early-adopter fans who had given up actually really like it. While some might have expected a jumble of commercially motivated compromises and outdated sounds — which would have been a fair assumption given the debuts from artists who found themselves in similar situations, like Angel Haze, Lil Mama or Saigon — they instead are celebrating Broke With Expensive Taste‘s experimentation and strong perspective.

In these financially unsteady times for the music industry, new talent is frequently being picked up, only to watch long-awaited albums released after being tinkered with to death, if they’re released at all. Sure, it’s been happening for decades, but now listeners feel more aware of forever-delayed albums because of the constant contact most artists (or artists’ support teams) have with their fans through social media. In the wake of Broke With Expensive Taste‘s release, Ducker spoke with Lindsay Zoladz, New York magazine’s pop music critic, about what else we haven’t heard that is out there and whether the whole concept of the label-scrapped album will soon be a thing of the past.

Did you think Broke With Expensive Taste would ever come out?

You know, within the last few months I finally reached the point where I believed it never would. And then, behold.

Right before you played it, were you excited, or was it more of a resignation thing where you felt like you had to do it as part of your job as a music journalist?

Ha, it was absolutely a resignation thing — which, as I wrote in my review for Vulture, made me feel a little guilty, given how much I was into her when she first came on the scene a few years ago. My resignation was half due to my disappointment with her post-“212” output, and half that “Oh great, another SURPRISE album that I have to review” feeling that every music journalist in 2014 is now intimately familiar with.

At what point in your listening did you realize, “I might like this”?

Like, the second I hit play. The first track, “Idle Delilah,” is great, and it opens with this unhurried, scene-setting confidence that really says, “This is an ALBUM, not just a collection of singles.” What I like best about BWET is how it flows as an entire listening experience. It’s more about the overall arc and vibe than any stand-out single, which is clearly the problem Universal had with it — they didn’t hear an obvious hit.

Do you think that’s really the culprit when there seem to be so many albums that never come out? That there’s a cool artist that kind of knocks a segment of listeners’ socks off and a major label sees potential in them, but in reality the artists are incapable or uninterested in producing obvious hits for a bigger audience?

You know, the irony of Azealia Banks’s story is that it feels like something of an anomaly now. Sure, we’ve seen it with records like M.I.A.’s long-delayed Matangi and Angel Haze’s debut earlier this year, but these days there are so many avenues through which artists can self-release music that this narrative (major label scoops up underground artist, imprisons her in a creatively restrictive contract, etc.) feels strangely old model.

I don’t know. Maybe this stuff is in the front of my mind with this Azealia Banks album, as well Teyana Taylor finally putting out an album and Kid Sister’s self-released thing from a few months ago. Those other two are somewhat different situations, but may come from a similar issue. It’s got me thinking of the hot acts who signed to majors around 2008 to 2011 that didn’t flourish. Maybe every generation of indie artists has to see labels not work for people who were ahead of the curve before everyone else figures out different models that are better for them. But what if Das Racist had fulfilled their deal with Sony in 2012 instead of breaking up? Do you really think we’d have a major label Das Racist album by now? I’m not sure that we would.

Yeah, although I wonder if this will be the last generation that has to see that play out. Now that any new artist can put their stuff up on Soundcloud or Bandcamp, I’m not even sure young musicians sitting around dreaming of million-dollar contracts with major labels is even a thing anymore. Or maybe it’s only a dream of the kind of artists who are hell bent on world domination, as Azealia Banks claimed to be when she first came out. The artists that you still see thriving in the major label system seem to be the ones who have come to terms with the fact that they have to link up with brands, genetically engineer monster hits and rely on a lot of extra-musical work too. Of course, I’m thinking of Taylor Swift and her huge sales, but also someone like Nicki Minaj (an artist Banks was compared to a lot in the beginning), who often talks about herself as a kind of rapper/mogul in the tradition of Jay Z and Diddy. (She makes it sound like a threat on “I Am Your Leader“: “I’m a brand, b—-, I’m a BRAND.”) But of course, we’re still waiting on her long-delayed record too…

Maybe all young musicians aren’t sitting around dreaming of a million-dollar contract, but if one is put in front of them, it’s hard to turn it down, especially if they’ve been broke for a while. Then it’s a question of whether they can accept what is necessary of them to thrive in that situation. And as you said, there seems to be a limited number of artists who not only can accept it, but also are willing to make all the decisions and put in all the work to make it happen. Then they’re still not guaranteed to get their albums out, much less have the hits that are hoped for.

There’s also the whole complication of artistic development happening in the digital fishbowl. New artists used to be able to work on their first albums with anonymity and privacy and without really engaging in the narrative forming around them. What was detrimental to Banks is that she was watching — and in a lot of cases, prodding — the conversation happening on Twitter about her album while she was making it. Contrast that with someone like Lorde, who uploaded “Royals” and her whole first EP to Soundcloud when she was a nobody (albeit a nobody with a major label development deal).

So are there still remnant artists who signed deals somewhat recently who have never put their debut album out or who haven’t put out a new album out in years that you want to hear?

For me, the Holy Grail of as-yet-unreleased albums is the official debut from the reclusive London artist Jai Paul. He’s signed to the indie label XL, but I still think he fits the bill here. Last year there was that whole mysterious incident where something that someone was passing off (and selling!) as his debut album made its way to Bandcamp, but it was quickly pulled when the album was revealed to be just demos stolen from his laptop. (Or were they? There are probably still some conspiracy theorists who believe it was a way-way-way in advance publicity stunt, and it certainly drummed up quite a bit of buzz.)

So why haven’t we heard the real album yet?

No one seems to know but Jai Paul! I’ve heard rumors that he’s a perfectionist who has been tinkering with it for years, but he’s managed to maintain an aura of mystery for a long time. No small feat on the internet.

It’s funny that Iggy Azalea’s The New Classic, one of the biggest pop albums of 2014, had its release date pushed back for over a year and needed four singles before it finally came out. We have this idea that these types of albums are damaged goods, either commercially or artistically or both, but do you think that maybe that’s not the case?

Good point. I never could have predicted Iggy’s popularity (and still fail to understand exactly how it happened).

Are there gender issue in all of this? Do female artists who built followings for themselves, usually online, have a harder time getting the albums they want to make released by others? I’m thinking of Azealia Banks here, but also the aforementioned Teyana Taylor, Angel Haze and M.I.A with her third album, plus Maluca and others.

I’m sure that’s at play here somehow. As a culture, we definitely adhere to sexist language when it comes to artists who refuse to compromise their art — an uncompromising male artist is “a genius,” an uncompromising woman is “difficult.” The whole #FreeFiona controversy with Fiona Apple’s long-delayed 2005 album Extraordinary Machine is evidence of that, too.

It’s interesting you bring up Fiona Apple. We’ve mainly been talking about new artists since as listeners and journalists we’re more acutely aware of when new talent doesn’t put out their first big album because, as you said, the artist development process now feels so much more public. When the album doesn’t come out, it feels like we witnessed a huge buildup to nothing. I’m sure there are many more follow-up albums that are “long gestating” or being continuously futzed with than we are aware of. And I’m not talking even about the big ones, like D’Angelo’s Voodoo follow-up. For example, I had no idea Jenny Lewis had been trying to make a new album for years until she talked about her struggles doing it when The Voyager finally did come out this year.

Yeah, I think we’re seeing that a lot this year, with release dates getting pushed back. Nicki Minaj’s Pinkprint keeps getting pushed back, Charli XCX’s new album got pushed back, Lil Wayne’s Carter V, and so on. A lot of times, I see those kinds of delays as label panic, too, but maybe we’re always primed to think pessimistically of the old “label doesn’t hear a hit” scenario. Last week I interviewed Usher, who recently pushed back his eighth album, UR, indefinitely and decided to tour instead. When I asked him about it, [his explanation] seemed very logical — an artist who’s that established in his career should be granted the time to step back and do it right, outside of the frenzy of the album-every-two-years cycle.

It almost seems like in some cases it would be better for artists to just keep releasing singles to keep their name out there (if necessary) and not even mention an album or a release date for it until both the artist and the label are satisfied with what they have.

Exactly.

When I worked at an “emerging music” magazine last decade, during a time when musicians were becoming more and more accessible, we repeatedly had to teach new staff members that the artists were the least likely people involved with the album to know when it was really coming out. Instead, you had to ask the label people or the manager to get the real answer. Do you think that’s still accurate, or have artists gotten more control of when their music comes out?

It’s case by case but I would say artists have more control over music they release outside of the album cycle, which has become just as important.

Are you surprised Action Bronson hasn’t put a major label album out yet?

I didn’t even realize he hadn’t! What I’m realizing is that I don’t think in those terms — major label vs. indie label — as much as I used to. Again, that’s why something about the Azealia Banks story feels old model to me. More and more there’s a sense that, although those sorts of distinctions might influence the way a record does (or doesn’t) get made, once it is unleashed into the ceaseless flow of the internet, music is just music.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

In May of 1994, KMD were supposed to release their second album, Black Bastards, on Elektra Records. Three years earlier the trio of lead rapper Zev Love X, his younger brother Subroc and Onyx the Birthstone Kid had put out their debut, Mr. Hood. The group was best known as affiliates of 3rd Bass and the album combined whimsical samples with Five Percenter knowledge. Mr. Hood had its fans, but the album didn’t make as much of an impression as did other 1991 first full-lengths by New York peers like Black Sheep, Leaders of the School or Main Source.

By the time Black Bastards was ready, the group had only one member left, Zev Love X. Onyx had quietly left the group before work on the follow-up began, and Subroc was hit by a car and killed in 1994 shortly before it was finished. But even before the death Subroc, who Zev was incredibly close to, Black Blastards was taking form as a much darker album than Mr. Hood. Not only had the group started experimenting with all kinds of intoxicants, their outlook had turned bleaker and violent. Musically, it was better. As the group left their teens and entered their twenties, both their lyrics and production became more complex and distinctive.

And then, just as Black Bastards was about to go on sale (review copies had been sent out and some press was completed, a video for the lead single “What a N—- Know” was filmed), Elektra decided to pull the album and drop the group. The most commonly cited spark for this decision was Terri Rossi’s R&B Rhythms column in the Airplay Monitor, a newsletter from Billboard magazine, that attacked the album’s cover: Zev Love X’s drawing of the Little Sambo caricature hanging from a noose. Anti-Little Sambo imagery had long been featured in KMD artwork as part of their commentary against racial stereotypes, but, fittingly for an album that was grimmer, on the Black Bastards cover he was no longer depicted in a circle with a line through it — he was meeting his death. Rossi considered the cover an extremely racist image rather than an anti-racism one, and Elektra and its parent company WEA (the Warner Music Group) was trying to avoid potential problems following the massive controversy with Body Count’s “Cop Killer.”

No other label wanted to release Black Bastards, but bootlegs began to circulate in the proceeding years and three songs from it appeared on a vinyl EP released by indie label Fondle ‘Em in 1998. In 2000, Black Bastards was reissued in full officially for the first time on the label Readyrock, then was put out a year later on Metal Face/Sub Verse. By that time Zev Love X had transformed into the cult figure/rapper MF Doom and cultivated his own following. For listeners whose understanding of Doom began with the youthful, often silly Mr. Hood, his 1999 solo debut, the far more sinister Operation: Doomsday, came as a surprise. Black Bastards is the missing link between the two.

In late October Brian Coleman released his book Check the Technique, Volume 2, which tells the stories behind the making of landmark hip-hop albums. Over the past 20 years, the story of Black Bastards has been publicly recounted by Dante Ross, KMD’s A&R representative at Elektra and a fixture of New York City music, and by 3rd Bass member MC Serch. Coleman devotes over 20 pages to the making of Black Bastards, incorporating the perspectives of a wider range of the participants who made it happen. To discuss the impact and legacy of this strange artifact of hip-hop history, Ducker spoke with writer and fellow Black Bastards fan, Andrew Nosnitsky.

Do you remember the first time you heard Black Bastards?

I was pretty far behind the curve on that. I was still a baby [not literally] when it was supposed to come out. I probably first heard some of it via the 12-inches that came out on Fondle ‘Em, which would’ve been 1998, but it had been floating around on bootlegs for years prior to that.

I first heard it when my brother bought it on tape in what I believe was 1997. I dubbed it from him. I just asked him about it and he said about 10 of them appeared at Amoeba in Berkeley one day and disappeared very quickly. He said the sound quality on that tape was much better than any of the other stuff that had been previously floating around that he had heard.

Yeah, even to this day I don’t think anyone has unearthed the actual masters. All the reissues sound like they were mastered from a cassette bootleg anyway, though then again, maybe some of that is intentional.

You mean in terms of how KMD wanted the album to sound?

Yeah.

When you heard those Fondle ‘Em singles, did you know KMD’s first album, Mr. Hood?

I think so? My memory is a little foggy as far as timelines because we are getting into the hyper consumption Internet era. I definitely had the Doom 12-inches, which probably had lead me back to Mr. Hood by that point.

So Doom was your entry to them?

Yeah, I was getting into hip-hop right at the moment that hip-hop was kind of forgetting KMD. Or maybe not if you were able to get Black Bastards bootlegs in Berkeley in ’97!

I’m sure the audience for something like that was small but rabid.

Right, and secrets could still move slowly back then.

I’m a few years older than you, and I was a big fan of Mr. Hood. As a MF Doom fan first, what did you make of the Black Bastards stuff when you first heard it?

Honestly, I wasn’t instantly in love with it. It just kind of got filed on the Fondle ‘Em shelf at first. I’m not sure why they cut it to an EP, the album is so well structured that everything works better in context. Even the name of the EP, Ruffs + Rares, makes it seem like such a minor thing.

When you started listening to Black Bastards, at first or when you really dug into it, did it make sense to you that the guy on there would go on to become MF Doom?

Probably. There’s definitely more of an obvious connectivity between Doom and Black Bastards-era Zev than there is with Mr. Hood-era Zev. Man, it must’ve been great to hear all this music chronologically as it was happening.

Well, I think there’s very few people who did, and they were probably either close to the group or helped make the album. When I heard the tape, the first MF Doom stuff was already out, so people my age or older were trying to reconcile how the bookish and playful young Muslim guy in KMD went on to become this demented street super villain character named MF Doom, but Black Bastards makes it a very clear progression.

Totally. It must’ve been shocking to hear him go from “Peach Fuzz” to a full on stick up kid on the first track. But in a way, that’s what being a young person is — stepping in and out of identities until you find the right balance.

That’s one of things the Check the Technique chapter really drove home for me, how young KMD were (especially Subroc) when they made their two albums. They were in videos with 3rd Bass and doing songs with Brand Nubian, so to the 13-year-old me, they are basically full-on adults, but in reality they would have only been a few grades ahead of me in school.

Yeah, that’s always a weird moment for a hip-hop listener, when you realize the stars you were looking up to as a kid were actually just slightly older kids. But I think that has a lot to do with the potency of a record like this. Here are these kids who are thrust into adulthood at an even more rapid pace than someone in their late teens/early twenties and they have a document of that transition.

I actually found an old review of Black Bastards in Spin from when it was supposed to come out in 1994 and even the writer [and The Record contributor] Danyel Smith doesn’t seem to grasp about how much of a departure and progression this album is, and she’s very knowledgable,.

Yeah, I was just reading that. Danyel is a west coast writer though, and I do think [the review is] an interesting way to frame what was happening in east coast hip-hop at the time — like as west coast stuff got smoother, the east coast guys got pissed and made a bunch of angry lo-fi s— (see also Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers). I’m not sure I agree with that theory. It’s probably more likely that the industry saw the money drying up on these acts, which left them to their own devices and allowed them to tap into their more instinctive ruggedness.

What other albums from 1994 that actually did come out in 1994 do you feel like Black Bastards is akin to? Or do you think it stands out as a separate thing?

Musically it’s pretty singular. I guess you could tie it into 36 Chambers in a way, though that was from the year before. Thematically I would actually put it next to Common’s Resurrection in terms of bleak but also somehow playful coming of age stories — both being sophomore albums by artists who were basically complete goofballs on their first records and who are still basically goofballs but are suddenly carrying frustration on top of that. It’s related to what I was saying before, of capturing this very specific moment of a maturing artist. I’d throw Organized Konfusion’s Stress: The Extinction Agenda in the mix there, too.

Do you hear that idea mainly in the lyrics or in the production, or is it reflected equally in both?

Lyrics. Here’s the thing: all these acts got objectively harder on these records. They were talking a lot more s—, but there was a clear-cut reason for that. For lack of a better word, they were becoming more conscious, too.

Right, they had a philosophy or values that shaped their outlook on the first album, but the second album is kind of about what happens and how they adjust when they’ve presented that outlook to the larger world.

Yeah, and when the larger world kind of comes crushing down on them, which is a very real experience for a young person. 1994 is an interesting time because you look at an album like Illmatic, which is so obviously constructed as a SERIOUS STATEMENT FROM A YOUNG PERSON, and in a way it’s a lot less interesting. Young people don’t make serious statements, not consistently. They’re scattershot aggression and joy and chaos, and then sometimes great wisdom emerges out of that mess. That ties into another thing I love about Black Bastards: it’s not especially self-conscious. They still had that Native Tongues thing going on where it felt like you were peering into someone else’s universe. It’s like the dark Native Tongues album

Yeah, I feel like the hidden in plain sight thing about most Native Tongues/Afrocentric albums of the early ’90s that people don’t talk about is how horny they are. But Black Bastards is more violent and confrontational. There’s nothing fun about that album.

I wouldn’t say that at all. There are still running gags.

Well, they are darker gags.

Exactly, but it’s the same thing as with Mr. Hood and a lot of the Natives stuff, where it’s such a specific voice that it could only come organically from a group of friends. You can just imagine them listening to that Kain record and hearing him say, “Like a constipated monkey,” and having it be a running joke for a week in their circle. Or not even a joke, just a reference, like this is something that is being absorbed into the way they communicate with one another and then spit back on a record.

So, going back a little, the Common and Organized Konfusion albums you mentioned in a way saved or redirected their careers. Had Black Bastards come out, how do you think it would have been regarded and how would it have affected their career? (This hypothetical question is even harder because Subroc had already passed on.)

It would probably have been more of an Organized situation than a Common situation: well regarded by well-informed rap nerds, but more or less forgotten by everyone else. (And the only reason Common’s Resurrection holds water today is because it had a big resonant single. Nobody is listening to “Orange Pineapple Juice” in 2014.). And I’m so hardwired to the KMD mythology that I can’t even imagine what a third record from them would sound like. Looking at the Common and Organized timeline, I guess it would be an overlong and confused record with a couple amazing songs on it. There is this giant chasm between 1994 rap and 1997 or 1998 rap, and most people didn’t make it over.

You mean there weren’t many artists who were able to release albums in both of those time periods?

Right. Because Doom was pushed out early, it gave him space to regroup, whereas guys like Organized were stuck in a system that was changing dramatically. Expectations were a lot higher. Stakes was high!

Back then Doom didn’t look like he was taking a loss going from a major to an indie (which wasn’t a cool thing to do back then), because he could transform into a “new” artist.

Exactly, and he never had to make his sellout records. God, can you imagine Doom being forced to make jiggy music in 1997? Actually on second thought, that would be kind of tight. As much as I love Operation: Doomsday, I am sad that we never got to hear an Zev Love X and Puff Daddy collab, ala Mic Geronimo’s “Nothing Move But the Money.”

How much do you think the mystique and interest around Black Bastards exists because of the fact it never came out in 1994, the reason why it didn’t come out and Subroc’s death before it was finished?

That’s a tough question because, like you said, so few of us had a chance to hear it divorced from that context. Even if we had gotten a bootleg early, it was a rare lost masterpiece. Empirically it’s a very good record.

So you don’t think that context adds extra gravity to it? I love it, but it’s always tough to judge whether I love something purely or if it’s because of my history with the artist, my age when I first heard it, what else I was into when I first heard it and so on.

I could see some early KMD fans being put off by the darkness without the benefit of context. Devout Muslims turn around and make a bunch of songs about robbing people and drinking wine, but that’s the eerie thing about that record, the context affirms its existence. I don’t usually believe in premonitions and things like that, but you can sense that they could sense that all was not right.

I can’t remember if it was Dante Ross or MC Serch talking about it on a podcast, and it’s alluded to in Check the Technique, but it sounds like KMD were using lots of hallucinogenics while making Black Bastards.

Yeah, I saw that. Makes sense.

What more do you want to know about the album?

I’m still processing a lot of the stuff that was revealed in that book. I didn’t know they were close with Dr. York and recorded part of it at his studio. That adds another layer of darkness, in a way. Or the part about Doom playing the album front to back at Subroc’s wake.

Sonically and perspective-wise, have you heard the influence of Black Bastards on releases from other artists?

Not very much. As far as rapping, it seems like later Doom is more influential. The one thing is the “What a N—- Know (remix),” which as far as I can tell, was the true birth of the Chipmunk soul thing that Kanye blew up at the turn of the century, even though everyone always gives it to RZA. That Gil Scott-Heron “I saw the thunder and heard the lightening” bit is the first example of a rap song specifically pitching up male soul vocals to sound female.

Do you think that was a conscious influence or just an inevitable development?

I have no idea. I wonder if RZA has listened to Black Bastards; I wonder if Kanye has listened to Black Bastards. That’s the thing about this record, it’s kind of cut off from the lineage. It’s legacy is Doom’s legacy, but I don’t think it goes much further than that. Maybe I’m wrong though, butterfly effects and all.

Butterfly effects?

Like a butterfly flaps its wings and causes an avalanche, or whatever.

I thought you meant there was something about the sound on the album you were likening to a butterfly or the sound a butterfly makes.

There might be. There’s a lot happening sonically in the margins of that record.

When I asked you about the influence of Black Bastards on other artists, you mentioned that you think that later Doom’s rapping is more influential. Who do you mean specifically?

I hear more of the sloppy, non-committal, multi-syllable flows in kids like Earl Sweatshirt than I do the more lively Zev Love X flow. Even when they were rapping about miserable things, KMD had a real upbeat energy to their rhyme style and that seems like it would be incongruous with basically everything out today apart from maybe Rae Sremmurd or some Young Thug songs. Everyone else raps sad or serious or angry now.

I’ve been trying to find out for years what happened to Onyx and was bummed there wasn’t a definitive answer in Check the Technique. I once emailed Ta-Nehisi Coates about it after he wrote the Doom article for the New Yorker, but he didn’t know.

I asked Doom about him when I interviewed him. He gave me a very vague answer: “He went back to doing whatever he was meant to do in his life.”

Has Doom talked about the album much before this book?

He didn’t talk much about the album in the book. The Doom quotes are like, Yes, that was a song about drinking wine, we were drinking a lot of wine.

It’s weird because the legend of that album over the past 20 years has basically been totally told by Dante Ross with a little bit of Serch.

I can’t imagine it’s a period that [Doom] wants to relive. I read this 4080 interview from back then with him yesterday and he said, “I rarely get a chance to feel good.” I wanted to cry.

Black Bastards was one of the first instances I’d ever heard of where rap artists who already had at least one album out and arguably had a following got an album shelved. The other one was Del’s Future Development, which also found its way to the public around 1997. In recent years rappers get their albums shelved or indefinitely delayed all the time. Do you have a sense if that was happening to other rappers back then?

A lot of stuff from around that time got shelved. Off the top of my head there’s Freddie Foxxx, Crustified Dibbs, the third Jungle Brothers album and probably a lot more that we still haven’t even heard about. That might’ve been the first wave of labels realizing that rap music wasn’t always a cash cow, and Elektra especially had a lot of rap artists who were pretty unmarketable (though talented). The KMD album probably got the most attention of these because the narrative had legs what with all the tragedy and the “Cop Killer” controversy.

One things that’s always been interesting to me about the circumstances in which Black Bastards wasn’t released in 1994 is that it happened because of music industry self-policing. The complaint mainly came from Terri Rossi, who had an R&B column in Billboard, a trade publication, and she left to become a VP of Marketing at BMG a few months after the column against Black Bastards came out. And Elektra decided to not put out the album and release KMD from their contract without any form of outsider outcry. A lot of people say that Elektra dropped them because they were still on edge from the “Cop Killer” situation and didn’t want another controversy, but part of me feels like the whole thing was more commercially or financially motivated, like they just decided to cut their losses on a group that probably wasn’t going to make them any money.

Yeah, I tend to agree. It was pretty telling that they didn’t just do the obvious thing and ask them to change the artwork. If Elektra really thought they had a Snoop Doggy Dogg on their hands they would’ve happily released the album, nooses and all. They might’ve even asked him to add some more nooses to the cover.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

PC Music out of London has become one of the most divisive new labels in dance music. Though a thoroughly underground label — one that doesn’t even really charge for its releases, it just throws them up for free download on its SoundCloud page — it is invested in the poppiest pop of modern history. The songs are packed with ultra bright sounds and winkingly saccharine lyrics that make them infectious but almost inhuman. There’s a sense of detached maximalism to them.

PC Music artists’ influences include current radio dominators, polished American R&B from the 1990s, trance, K-pop and J-pop, as well as club cheese of indeterminate European origin. But all these references don’t necessarily come together easily in their off-kilter songs. They sometimes feel like a Tumblr page filled with so many reblogs and customizations that they’ve been rendered incomprehensible. But maybe that’s the point.

It is also an incredibly secretive label that often seems to be purposefully obscuring the facts and whose artists rarely give interviews. Still, the audience and recognition for acts including A.G. Cook (PC Music’s founder), Hannah Diamond, Kane West and GFOTY (Girlfriend of the Year) continues to grow. The label is also affiliated with SOPHIE, a producer who has put out two successful singles on the Numbers label, but nothing so far (at least under the SOPHIE name) on PC Music. SOPHIE recently teamed with A.G. Cook for a project called QT, which will be put out on the British mega-indie XL Records.

With a project as high-minded and confusing as PC Music, are we really getting good music, or are we just getting a lot of ideas? Eric Ducker discussed whether the sounds of PC Music can be appreciated even if you don’t know the context with Alex Frank, the Deputy Culture Editor at VOGUE.com.

What are the concrete facts you know about PC Music?

Like most of the world, very little. It’s kind of an inscrutable universe. I know it’s a label and, dare I say, a subculture that’s going on in London at the moment

Does that make you want to learn more about it or do you like that it’s inscrutable?

I suppose I’m used to mystery in electronic music. But I guess in the case of PC Music, the secrecy sometimes feels so intentional and directional that it almost makes me want to explore why they’re so interested in confusing us.

Do you think they’re hiding something, or is it just a game?

My sense is that it’s just a game, a game we’re all so good at playing now. Messing around with identity on the Internet is fun! And then when they started getting attention from being mysterious, maybe it just made them want to do it even more.

Right. When considering what they could potentially be hiding, I don’t think they are older people adopting the mannerisms/tactics of 1990s kids and I don’t think they are established artists trying new pseudonyms. The only thing I think of that they might be trying to obscure is that there may be less involvement from actual women then they seem to be presenting and that a lot the female voices they use are created through computer processing.

That certainly seems true. SOPHIE is a dude. QT’s voice is probably a dude, too

If there are not as many women involved as it seems, is that troublesome?

Maybe, especially because so much of the aesthetic is sort of an electronically camp take on “girliness” and cuteness. But I’m also of the school that instead of vilifying, I’d be more interested in exploring just why a bunch of young adult males would want to put on internet drag for the sake of some songs.

So, why do you think they would? They’re probably not going to give the answer.

There’s so many answers to that question, one of which is just the simple answer that so much of the pop music that is ultimately the most important, at least since Madonna, is made by women. So if you’re doing a campy take on pop, maybe that’s the natural place to start. My question is: Does that make them drag queens?

I don’t know. Maybe they see a voice as just an instrument that can be manipulated to achieve they sound they want. Positive K pitch-shifted his voice on his biggest hit, “I Gotta Man,” so it sounded like he was rapping back and forth with a woman, then used actual women for the videos and performances. I wouldn’t consider him a drag queen. Then there’s stuff like C&C Music Factory where they would use one woman’s voice for recordings and they have another woman lip sync in videos. That’s a manipulation, too.

Totally. I wonder if the entire point of PC Music is that there is no vocalist at all. Girl, boy, robot — maybe the pitch shift is just meant to highlight how there’s no need for a human at all. They’re drawing attention to the artificiality, which seems to be their entire raison d’être. Porter Robinson used a computer speaking software for some of the tracks on his new album, and seemed really proud of that. Ultimately that’s a direction I’d love to see explored even more in music, just stripping away any notion of “the human” seems like an interesting project.

Let’s backtrack here. Do you like the stuff on PC Music as music, or is it just an interesting project?

Ha, that question really seems to be at the heart of what PC Music is all about, and I don’t know if the music and the idea of the project are easily separable. But just the pure music streaming through my iPhone headphones as I walk down the street? Yes, I like it. Not all of it, of course, but a fair amount of it is enjoyable to me. It definitely is a stretch, musically, but I don’t know if it’s as much of one as people are making it out to be. I mean haven’t we been here before, to some extent, with Unicorn Kid and chiptune?

Do you find the PC Music a progression of that? Are they just doing the same idea in just a different way or is the conversation moving?

The conversation is moving, partly because PC Music is such a pastiche of so many things that came before it — not just Unicorn Kid and chiptune, but Ryan Trecartin movies, Grimes, Ariana Grande — in a way that’s totally contemporary. PC Music is new in what references from the past it puts together and how it frames that collage.

Hypothetically, let’s say you grew up in a family of strict rockists who dictated everything you listened to and you never heard any of the Europop, J-pop, K-pop, 1990s American pop R&B or anything else that PC Music references, but you still had the capacity for objective and critical listening. If you were given a playlist that mixed up PC Music’s influences with PC Music’s own recordings, do you think you’d like or appreciate the PC Music stuff as much as the originals?

The answer to that is probably no. Like, is Frankenstein more beautiful then the people’s whose body parts were assembled to create him? No. Ace of Base is more palatably enjoyable than PC Music. Mariah Carey is more palatably enjoyable than PC Music. Even Kyary Pamyu Pamyu is a little easier on the ears. But that doesn’t make PC Music bad, just difficult.

But that’s the question with all music now, right? Can the content be appreciated without the context? I’m sure there are people who can do that, but the culture of music is what interests me the most.

Well, what interests you about the culture of PC Music?

Unlike most pop music I like, it doesn’t make me want to dance or sing along, but I like listening to some of it because it’s like listening to a bunch of funny jokes.

Yes! I asked my friend Julianne Escobedo Shepherd if PC Music is like “Weird Al” Yankovic for hipsters — the idea that it’s an inside joke that we can all be in on, but that’s still catchy and fun to listen to. She said that the precise difference is that Weird Al isn’t cynical and that PC Music is cynical.

Cynical in what sense?

Cynical in the sense that PC Music’s manipulation is possibly just too manipulated. It’s like trend forecasting to an almost scary degree. As in: If you combine these X, Y and Z nostalgia points that the internet cares about so much, you’re going to have a hit. It’s like seeing what’s culturally trending, combining them all together and of course that’ll hit big.

So as a listener are you supposed to laugh at their approach or the fact you’re responding to it?

You’re supposed to be proud of yourself for being in on the joke, on knowing the references. That’s the wink-wink. PC Music is almost a double-wink. It’s having the ironic edge of the wink, but taking it one step further and letting us know that you even know that being IRONIC is lame. I hate to say it’s post-ironic — because I hate when people say post-racial or post-gay or WHATEVER — but that’s what this is, right? It’s incorporated the laugh track right into the beat.

I’m also incredibly interested in what PC Music’s relationship to the larger music industry is, in the sense that it feels like the antidote to the post-Disclosure house music that is now everywhere. PC Music is like the anti-Kiesza.

Whereas Disclosure is hoping to revive electronic music’s history of soulfulness, and in doing so has brought house music back to a gigantic audience, PC Music is kind of saying that electronic music is still an insider’s club. If Disclosure is now played at every wedding party in New York City, PC Music is saying, “No, this music is for weirdos.”

They’re saying dance music should be insider?

Yes, I think so. Sure, it embraces pop as like an aesthetic tool, but this is difficult music. This is not likely to get DJed at a Meatpacking District club, it’s just not.

Did you go see SOPHIE at MoMA PS 1’s Warm Up a couple weekends ago?

I did not, and it’s funny that he played on the same day as Skrillex, another person who divided the world into two camps — one who said he’s ruining music, one who said he’s great.

From what I read, it sounds like SOPHIE was aggressively un-fun, while Skrillex took an opposite, very crowd-pleasing approach

Which is super interesting, and makes me wonder, is PC Music the second coming of Salem?

Uh oh.

Salem was met with similar confusion. They were sort of extreme amalgamation of what was happening in music that was aggressively cynical and un-fun.

Most people’s complaint with Salem was that in the end, underneath all the layers, was nothing substantitive. Did you feel that way?

Well, I hope I don’t sound like a cheesy dime store Oscar Wilde, but I don’t know how much I care if there is something substantive underneath. I like surfaces, sometimes. I don’t think music always has to have more than a nice surface. The layers can be the best part.

Let’s talk about QT, the new project from PC Music head A.G. Cook and SOPHIE. Only one song is out, but I guess the concept is that QT is combination singer and energy drink. It seems like it’s a riff on Hatsune Miku, Japan’s virtual pop star. The project is coming out on XL Records, and they have that Adele money now, so I’m curious if those resources are going to take Cook and SOPHIE’s ideas to crazy levels or if it will ruin them, because the PC Music stuff has been purposefully so low budget.

I hope this doesn’t come back to haunt me, but I think there’s no fear that QT and SOPHIE will ever be crushingly-famous, no matter what label they are on. They would have to seriously temper their sound if that were ever to happen. But maybe they will? My dream would be to have Miley Cyrus collaborate with PC Music. I know they’re working with Kyary Pamyu Pamyu on something, but I think if they could bridge their sound to Miley or Katy Perry they might have something.

But I will say one thing: I wonder if the kind of incessant peppiness that is at the heart of PC Music is already on its way out. Their labelmate on XL, FKA Twigs, is transgressive, like them, but in a totally different way. She does music so seductively, slowly, and something about her moodiness feels right at the moment. That’s what so funny about PC Music, everyone is labeling them as so forward thinking, but actually, they’re making commentary on the past five years or so of peppy Dr. Luke pop, J-Pop, Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus. I wonder if people are kind of sick of peppy pop music and are ready for something a little darker. There’s only so much cuteness that one culture can take, right? Ariana Grande might be proving me wrong though by having a No. 1 album this summer.

Maybe they’re so on trend they’re actually behind trend. Which ultimately is avant-garde, right?

Yes, being behind trend is the new being on trend. I hate myself for saying that, but maybe it’s true. Look, there’s space in the world of electronic music for both Twigs and PC Music. Twigs reads as almost insanely authentic in a classic sense, and that’s really worked for her. Authenticity still works. Songwriting and feeling and emotion and sexiness still works. It still moves people. PC Music is a different thing and there’s space in the world for different things. But in its calculation, in its manipulation, in its almost soullessness, [PC Music has] hit upon something incredibly intellectual. But I wonder if people even want their music to be intellectual.

People may not want their pop music to be intellectual, but they do want it to be emotional.

Yeah, I think they do. And maybe that’s because we’re still caught in the 20th century. We’re still wedded to old ideas about what music is supposed to be and we’re not ready for PC Music, in a way. Maybe PC Music is helping push us forward, to start to get comfortable with uncanny sounds. It’s uncanny pop. It’s pushing us towards inhuman music.

This summer people were all in a stink about discovering that track of Britney Spears singing without Auto-Tune, and I just thought, “Who cares? The song is great!” (By the way, I think Britney Spears is the original cyborg pop star, and perhaps PC Music’s most important influence, but that’s another story.) But I also understand why people were mad. We’re still human enough that we want our songs to feel real, whatever “real” means. It’s a feeling, you know it when you hear it. Or you think you know it when you hear it.

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