Anyone who has two brain cells to rub together knows Time Magazine is the clairvoyant purveyor of emerging music culture. Moronic conspiracy theorists claim Time is an antiquated rag shilling for corporate hustlers who reluctantly cram dolla, dolla bills in it's fraying G-string. They also claim Time's survival is predicated on ever-diminishing stacks of said crumpled, beer-soaked bills, sadly transforming its whoring from exotic weekend hobby to formal business model. Well, I don't like haters and I will not debate the hate. I choose positivity. Moving on.

A new Time article was hand-delivered to my inbox today, what a treat! Time has granted me exclusive insight (subscriber baby, yeah!) to the music trends for 2018...three words (with cleverly missing punctuation): Why Don't We

Unlike boy bands of the past, Why Don't We ups the game of culture engineering to the next level, inducing CEO-level wet dreams among the Big Dicks in the pomade-industrial-complex. Boys bands have thankfully moved beyond the days of NSYNC's tween-insulting, puppetry-toy store videos and Backstreet Boys' choreographed suburban-gangsta-swing. With Why Don't We, musical expression is algorithmically crafted and human emotions are micro-targeted in a Cambridge Analytica manner to customize a music experience that feels simultaneously refined and natural much like your organic, fair-trade corporate coffee or a sapiosexual relationship with your Alexa. It's great! It's uncomfortably, perfectly great.

The dumpster of musical history is body-stacked full of soulless, corporate ghostwriters who farted-out copy for snack foods by day, but got jiggy with the boy band beats in the Manhattan evenings. The thankful evolution in Why Don't We's music progresses well beyond previous incarnations of boy band inauthenticity and creates a new, more subtle form of inauthenticity that feels refreshingly authentic. Gone are the days of goofy antics and overwrought emotions slathered atop looping techno beats and shrill, pubescent howls. With Why Don't We's 2017 release "These Girls", fans experience hooks painstakingly engineered with advanced machine learning for maximum jinglistic value. The hooks subconsciously encourage incessant, mantra-level humming, beckoning the comfort of a warm bath (and straight razors) in a transporting musical experience that listeners ride upon into the afterlife.

"These Girls" is such a finely tuned instantiation of musicality, it boggles the mind to think of its near-immaculate inception. Delivered as a montage, "These Girls" is a flashy banquet of pop culture symbols designed to scrape each mathematically potential view from roving teens dry-humping their way around the Interwebs. The emoji-imagery, the ironic clichés, the meta-pop orientation all make for a wonderfully deja-vu-like experience where viewers feel as though they make actually be in the video. No female demographic is forgotten in this highly calculated musical experience, be it the broken-tooth Kentucky skanks cleaning pig sties for a $.25/ea or the Toykyo totties plastinating every square inch of their souls with daddy's Cayman hedge fund proceeds. If you are a teen girl and don't feel personally connected to the lyrics, you are an alien, literally (they are studying your species, the next album will have you covered).

And going beyond, "These Girls", Why Don't We's catalog is so wonderfully AI-handcrafted so as to feel perfectly tailored to all aspects of the teenage human experience. Five beautiful variations of the neo-pompadour bounce excitedly in a flurry of clichés and soupy sentiments no doubt capturing a deterministically profitable amount of clickage. And the AI doesn't stop there. Faux-organic social media linkage between other YouTube phenoms (Logan Paul as co-Director) lends immediate click-bait-credibility, enabling both Paul and Why to harvest teen-attention in a joint-venture, circle-jerk click-a-thon.

To summarize, the artistic expression in Why Don't We's catalog underscores what seems increasingly clear in our modern technoculture...resistance is futile. If we are to continue as a music-loving species, we need to embrace bot-generated musical expression. If we just open our minds the joys of eliminating every speck of natural human behavior, thought, motivation and intuition, then we will fully appreciate the sheer precision of algorithmically-generated artistic expression. If we dare go against the trend, we may find ourselves locked in a dark room, drooling, caked in feces, rhythmically bumping our head against the walls so as to hear something musical as we attempt to escape the cell our AI overlords placed us in. The future of culture is currently being compiled from a string of 1s and 0s and I, for one, am super fucking excited.

Words always fall short, this is why painters exist. Sadly, I can't paint. Instead, please enjoy these 17 syllables, each typed with love, a love inspired by watching "These Girls" roughly 10 times before penning this post. Time nailed it. 2018 is going to be a great year for music. Thank you Why Don't We for your contribution.

~These Girls~

Are you a female?
Do you breathe, eat, go pee pee?
Please buy this music.

Comedy Open Mic Round #6
I nominate @lexiconical and @adversus to participate in this round

_{* images taken from google images (labelled for reuse)}