Avant-Garde Bait
I have a soft spot for Jeff Witscher’s solo work. Approximately 1,000 Beers is a great example of post-net art, uncanny and engaging in all the best ways Rhizome.org browsing primes you for. And 2020’s Twitch1 is extremely prescient—as we become more and more streamer-brained, juxtaposing different streams together in a jumble of comms and diegetic sound satiates the way we imbibe gaming today, constant and ping-ponging through hyperactive modes in order to be as engaged as possible.
This goodwill is slowly eroding as his collaborations with Jack Callahan have become far more frequent. If you could conjure the most trite stereotype of a Brooklyn hipster, Callahan would be it. Self-aggrandizing, pretentious, overly educated and insulated in a bubble where no one calls him out on how truly insufferable his schtick is. It’s a pity that Witscher has acted his cheerleader for his brand of bullshit, because it’s how we got Think Differently.
What if you made the most obvious joke about indie/avant music culture and turned it into a song? This is the whole premise of the album. Witscher doing an intentionally bad set for Boiler Room? Haha man what a troll, he’s so quirky chungus bro. The intro being a send-up of “I Love Kanye” but with AI voices of Kanye, Peter Griffin, and Mr. Krabs? I gotta send this to the OpenAI slack 🤣 The replay value of this shit is abhorrent, it’s essentially Rap Battles of History for the ISSUE Project Room set.
And the little constant 90s rips for an isolated laughs continue to annoy me. Say what you want but Smash Mouth and Sugar Ray and other kitschy 90s bands had an earnest craft to their goofiness, making the shimmery riffs far more digestible than when caked in a layer of irony. Using these tropes to get off pithy quips about your personal grievances within such a cloistered atmosphere is lame as shit, far more suited for satirical tweets than actual live music.
The sad part is, Callahan & Witscher are clearly talented musicians. I do fuck with “Long Drive”, a fairly straightforward Sugar Ray ape describing the tribulations of the tour game, but it’s the rare dip in sincerity across the record. They’re so obsessed with looking smarter than everyone else it’s depressing, the spoken-word cynicism and attempts at one-liners being actively groan-inducing. Y’all are in your 40s, make something true, start a family, anything but this bullshit.
Ultimately what typifies Think Differently is “Hate the Player”. A manifesto against dismissive, sneering critics, it’s tailor-made for me to react to, a dialectic masquerading as song. Using the tried-and-true methodology of dismissing haters as afraid of risk and unwilling to create themselves, it’s a pathology of insecurity, holding up a mirror at a duo who seem desperate to get a reaction to their elevated pranks. Congrats guys. You did it. Now what?
Despite appearing on Witscher’s Bandcamp, I was informed it was not his work, but Baltimore’s Door. I apologize for the confusion.
This is an embarrassingly bad review. I can’t for the life of me understand how you can like Jeff Witscher’s solo work and not understand the satirical brilliance of his work with Callahan. Also the transparency is hilarious regarding your insecurities dealing with the reality of the lyrics to Hate the Player. You’re just one of the countless talentless cynical hacks that can’t create anything original so you spend your time putting down those that do create something of value. In your own words “make something true, start a family, anything but this bullshit.”