Dead Music

Music died, and DJ Khaled’s Wild Thoughts is just what we’re pretending is alive instead. It’s not even a song, really—he grabbed a beat, looped it, threw a couple of notes on top, and then got some famous people to mumble at it. That’s the whole formula now. No songwriting, no craft, just assembly.

But the video is where you see what’s actually happening. Rihanna basically stands there and lets her breasts do all the work while she barely bothers to move her lips. The less she actually sings, the more the frame pulls back to show her body. There’s something almost honest about how shameless it is.

Somewhere along the way, the industry figured out that talent was optional. You just need someone attractive enough to point a camera at and not try too hard. Rihanna understood this before anyone else—she figured out you can show up, barely move, barely sing, and still get a hit as long as the frame is wide enough. There’s no gap anymore between the product and the marketing. They’re exactly the same thing.

What kills me is how clear it all is now. The industry used to hide what it was doing. Now it’s all naked economics. Just bodies and noise. But I don’t think that honesty makes it better, just sadder somehow. This is what we’ve decided music is.