Is Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” a country song or a rap song? Does it matter either way? Genre is useful to understand musical lineage, but beyond that it starts to become a game of semantics. What does it mean for a song to be country, or rock? More perplexing: What, exactly, is pop music if pop music is always changing? Can music that isn’t popular still be called pop?
That’s the question posed by Truck Music, the seventh release from Philadelphia’s Christopher Taylor, who records alongside a rotating cast of musicians as Body Meat. He appears mostly solo here, with some percussion help from Matthew Anderegg. At times Taylor wields noise like a weapon, allowing cut-up vocal snippets to stutter over blown-out synths and skittering percussion. Each song sounds like six songs being played at once, and not a single second is clean or overly fussed over. Taylor seems dead-set on fitting every possible idea in his head onto this album, resulting in a mutant pop record that sounds at various moments like Chicago footwork, post-Young Thug melodic rap, or a less bummed-out James Blake.
That Body Meat apply rules from multiple genres to create a warped new sound is not inherently interesting. What is interesting is Taylor’s ability to create synthetic music with real heft. The songs on Truck Music are, for the most part, chaotic, but as they progress they reveal a skewed logic. A dense mass of video game plings and broken keyboards lock into a recognizable pattern; something clicks in your brain, and the rhythm, which has been there all along, makes itself known.
On Truck Music, that chaos can be purposeful. Album opener “Combo” sounds huge in the same way that an ant hill is huge: Hundreds of tiny sounds pile on top of one another, each individual piece essential to the whole. Single “Nairobi Flex” unravels so quickly that if it weren’t so robust, so present, it would be easy to assume it was a one-take improvisation. The roughly chopped samples on “Shopping” never quite cohere, but they’re weirdly beautiful anyway. In Taylor’s approach to music making, everything can fit if you don’t give it enough time to sound wrong.
Taylor uses pop’s sonic experimentation as a road map, whether evoking a busier version of Missy Elliott’s collaborations with Timbaland, or accelerating the starkly alien sounds of vintage Neptunes to warp speed. The genres he pulls from on Truck Music are sort of beside the point, because the point seems to be: How unrecognizable can an experimental song be while still reading as pop? Though these tracks are too unpolished for radio play, they have all the right reference points to make sense for radio, and that’s part of their magic. Sifting through the wreckage of genre touchstones, Body Meat use the musical language of right now to point toward possible futures.
