December 19, 2011 at 1:27pm
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2012 Hype Predictions
- A new artist named $teve’s club anthem about drinking and also having fun and believing in yourself will be inescapable for two months, until an enterprising journalist uncovers his dark past: It will be revealed that before $teve was $teve he was ‘Steve,’ second-string member of the Mexican Summer roster who in ‘09 released an album of hazy, introspective indie-folk tunes and opened a few shows for Toro y Moi. Speculation will run wild: Did $teve’s managers insist he tone his abs and get a spray-tan, to better court a mainstream audience? Is he really interested in getting drunk and having fun, or is it all an act? These questions will be either fully resolved or further complicated by his marrying the newly single Kim Gordon.
- Jeff Mangum will release a 5-disc expanded edition of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, featuring demos, outtakes, positive reviews of the album read aloud by Barack Obama, negative reviews of the album read aloud by Pauly Shore and then savaged by a panel of our most respected music critics, an hour of Mangum crying into a pillow, and of course the songs themselves, remastered and accentuated by woozy synths. Nobody will say “hey, those twenty songs you wrote fifteen years ago were great, but you’re a songwriter, right? Well then why don’t you write some fucking songs.”
- Reasoning that their three albums will be lumped together at the top of year-end lists anyway, Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear and Dirty Projectors will release just one album, as the Dirty Grizzly Collective. Not to be outdone, Wild Nothing, Beach Fossils and Yuck will combine to form The Cure.
- A prominent blogger will come under fire for championing an act called ‘Truth’ when a less prominent blogger points out that “he’s not really rapping, right? I mean it just sounds like he’s reading unfocused essays about why he hates women and gay people, no? And stop me if I’m out of line here, but are those ‘beats’ not just the sound of someone banging arrhythmically on a kitchen counter while his friend shakes a marimba, and also reads his own hateful essays in a quieter voice?” And the prominent blogger will explain that that’s the point, that he’s taking your average plaid-wearing middle-class listener out of their comfort zone by confronting them with the inarticulate bigotry that consumes large swaths of the US populace, and to save his reputation he’ll conduct a video interview with ‘Truth’ which will go like this: “Your lyrics seem to be, in a way, articulating the inarticulate bigotry that consumes large swaths of the US populace, and also confronting people with it, you know?” “The things I say are the things I genuinely believe and feel.” “Ooooooooooook [makes wiping hands clean gesture] On to the next one, huh guys?”
- Bon Iver will retreat to the woods to record his third album, after Kanye West (good-naturedly!) makes fun of his beard. The result—a 90-minute record mostly about why his beard is cool, and why Kanye is a jerk—will receive a 10.0 from Pitchfork and somehow win an Oscar.
- The blog world’s enthusiasm for a mysterious new female guitarist who refuses to reveal even her name will turn to concern, when it’s revealed that she is in fact an amnesiac.
