"Think Differently" is a polemic (even if they don't think it is) in the form of musical comedy (even if it is, in fact, gravely serious). It's not a shitpost or an inside joke. It's not very good music (more on this below), but it has an aura of importance. It seems rather obviously addressed to the most tragically online, scene-entrenched experimental music people, despite the vaguely universal object of its pseudo-criticism. We feel compelled to reply, with some carefully measured mixture of snark and earnestness, to the question it asks: "How do you judge a music's worth?"
There are tired, but forever unresolved, questions about irony and pastiche that immediately rise to the surface. Callahan & Witscher are aware that they sound like "jesters in agony" ("Columbus"), jaded scenesters making a wry joke of their own abjection (winking here) as experimental music lifers. But they want you to know that their worldview is more expansive, actually; that their wholesome American palates, sharpened by life on the road and augmented by avant-garde bonafides, accommodate an uncommonly rich media diet; that they care too much, they know, about a bunch of weird old shit and weird old ideas, but that they also know a little bit about the younger generation, and (winking again here) maybe they know it better, in some way, than it knows itself. But the onslaught of samples and references is not an appeal to relevance or a gesture of identification. (Nor would sitting down and trying to list all of them reveal anything important; though the ones that amuse or irk you the most — for me it's AI Anna Khachiyan, the PornHub break, and the Metal Gear Solid alert sound — might help you identify your symptoms of the disorder for which "Think Differently" wants to serve as a diagnostic.) There's a purely quantitative excess to "Think Differently" that stands in front of and obscures a deeper meditation on value and music.
"Quantitative excess" — as a collector, music is worth the money I pay for it, or the space it takes up in my room. As a performer, it's worth the cash I make at the door, or the attention and esteem I receive, packaged into metrics by YouTube and Bandcamp. As a critic, it's worth, for example, 3/5. But I've never been any one of those things to the exclusion of everything else, had any one of those relationships to music without the others; and taken individually, these kinds of value seem obviously extraneous and beside the point. Looking back at my life, I've often had a vague feeling that music is worth more than anything, holds value beyond anything I could give or risk. But I have never done anything for music. Music has been a force, a function, or an organizing idea of the exchanges I've made with people, with the world. It's hard to say whether music has any value at all.
That ambiguity is central to the confused affect of "Think Differently" — a kind of longing for something that may have never existed. The choice of 2000s alternative rock as the nexus of stylistic reference isn't arbitrary; it points to an outmoded relationship between the mainstream and the underground, an anachronistic framework of cultural exchange. But "Think Differently" isn't a nostalgia trip — it pulls from its source material in a way that feels contemporary with broader tendencies in music. It has parallel sensibilities to something like 100 Gecs, for example, albeit without the crossover poptimism (and for that very reason some of you will wince at the comparison). They know how broadly unappealing this music is: "At this point, any peers of mine or anyone older just think that what we're doing is just a gimmick, or some sort of cynical joke. And anyone younger just thinks, oh, look at these old guys trying to do this aesthetic but doing a bad job at it" ("Won't Let You Go").
My balanced take, as someone born on the Millennial-Gen Z cusp: it's a gimmick, or some sort of cynical joke, and it's also old guys trying to do this aesthetic but doing a bad job at it. But as a jaded, burnt-out former experimental musician and critic, I can't help but be a little moved by it. And unlike most hyperpop, it doesn't viscerally offend my taste — "Who Knows Where The Time Goes" and "Columbus" are actually not bad songs, I think. But I don't think it's unfair to say that Callahan & Witscher aren't great songwriters. That this feels like a pretty whatever criticism suggests a more substantial one about why they chose to deal with these things in song form in the first place. But what is admirable about "Think Differently" is precisely its stubbornness, its zealotry. Callahan & Witscher are relentless partisans of music. To defend it, they're willing to risk coming off like a couple of cynical losers, which isn't much, but it's more than most of us have to give.
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