INFINITE NORMAL track 7: “performance”

I know I just released this as a single, but now I get to talk about the whole thing 😈

This is the centerpiece. In the arc of the album, it’s sort of a wake-up call after the downward spiral the prior 3 tracks on the album. It’s meant as a critique of social media & its performative nature…

…which is a really weird thing to say because of my day job working on a product that’s supposed to help people on social media. I think my mixed/complex feelings about social media ultimately help me be better at my job - it’s important be ultimately optimistic about how how being online as a creator/business is changing, but one must be honest about the pitfalls and bad incentives that we need to deal with in order to survive on these platforms.

I wanted to lean hard into theatrics for this one, including a few “meta” moments of performance within the track

• the vocal vamp from @brennamenz as the conventional song falls away
• the improvised piano following
• the spoken word piece describing a sort of performance in itself (also a semi-improvised word salad, but AI-generated social content sometimes feels that way let’s be honest!)

One last fun thing: This song also directly calls back to my earlier track “loser in the free world”, a song I think which contains some of the best and most biting lyrics I’ve written but would never work as a single. The idea that I wrote those lyrics mid-pandemic, and nothing’s really changed, is a wake-up call on its own.

Listen to “performance” in full: https://kidlightbulbs.bandcamp.com/track/performance-feat-brenna-menz