YouTuber Todd in the Shadows has a recurring point of criticism that’s changed the way I think about music in a micro sense: what’s the best or worst two seconds of music of an entire year. Some off Todd’s most recent examples are the stop-on-stop moment “I should stop… but I can’t” on Olivia Rodrigo’s “bad idea right?” and the drum fills at the end of the chorus on Harry Styles’s “As It Was.” The Quintessential Two Seconds has become an important phenomena to examine for me, and in this blog I want to talk about my Quintessential Two Seconds in music this year.

In the most recent episode of Jen and Jake’s Bizarre Affray, our discussion of Sudan Archives’ incredible album The BPM brought me to a tangent about music throughout the year that’s dealt with our symbiotic relationship with technology. I’ve been listening to a lot of EDM this year, and The BPM and Ninajirachi’s I Love My Computer make a symbiotic relationship with tech a core of their text. For Sudan Archives, “the BPM is the power,” the ability to make music with these new tools allowing a mode of self-expression that cuts through the digital noise that defines much of our modern social structures. Ninajirachi’s album is all about loving the act of making music, and being able to do so with a computer, the thing that eventually knows you better than anyone else. But on the song that contains my Quintessential Two Seconds, this concept of finding passion in technology is not as optimistic.

JPEGMAFIA and Flume’s EP We Live in a Society didn’t make a lot of noise for either artist’s respective fanbases. The collaboration between them makes sense, giving Flume a chance to bring his skill with glitch pop to a more melodic set of lyrics from JPEGMAFIA, who’s most recent album I Lay Down My Life for You contained some of the grooviest songs of his discography. The EP’s biggest moment, “Is It Real,” is a sweet treat of electronic drums and synths over the lilting and crooning of Ravyn Lenae and JPEGMAFIA’s essential question: “Now tell me, is it real?”

This is the essential musical moment of the year for me. It evokes so much of the postmodern frustration with the expanding chasm that is the uncanny valley in a post-AI society, where every image and sound is potentially a tulpa of something we could classify as uniformly and undeniably tangible.

In an era filled with AI generated music, “Is It Real” and the other music I’ve mentioned above throws a wrench into the idea of what “realness” even is. In a way I’m cheating a bit since the titular line is repeated more than a dozen times throughout the song, but the continued insistence of the question drives the narrative of the EP forward. The subject of the question changes as the song progresses, from the good time Ravyn Lenae describes and the catharsis of a fun night after a long week, to the AI Girlfriend that serves as the subject of the next song.

Sheila Kunkle’s “Psychosis in a Cyberspace Age” attempted to reckon with a newfound sense of psychological uncertainty in the face of the unreality of cyberspace. Kunkle’s paper has aged interestingly, since it’s very clear that much of cyberspace is real and has a tangible influence on our world, but it’s evolved into becoming a testament to AI’s new ability to instill individual persecutory delusions in onlookers. With chatbots encouraging us to kill ourselves and video and audio bots making slop constantly, it’s easy to get lost in an individual purgatory of the unreal. With JPEGMAFIA’s vocals begging to latch onto something still real, "Is It Real” is the key musical moment for me.