‘Kygo: Live at the Hollywood Bowl’ on Netflix Foreshadows The End Of Human Kind

In the build up to the new millennium the world was filled with dread. Experts told us the Y2K Bug would corrupt the world’s data systems, crashing global banking systems and financial markets, chaos would spread and lead to, “The End Of The World,” according to Time magazine. We should have been so lucky. If anything, the new century has been worse than what was predicted; September 11th, the Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, the Rise of ISIS, tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, school shootings, Trump; each month we seem to hit a new low. I didn’t realize how dire humanity’s prospects were, however, until I watched the new Netflix “live concert” Kygo: Live at the Hollywood Bowl.

Kygo is a 26-year-old Norwegian EDM producer and songwriter whose music has been streamed nearly 70 billion times. According to his Wikipedia page, he specializes in “deep house,” as well as “tropical house,” and “progressive house,” and other sub-sub-genres, whose names and stylistic particulars are known only to bloggers. His music takes the perky and optimistic 4-chord melody of Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida” (A.K.A. the worst song ever written) as its starting point, and coaxes it along with incessant dance grooves bleached clean of any rhythmic aggression, topped off with a chorus line of guest vocalists singing meaningless inanities like “We’ve got a wild love” or “We light up the world” or some other twaddle lifted from a greeting card or sneaker commercial.

Ever since the advent of electronic music – music which is created and performed primarily without live instrumentation – the major challenge has been creating an exciting live show. Besides singing and rapping, and the odd percussionist or DJ, it’s just not that interesting watching a guy press buttons on a computer. This is as true of Kraftwerk or Die Antwoord as it is of Kygo, who bops about his elevated producer’s perch, singing along to his own songs and occasionally taking a stab at a keyboard. The solution is, apparently, lights. Lots and lots of lights. They do look pretty cool, I must admit, evoking a neon version of Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, or something out of Tron: Legacy. The crowd of affluent, well-coiffed Los Angelenos seem to like it too judging by the amount of cellphones held aloft during the show.

Kygo then trots out one guest singer after another. The introduction of live elements is a good idea in theory; it brings the excitement level up and adds a human element to what sounds for the most part to be prerecorded backing tracks. The only problem is not one of them can hold tune if their lives were dependent on it. I don’t mean to say that the melodies are bad or boring or predictable or unoriginal or amelodic or unpleasant any other subjective criticism you might make of them. I mean they are straight up out of tune. Painfully so, like you just bit into a lemon or heard nails on chalkboard. Even Seal.

“I saw a photo of Jimi Hendrix on this stage,” Kygo says before Austrian singer James Hearsey comes on stage, holding a guitar. I once surmised that in the future humans will no longer even know how to play the guitar, yet will still use it as a stage prop. I guess the future is now, because mid-way through Hearsey delivers a guitar solo so terrible, Nick Jonas’s ACM debacle seems like an act of virtuosity. Other attempts at live instrumentation include a sax solo by the YouTube star Sergio Flores, better known by his stage name, Sexy Sax Man. He cannot play his instrument, either, but it doesn’t seem to matter to the crowd who love it because of his social media status, the ultimate commodity in a world where nothing happens if it isn’t shared virally. Later Kygo sits down at the piano to perform the hit “Fragile” with the English singer Labrinth, who, though he is also singing completely off-pitch, seems to at least know the basics of guitar playing.

Did you know people used to memorize entire books? Hundreds of pages, from end to end, which they would then recite back to people for entertainment. These days I can’t even remember my best friend’s phone number. I doubt most people know how to use maps anymore, they just enter an address into GPS and let their phone tell where to go. We watch singers who can’t stay in key without computer software. We think music is watching a guy on stand on stage and press the “Play” button on his laptop. This isn’t about “electronic music,” which like any genre spans from great to terrible, and I’m not even knocking Kygo, whose music is pleasing to the ear, the sort of thing I imagine people like to listen to at spin class. Every new technological advance, from automated manufacturing to self-driving cars to Alexa brings with it existential fears about Artificial Intelligence and robot overlords conquering the world. I’m saying they don’t need to conquer anything. We’re already giving it up. And we don’t even care.

Benjamin H. Smith is a New York based writer, producer and musician. Follow him on Twitter:@BHSmithNYC.

Watch Kygo: Live At The Hollywood Bowl on Netflix