My devastating Oneohtrix Point Never anecdote is that at the 2016 edition of Moogfest I briefly fell in with a crew of four tech bros who worked at LinkedIn and were really excited about the prospect of me getting their utterly garbage band, Rad Dads, onto the radio. The opportunity to make fun of other peoples' anglo-ass names is really rare for me, and so it's with great pleasure that I tell you that one of them was named Siegfried Bilstein (I am, alas, making none of this up). Anyway, these dunces left in the middle of an utterly incredible Dawn Richard set in order to get good seats for Oneohtrix Point Never. When I ran into them hours later, they couldn't talk about anything else, giddy about how vividly the OPN show had reminded them of being, I quote, angry, sexless teenagers using the computer after school.

I'm tempted to leave it there, but I won't. Oneohtrix Point Never is a sort of poster child for experimental music's current and most boring ever period, typifying the current era in which stoned dudes from rich families, plodding away at the synthesizer while anxiously awaiting their inevitable cancellation by a thousand sexual assault accusations, are for whatever reason considered the vanguard. It's a school of thought that relegates any and all qualities of the music itself to tertiary priority at best; more important is the extent to which some fool who uses their middle initial can project their own desire for superior detachment onto the record's ironic invocation of rap tropes or chintzy sensibilities or whatever else is markedly uncool until it's reclaimed by Oneohtrix Point Never (or James Ferraro or whoever). It's of little importance, even undesirable, that the experience of listening to the music itself have anything whatsoever to offer.

Ol' Dan Lopatin has been maintaining a steady output of one enjoyable song per album for years now, and Age Of is no different; I could listen to the bass figure that opens The Station (mocked in at least one review because of its... listenability) on a loop forever. This, from a few years back, is hot. But good lord, I would trade it all to never hear about this guy again.