1000 gecs and The Tree of Clues, the recent project of eclectic duo, 100 gecs, initially appears as confusing and counterintuitive. With an A.G. Cook remix of the group’s hit “money machine”[1] that opts to further distort founders Laura Les’ and Dylan Brady’s auto-tuned-to-hell vocalizations layered over headphone-shattering bass hits, 100 Gecs decimates the coherence of their most popular song, and by extension, the vehicle of their recent spike in popularity. The album showcases a hodgepodge of featured artists. “Hand crushed by a mallet (Remix)”[2] opens with a creeping baseline antecedent to Fall Out Boy’s unexpected emo contribution to the already genre-fluid nature of 1000 gecs. The hypnotic beat of “gecgecgec (Remix)”[3] entails the incessant repetition of the onomatopoeia, of which the 100 gecs’ fanbase has stretched to operate in almost any context: as a noun, verb, and adjective that transcends meaning itself. Les explains that the origin of the term was effectively gec ex machina: the duo encountered the strange word from a spray-painted wall outside Les’ Chicago dorm.[4] Other sources claim the name originates from the accidental delivery of 100 geckos.[5] The meaninglessness of the term begs the question of whether the origin really matters. 100 gecs’ artistic choices appear as perplexing considering each—noisy, deconstructive anthems; undiagnosable within a single genre; an outlandish and meaningless moniker—further deters mainstream recognition. However, when analyzed as absurd, 100 gecs produces a political-philosophical project aimed at decimating, or confusing at the least, the concept of the mainstream itself. My argument does not analyze intention, but tracks the effects of 100 gecs’ music. The “gec-effect,” as I call it, consists of stitching together different genres and sounds to produce a new outcome that pushes the boundaries of what the mainstream considers “to be popular music.” To go even farther, its decimation of lines between genre renders the boundaries separating them useless. After the dust clears, we are only left with “gec:” the basis of a radical musical monism that refuses genre categorization altogether.
The usual (mainstream) charge against 100 gecs viscerally rejects their music because it sounds “bad,” “weird,” or “noisy.” These designations all stem from a normative belief that music must offer the listener an interpretable and narrative experience that revolves around a digestible theme. The fact that one might react to 100 gecs in such a way exposes the unspoken popular belief that certain arrangements of noise constitute “music” and some do not. In this sense, 100 gecs invites a criticism of “what constitutes music” not by explicit mention in lyrics or interview, but by virtue of its existence.
Such was the effect of Duchamp’s Fountain. Submitted to the Society of Independent Artists under pseudonym “R. Mutt,” Fountain was rejected under the condition that it could not represent art. [7] The position taken by the board exposed an informal belief in a certain limiting definition of art. Thus, a characterization of 100 gecs as “trash,” “garbage,” or “waste,” may have given the duo’s body of work more power than merely ignoring it: such a charge has exposed a governance within the realm of music. Further exploring the parallel between Duchamp and 100 gecs demonstrates how the injection of art considered culturally “useless” into the mainstream frees art from a naturalized utilitarian frame of reference that only values what appears as “objectively” art. If this definition of art has infiltrated the public’s imagination, Duchamp and 100 gecs essentially “piss” on art itself. For Duchamp, art is his toilet. For 100 gecs, art is their “piss baby.” [8] 100 gecs intrinsically resists such governance of art without alienating mainstream appeal: they do not position themselves against an artistically deficient public, like the Italian Futurists. Instead they maintain artistic anarchy for the public. For example, in response to “gatekeeping” of 100 gecs on digital media app, Tiktok, Les cemented the egalitarian ethos of “gec” with the casual statement, “everybody should be allowed to have a good time.”[9] In an interview with the Guardian, Les states her and Brady’s agenda as “do[ing] our best not to be jerks.”[10] The perceived aimlessness of 100 gecs reveals that the duo’s intention is not really for, or against anything. It appears they merely make music to make music and have a good time. Here, in apparent apathy, 100 gecs exudes absurdism at full force. Les and Brady shrug off meaning as quickly as critics can place it on to them. Still, 100 gecs generates a “gec-effect” where the duo’s subversion of pop-norms itself acts as a parody.
How do we reconcile the destabilizing power of 100 gecs with their occasional embodiment of conventional aspects of pop music? Lyrically, 100 gecs preserves the structure of chorus and verse, while employing rhyme and repetition to acquire the “catchy” edge that makes pop songs appealing and infectious. Les’ post-chorus on “money machine” encourages the listener to join in with an ultimate falsetto imitation of her night-core crooning. From “making money on [your] own,” on “745 sticky (Injury Reserve Remix),”[11] to “[your] boy’s … own ringtone,” on “ringtone (Remix),”[12] and “[being] addicted to Monster, money, and weed, yeah,” on “800db cloud (Ricco Harver Remix),”[13] 100 gecs’ subject-matter does not stray far from contemporary pop’s obsession with love, materialism, and drugs.
While 100 gecs does repeat the norm, they simultaneously parallel their pop conventions with absurdism, thus destabilizing the norm. “Stupid horse (remix)”[14] engages in a nursery rhyme chorus that derides various animals before the narrator declares they fell out of multiple vehicles with rhyming names:
“Stupid sheep, I just fell out of the Jeep
Stole the money in your bank account, oh no
Stupid goat, I just fell out of the boat
Stole the money in your bank account, oh no
Stupid bird, I just fell off of the Bird
Stole the money in your bank account, oh no
Stupid dog, I just fell off of my hog
Stole the money in your bank account”
100 gecs, stupid horse (remix)
100 gecs’ parallelism of the childish invocation of “farm animals” against pop music’s “money” allows the absurd to eclipse all meaning, exposing the conventional itself as absurd. “Stupid horse’s” remix asks: what separates “farm animals” from “money” in the context of our infectious melody? The absurdist chorus of “stupid horse” acts as a mirror to divert attention to the apparent conventional/non-absurdist aspects of the song, elucidating the fragility of distinction between the two. In other words, “stupid horse” exposes the essential lack of difference between singing about money and singing about farm animals. Both are “pop music” in the end. In this sense, choruses like “stupid horse’s” produces a parody: the “gec-effect.” The parody deconstructs the conventions of pop music by taking their definitions to a logical extreme, thus exposing the arbitrary nature of limits and category in music. One could say Diogenes enacted the “gec-effect,” when he declared a naked chicken as a man, according to Plato’s axiom: “Man is a featherless biped.” Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble endorses a similar approach to hegemonic understandings of sex and gender. Butler writes, “[the critical task] presumes … that to operate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically its domination. It offers the possibility of a repetition of the law which is not its consolidation, but its displacement.”[15] Butler allows us to theorize 100 gecs as avant-garde even though they adhere to certain pop conventions like subject matter and song structure. Though the duo venerates the absurd—assigning the project meaning would be asinine—analyzing the productive value of their work points to a “gec philosophy” that wrecks norms of pop music, confuses boundaries, and decimates definitions. But what does “pop” have to do with politics?
100 gecs’ establishes a fluid sound that resists genre categorization, sharing similar themes to queer theory: its departure from normalcy, its flaunting of restrictions, and abandonment of genre. Sonically, the duo primarily “queers” popular music by experimenting with voice modulation. 100 gecs’ voice modulation often makes the “gender” of the singer unrecognizable. The voices on 100 gecs’ discography range from masculine, feminine, to robotic, and somewhere in-between. The sheer variability of voices renders categorizing them impossible, reductive, and possibility politically problematic. 100 gecs’ heavy use of voice modulation stems from Les’ struggles with gender dysphoria, expressed through her earlier solo track, “how to dress as a human.”[16] In an interview with Michelle Kim, Les says “[i]t’s the only way that [she] can record.”[17] Max Schaffer, blogger, Harvard graduate and the “transfemme bxtch seek[ing] meaning]” behind “Saint Taint,” places 100 gecs within a history of musicians subverting boundaries between the masculine and feminine voice in their article, “Modulation & the Chaos-Trans Voice.”[18] Schaffer locates 100 gecs within “the modern practice [of] ‘queering’—which [they] define as tearing something to pieces and haphazardly smashing [it] back together in new forms.” Schaffer’s “queering” describes 100 gecs’ approach to genre and sound while locating them within a political history of gender in music. In this sense, to claim that 100 gecs’ “queers the voice” theorizes “queer” not only as an identity, but as an active struggle and political project against gender norms in music and society.
“Gec 2 Ü (Danny L Harle Harlecore Remix),”[19] arguably 1000 gecs’ most ambitious delve into vocal modulation, feminizes and masculinizes both Brady and Les’ voices to the point where distinguishing between the singers’ genders becomes an impossible task. Initially, I visited the song’s Genius page[20] to find out which member of the duo sang which part. To my surprise, Laura sang the outro, where a longing autotuned teenage-heartthrob’s voice, reminiscent of BROCKHAMPTON’s vocalists, cries out: “Sitting all alone, and you call me on the phone / And you say, ‘I need love, can you get to me now?’” Laura’s performance demonstrates the effectiveness of modern vocal technologies in confusing the gendered assumptions behind what constitutes a “masculine” and “feminine” voice. In fact, the notion of my surprise reflects an imbued societal tendency to interrogate the gender of an encountered speaker, pointing to the embeddedness of hegemonic gender norms in seemingly neutral and everyday interactions. The degree to which the “gec 2 Ü” voice can transition between a socially constructed “masculine” and “feminine” voice critically frames gender as a categorization and governance of the voice. Returning to my discussion of Duchamp, I want to postulate the voice itself as art, not just the product of an artist. The governance of the voice by hegemonic gender definition parallels the governance of art by hegemonic genre definitions. The proximity of gender and genre here points to the interconnectedness between the two. Etymologically, English’s “gender” stems from Old French’s “genre” and Latin’s “genus.” Gender and genre serve the taxonomical (genus) function of categorizing unkempt matter; they represent an instrumental-rationalist attempt to render the world ordered and knowable by objective measurements. By confusing the boundary between masculine and feminine, the “gec 2 Ü” voice exposes the absurd nature of categories (taxonomy) itself by repeating them: the listener cannot distinguish the boundary where the masculine and feminine begin and end. In this sense, “gec 2 Ü” reveals that taxonomy always fails, because the inherent nature of matter always oozes out of the containers in which we try to hold it.
Schaffer notes that 100 gecs was not of the first musicians to rely on the heavy use of voice modulation. For example, SOPHIE, a hyperpop contemporary of the duo, enacts a similar “queering-gec-effect” on “Ponyboy,” a single off of SOPHIE’s OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES. A deep metallic voice barks orders at their “ponyboy,” contrasted with a pitched-up seductive chorus, declaring ownership of their “little ponyboy.” The quick transition between robotic and feminine discards the binary application of gender to voice. At first, I was unaware of Cecile Believe’s contributions to the album, making “Ponyboy” appear directly parallel to Les’ verse on “gec 2 Ü” where one source of the voice transitions between a voice that should belong (according to gender norms) to two. In “Ponyboy,” although the voices come from two sources, they nevertheless form a unity that sheds the dichotomy between one-ness and two-ness itself. Following Butler’s concept of gender as performative, we must locate “gender” in songs themselves rather than in singers. Butler writes of gender as “a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of a substance, of a natural sort of being.”[21] Here, the song represents the gendered act, and the singer as only a façade of “a natural sort of being.” In this proposition, there is no artist, only art. This theorization allows us to avoid inscribing “gender” onto the singer who represents the apparent “source” of the voice. Singing as the teenage-heartthrob in “gec 2 Ü” does not make Laura Les a “boy:” equating the “gender” of the voice and the singer could have transphobic consequences when trans- artists use vocal modulation as an coping mechanism against gender dysphoria. Regardless, the ease of which Les transitions between “masculine” and “feminine” voice on “gec 2 Ü” makes diagnosing the gender of the singer irrelevant. The binary gender diagnosis of the voice faces even more issues when confronted with vocal technology’s enabling of the robotic voice. Sessi Kuwabara Blanchard notes how SOPHIE synthesizes both organic and inorganic voices to create a robotic in-between space on the gendered vocal spectrum: “her voice and the voices she samples are of the body and the cloud, living in Adam’s apples and circuit boards alike.”[22] With innovations in vocal technology, the listener cannot assume the “source” of the voice was organic at all, especially on songs like SOPHIE’s “Ponyboy.” In 100 gecs’ parodic world of “gec 2 Ü” enabled by technological developments in music, gender appears as an obsolete and archaic construct. Here, vocal modulation begs the larger question of technology’s role in determining gender’s future. In a world where modern technology can enable things previously thought impossible like In-Vitro-Fertilization and gender affirming surgery for trans- people, will gender perish with the arrival of a technologically savvy future? Interestingly, the “yes” answer to this question inscribes gender onto the physical body: a concept that Butler’s theory resists. Gender liberation cannot solely happen in the realm of the body. By no means do all trans- people have access to the resources to medically diagnose gender dysphoria, let alone medically transition, nor does gender-affirming surgery represent the epitome of “transitioning.” Songs like “Gec 2 Ü” and “Ponyboy” mount a political challenge to gender without re-inscribing gender onto the voice. The songs meet Butler’s “parody” by using (gendered) voice to displace the naturalization of gender in voice. Their fluid transition between gendered voices from untraceable sources activates the parodic “gec-effect:” a parallelism that makes constructed categories like gender and genre absurd.
My article has tracked the “gec-effect’s” implications for pop music and gender. Can we consolidate the “gec-effect” into a subversive practice, reverberated by legions of fans? A practice radically accessible to anyone? Jack Halberstam’s 2012 Gaga Feminism situates the avant-pop sensation that was Lady Gaga as an allegory for the emergence of a new generation’s gender politics. A similar onomatopoeia, “gaga” and “gec” share status as pop innovators who pushed the limits of the genre and gender. Halberstam defines their fundamental concept, “gaga feminism,” as “a feminism that recognizes multiple genders, that contributes to the collapse of our current sex-gender systems, a feminism less concerned with the equality of men and women and more interested in the abolition of these terms as such.”[23] Following Halberstam, I want to articulate an absurd “gec feminism,” a continuity of gaga in principle, yet unique in situation. Juxtaposing “gec” and “gaga” can reveal how the gender politics of avant-pop has changed with the continued virtualization of everyday life. COVID-19’s inhibition of travel and physical interaction has directed even more of the American public’s existence to virtual space. COVID-19 has blurred the distinction between real and virtual, granting more legitimacy to the virtual space as an integrated aspect in American’s everyday lives. The conditions for “gec feminism” have flourished within the interconnectivity of the virtual. The core 100 gecs fanbase resides on the ephemeral Tiktok-sphere. Self-proclaimed as “alternative,” 100 gecs fans have positioned themselves against the (cismale)stream. The label “alt” contains a queer connotation: it locates a “straight TikTok” to disidentify from. This creation of a distinct cyber-environment allows for the flourishing of queer cyber-communities displaced by geography, yet united in “gec.” This disidentification accurately captures 100 gecs approach to genre and forms the basis to my proposed egalitarian politics of “gec feminism.” Finding “proof” of this community-building—tracking and citing “alt” videos about 100 gecs—remains increasingly difficult with the impermanence of TikTok’s content and the constant waves of new content uploaded to the platform. Finding specific videos is almost impossible. Perhaps this fact cements “100 gecs Tiktok” as a queer space—one finds it not by searching, but by stumbling onto it based on their personalized “For You Page”—a stream of customized content intended to reflect the user themselves. By virtue of its fanbase, 100 gecs establishes a fun feminism rooted in pop culture, where its “generation z” adherents sing along to condemning cishet “piss babies” as they deconstruct gender norms. If you are hesitant to jump onto the gec-train, take Halberstam’s words of warning: “if you don’t go gaga soon, you may wake up and find that you have missed the future and become the past.”[24]
[1] 100 gecs, A. G. Cook. 2020. “money machine – A.G. Cook Remix.” 1000 gecs and The Tree of Clues. Comps. Dylan Brady and Laura Les. Spotify.
[2] 100 gecs; Owens, Craig; Fall Out Boy; Dollanganger, Nicole. 2020. “hand crushed by a mallet (Remix) [feat. Fall Out Boy, Craig Owens, Nicole Dollanganger].” 1000 gecs and The Tree of Clues. Comps. Dylan Brady and Laura Les. Spotify.
[3] 100 gecs; Lil West; Tony Velour. 2020. “gecgecgec (Remix) [feat. Lil West and Tony Velour].” 1000 gecs and The Tree of Clues. Comps. Dylan Brady, Laura Les, Jhaisiah Everidge and Semaj Grant. Spotify.
[4] 100 gecs, interview by Pigeons & Planes. 2020. 100 gecs on Soulja Boy, How They Got Their Name and the Future of Virtual Concerts | Trending Topics (June 17). Accessed August 16, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=vI1DFv000OU.
[5] Davies, Dean Mayo. 100 gecs are ready for the age of the virtual music festival. 20 April 2020. 17 August 2020. <https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/48794/1/100-gecs-laura-les-dylan-brady-minecraft-charli-xcx>.
[6] Qualls, Larry. 1988. “Fountain.” Ronald Feldman Fine Arts. Artstor. New York. https://library-artstor-org.www2.lib.ku.edu/asset/LARRY_QUALLS_10311708756.
[7] Howarth, Sophie, and Jennifer Mundy. 2015. Fountain. August. Accessed August 11, 2020. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/duchamp-fountain-t07573.
[8] 100 gecs, A. G. Cook. “money machine – A.G. Cook Remix.”
[9] @xxlaura_lesxx. 2020. Laura Les. July 12. Accessed August 16, 2020. https://twitter.com/xxlaura_lesxx/status/1282532925926510592.
[10] Ewens, Hannah. 2020. ‘We’re not doing this to be ironic’: are 100 Gecs the world’s strangest band? June 23. Accessed August 11, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/jun/23/were-not-doing-this-to-be-ironic-are-100-gecs-the-worlds-strangest-band.
[11] 100 gecs; Injury Reserve. 2020. “745 sticky (Injury Reserve Remix).” 1000 gecs and The Tree of Clues. Comps. Dylan Brady, Laura Les, Corey Parkey, Jordan Groggs and Nathaniel Ritchie. Spotify.
[12] 100 gecs; Charli XCX; Kero Kero Bonito; Rico Nasty. 2020. “ringtone (Remix) [feat. Charli XCX, Rico Nasty, Kero Kero Bonito].” 1000 gecs and The Tree of Clues. Comps. Dylan Brady, Laura Les and Gus Lobban, Laura Les, Maria Kelly, Sarah Perry Charlotte Aitchison. Spotify.
[13] 100 gecs; Ricco Harver. 2020. “800db cloud (Rico Harver Remix).” 1000 gecs and The Tree of Clues. Comps. Dylan Brady and Laura Les. Spotify.
[14] 100 gecs; Count Baldor; GFOTY. 2020. “stupid horse (Remix) [feat. GFOTY & Count Baldor].” 1000 gecs and The Tree of Clues. Comps. Dylan Brady, Laura Les, Polly Salmon and Thomas William Parker. Spotify.
[15] Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. (New York and London: Routledge Classics, 1990), 42, emphasis my own.
[16] les, laura. 2017. how to dress as human. Soundcloud. https://soundcloud.com/osno1/how-to-dress-as-human.
[17] Kim, Michelle. Meet 100 gecs, the Absurdist Pop Duo Inspired By Everything on the Internet. 16 January 2020. 16 August 2020. <https://www.them.us/story/100-gecs-interview-dylan-brady-laura-les>.
[18] Schaffer, Max. Modulation & the Chaos-Trans Voice. 9 December 2019. 16 August 2020. <https://maxmadethat.com/publishing/transvocalmodulation>.
[19] 100 gecs; Danny L Harle. 2020. “gec 2 U.” 1000 gecs and The Tree of Clues. Comps. Dylan Brady and Laura Les. Spotify.
[20] Genius. gec 2 Ü (Danny L Harle Harlecore Remix). 10 July 2020. 16 August 2020. <https://genius.com/100-gecs-gec-2-u-danny-l-harle-harlecore-remix-lyrics>.
[21] Butler, Gender Trouble, 45.
[22] Blanchard, Sessi Kuwabara. How SOPHIE and Other Trans Musicians Are Using Vocal Modulation to Explore Gender. 28 June 2018. 16 August 2020. <https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-sophie-and-other-trans-musicians-are-using-vocal-modulation-to-explore-gender/>.
[23] Halberstam, J. Jack. Gaga Feminism. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012), 25.
[24] Halberstam, Gaga Feminism, 29.
Miles Luce 
Can you define feminism without the socially constructed ideology of gender?
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