This week for the Cultish Creative Music Club, Joseph Moore and I went deep into Dave Nadig’s submission of “Dumbest Girl Alive” by 100 Gecs, as a song that best describes some aspect of American life. In true Nadig fashion, the twist he included in his pitch, was to focus on the music and not the lyrics.

I have to hand it to him. That nudge was so worth him making. In the whole conversation you get to watch Joseph slowly become a fan (he connects with the lyrics and thinks of his own kids), and me find ways to create Red Hot Chili Peppers metaphors and retell the lore of one of my favorite bands from the 90s, The Vandals, and why they have my favorite Father’s Day song.

Here’s the song and the episode where we get deep into those ideas, but below, I wanted to give a better explanation of the THX Deep Note, which is the sound you hear before every movie you’ve ever seen in a theater, and I did not have this for immediate recall upon this discussion.

You already know the sound, but if you need a reminder before we get into it, here you go:

We have to start with the sound.

This is what you hear first at the movies, and in the song. Since I sort of bungled my explanation in the episode, let’s untangle a few facts.

What you hear are about 30 voices clustered between 200 and 400 Hz, which, don’t worry about the math, just know it’s a fairly narrow frequency range, and they’re designed to start chaotically so they can move into a giant 3 octave stretching D-chord.

James Moorer, the sound’s creator, wrote a computer program to sonically tell the story of order emerging from chaos in all of 30 seconds.

Dave points out how the sound goes from THX, to ray-gun fart machine, to gunshots, to Crazy Train-ish riff (I correct this to Papa Roach), to a barely processed human “woohoo.” The drums are filthy. The sounds are overwhelming. And then we get a pure sine wave, which is the sound of pure frequency without overtones, the narrowest sound a person can make or a speaker can produce, making it the most artificial, before the song transitions into its next section.

That is a LOT of work to do in 45 seconds before we even hear the first lyrics (in a track that’s only 2:17 long!).

What I was trying to communicate in the episode is a slightly more cogent breakdown of just how genius I find this intro, and this group.

We get the movie story sound. We get a DJ remix culture rewind. We get a ripoff of a ripoff in the Papa Roach does Ozzy copy-of-a-copy style they love to do, and the real payoff is the slightly distorted sine wave, one finger keyboard riff.

It’s a story. It’s dumb. It’s confusing. It’s loud. It’s got soft bits.

And it’s the intro to the song. “Floppy human and raw digital” is one of the ways Dave describes it. To me, it’s the full range of the confusion of being a young adult, and trying to communicate across generations, with all the art and artforms previously used at your disposal - courtesy of the internet, asking if anybody hears you at all, let alone can understand?

Even the guitar riff. I hear it and am amused, partly because my skin crawls when I hear the Papa Roach song (they are so corny, even if they are also so catchy), but here’s 100 Gecs calling out to Roach fans and Ozzy fans alike with an honest, “dudes we really love playing guitar - check out my riff” note of appreciation. It’s couched in the self-doubt of the lyrics, but isn’t that what counter culture is always all about?

I called them messages in bottles. They’re stories told by sounds, even if we don’t understand what’s happening, and that’s what all songs are. Some people love certain sounds and styles, others hate them, and yet they’re all in communication in some way with each other. Where does a new generation fit in? That’s what they’re asking.

It’s as “Bastards of Young” as it is “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” on fast forward.

When all of our words get compressed and sorted by algorithms, we have to learn to look at how the other person is communicating. This song is a reminder of that. How there are more languages than English, with music as one of them, and exploring how we communicate with all these mediums - that's what art is for.

What a brilliant submission. I love how this club idea is pushing my brain. Can’t wait to see what song we listen to next!