Name three of the most significant releases in the history of music. Geez, umm… alright, I got this.
John Lennon spreading peace, love and optimism with ‘Imagine’; the release of the Shrek soundtrack led by Smash Mouth’s indisputably perfect ‘All Star’; and the moment Neil Cicierega decided the two would work perfectly together.
This is the story of a girl…
In 2014, Cicierega – a prolific content creator and Internet Person best known for Newgrounds’ ‘Potter Puppet Pals’ – dropped Mouth Sounds, a mixtape that used nostalgia like an inflatable weapon against the listener. It playfully desecrated every icon of the ’80s, ’90s and now, usually by liberally applying Steve Harwell’s cut-up and distorted reminiscence on what somebody had once told him. The follow-up (and ‘prequel’), Mouth Silence, left ‘All Star’ behind, upped the irreverence and doubled down on millennial TV references.
Now, the trilogy is complete – Mouth Moods (the ‘zequel’ or ‘squeakquel’, depending on where you look) is loose upon the world, and Cicierega’s masterpiece is complete. Moods is the best of both worlds; a collection of immediately recognisable tracks lovingly and meticulously pieced together to form something unconscionably stupid. To say that it’s annoying is both an understatement and an underestimation of the Mouth Trilogy’s value within its current context: it makes annoying into an art form.
To spoil the surprises of Mouth Moods would be to do the album a disservice – it’s got all your (least) favourite samples from the first album, brand new misplaced memories, and enough niche pop culture referencing to make Tumblr look out of touch. Simply put, it’s a stupefying masterpiece of music and comedy, and it’s what the world needs. Desperately.
Cicierega was far from the first to mash up songs for comic effect, but he’s arguably perfected the form. Like his predecessor Girl Talk, he has adapted sampling to reappropriate music as meme – his pastiche works are infinitely replicable, mutable and distanced from their points of origin. The difference is intent: Girl Talk gets club floors shaking, while Mouth Moods provokes disgust, hilarity and unexpected catharsis in roughly equal measure.
More distinctively, Cicierega has retained his online roots. The Mouth Trilogy is synecdoche for net culture – an environment in which sincerity is considered naive at best, repellent at worst, and where nostalgia is baited, indulged in and deeply scrutinised. It’s an environment in which the content creator is king, and the limits are twofold: the imagination, and YouTube’s copyright filters.
Mouth Moods is as much the logical conclusion to the cut-up work that Cicierega began with his lyric video to ‘Fly Away’ as it is the precursor to Run The Jewel’s Meow The Jewels; the bastard child of Danger Mouse and vaporwave. It shares DNA with #flutedrop creator D.J. Detweiler and Canberra’s own SoundCloud shitposter Dead DJ Joke (whose recent crimes include blending ‘Hotline Bling’ with the Angry Beavers theme, dancifying the Mortein ad and transporting Smash Mouth to Twin Peaks). And it has inspired fans to create video art matching his work.
“I doubt you will find two mash-up albums that will elicit as many emotions as these two will, and strong emotions at that,” said The Needle Drop’s Anthony Fantano, speaking before Mouth Moods’ release. It is a mind-boggling statement to make about a record in which ‘Love Shack’ and the Psycho soundtrack coexist, and yet entirely accurate. How can trolling be this touching?
“I hope that children continue to be an important voice on the internet because that kind of twitch humour and DIY ethic that children have is the lifeblood of internet humour,” Cicierega said during a presentation at last year’s XOXO Festival in Portland, Oregon. “I think it’s important to be nostalgic as much as you can and stay in touch with who you were as a kid, and keep all your old files, because you want to keep those synapses alive, so that it’s easier for you to remember that feeling that everything is hilarious and wonderful and new.”
Cicierega manages to make the old new while flying in the face of the expected, or even the desired (no one could possibly want this much Smash Mouth). His remixes exist solely to bring joy to the listener. Familiar sounds herald new discoveries. Each track is undemanding, immediate, frustrating and immature, and the more it annoys the people around you that don’t lock step into their niche, the funnier it gets.
The trilogy allows for our generation to indulge in our nostalgia without the guilt of arrested development. We never have to go back and see how badly Home Improvement has aged, because ‘Annoyed Grunt’ gives us new lines of inquiry: “How do you explain Tim Allen?” and “Why the fuck would anyone make this?”.
Cicierega creates on impulse, and (hopefully) for the same reason some idiot would spend 900 words in this magazine extolling for you the academic virtues of ‘Mullet With Butterfly Wings’. His music, goofy and nonsensical as it is, is an investment of love in both the past and the present. There’s nothing disingenuous about the way he lovingly trashes the past. He and his contemporaries innocently play poorly tuned flutes atop a wrecking ball swinging through your media library, then invite you to play with them in the ruins, where new wonders await.
His timing is perfect. We could all use a little change.
The Mouth Trilogy – Mouth Sounds, Mouth Silence and Mouth Moods – is available (hey) now at neilcic.com.
