VMP Magazine

Deep in the bowels of Spotify’s digital architecture you’ll find the anonymous, Google-proof artist profile of one “Tanya Swing.” She (or it) has exactly one song to their name: a chintzy karaoke version of “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.” In 2014 Taylor Swift publicly denounced the presence Spotify and Apple Music in commercial recording, and subsequently purged her discography from those services. In her absence, Tanya Swing has gathered a modest 10,000 plays, presumably driven by people misclicking for the real thing.

When the Rapture released Echoes in 2003, the burgeoning online music media hailed it as a watershed moment for fine-tuned polyglot taste. No more did the underground consist only of slack-jawed white men and guitars! Now it can include slack-jawed white men with synthesizers too. In Amy Granzin’s blurb for the record on Pitchfork’s 2000’s decade list, she wrote “Echoes ordered indie kids to drop their genre boundary-drawing chalk and start taking beatmakers and synth-players seriously. [It] paved the way for Justice, MGMT, Hercules and Love Affair, and a host of other independent-minded dance acts.”

In 2013, Cut Copy were looking inward. The globby, technicolor Free Your Mind famously took cues from the twin summers of love (San Francisco’s blissy protests in 1967, and Manchester’s MDMA-driven moral crises in 1988 and ’89.) The Melbourne quartet have always operated with a gumdrop of nostalgia—the slick, retrofitted disco on In Ghost Colours, the Bret Hart wraparound shades adorning an icy mannequin on debut LP Bright Like Neon Love—but Free Your Mind was the first time those inclinations felt overtly politicized. “There’s a sense in those eras that music is transcendent, and more than just being entertainment it really changed the culture of youth and the culture of life. It was something that made the world better during those periods,” said vocalist and primary songwriter Dan Whitford to BulletMedia, during the Free Your Mind press cycle. “It wasn’t a self-conscious time, it was like throwing off all the burdens of the Thatcher era and then looking forward to something that was a much brighter and more positive future; and something that was shared amongst the youth of that time.”

It is strange to hear DJ Drama talk about erasure, especially considering how long he ruled the world. There are precious few people who knew what it was like to be in the room during Lil Wayne’s legendary mid-’00s opus years, and fewer still who had the privilege of personally offering up the beats for his consumption. Drama was never a star player, but he was the perfect mixtape liaison; a behind-the-scenes hype-man silently feeding The Best Rapper Alive until the rest of us believed his boasts. It sure is crazy to consider how all that history is being moved closer and closer to the margins in the subscription-streaming epoch. The out-the-trunk philosophy Drama thrived on is not friendly with the copyright mandates handed down by venture capitalist conglomerates and, unfortunately, that means you can’t find any of those prime Lil Wayne mixtapes on Spotify. There are some days where this is annoying and others where it feels like an outright crime.

Your journey in The Artful Escape begins when the hatch pops off your starship on a twinkling snow-capped planet somewhere beyond the fifth dimension. The camera is framed through a two-dimensional panorama—Mario Bros. style—and the only way is forward. It’s a platformer, I guess, but with a heavy Psilocin load coursing through its veins. Player-character Francis Vendetti is a John Lennon-like voyager looking for truth, love or something close through the sweet release of music, and as he leaps over the first gap, he whips out his celestial axe and starts shredding in sublime harmony with the airy synthesizer backbeat filling the void. Yes, this is a video game where the double-jump is tied to a wicked guitar solo. A few minutes later Vendetti arrives at a cliff. He shreds some more, and the game prompts me to “jettison your guitar.” It floats out of my hands and explodes in a celestial mist, leaving behind a crystal bridge. A giant worm carrying a city on its back pierces the diorama in the distance.

For a few years, you could catch Johnny Galvatron holding down fort as the frontman in the kooky Australian electro-rock quartet the Galvatrons. They achieved respectable mid-level success—a record deal with Warner Bros., an appearance in the down-under edition of Rolling Stone—and within a few months of their auspicious debut EP When We Were Kids, Johnny realized how much he disliked being a rock star.

Video games are in a very weird place in 2016. Three years since release, home consoles like the PS4 and Xbox One have yet to achieve the need-filling ubiquity of the machines that came before them, and backbone triple-A titles like Titanfall 2, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, and Watch Dogs 2 are failing to recoup expenses. Much like the film industry, gaming’s middle class is disappearing faster than ever. Technology is becoming more and more consolidated, and the idea of owning a physical device to - specifically - play video games is only going to get more niche. In a world where not even Infinity Ward can hit their quota, I wouldn’t blame anyone in the industry for fearing the worst.

But in moments like this, it’s important to remember that creativity has a way of asserting itself, no matter what the sales figures say. From long-forgotten franchise reboots, to bedroom projects, to star-studded, thoroughly marketed sequels, I’ve had a lot of fun playing video games this year. The following 10 are worth your time for many reasons, but we’re featuring them here for their particularly memorable score. If you’re not a gamer and have a negative impression on the industry as a whole, I’d hope that these soundtracks might contextualize the hobby, and prove that there’s real people with commendable passions working behind the scenes.

Not so long ago, it felt like indie rock drove the discourse around music on the internet. Now, the Indie Rock Blog Hype Era is as gone as the Roman Empire. What happened?