The Teen Who Turned Noise Into A Lifestyle, And What It Reveals About Our Musical Moment
Imagine this: You’re 18, sitting in your Georgia bedroom, headphones clamped to your ears, willingly subjecting yourself to 400 albums of screeching, unrelenting noise. Not as punishment. Not as a dare. But because you want to. This is Sam Andrews’ reality—a teenager who’s become a minor internet legend for his quest to listen to every single Merzbow release. On the surface, it sounds like a punchline. But dig deeper, and his obsession reveals something unsettling about how we consume music in 2025—and why some of us are rebelling against the very idea of 'enjoyment.'
The Paradox Of Painful Art
Let’s address the elephant in the room: Why would anyone choose to listen to music that feels like a car alarm stuck in a blender? Personally, I think it’s about control. When every Spotify playlist is algorithmically optimized to flatter your ego, when TikTok reduces songs to 15-second dopamine hits, embracing Merzbow’s chaos becomes an act of defiance. It’s not about 'liking' the noise—it’s about proving you can still choose discomfort in a world that markets serenity as a commodity.
Andrews’ spreadsheet-driven approach fascinates me. He’s rating 30-minute tracks of a single frequency like they’re Taylor Swift singles. It’s absurdist criticism, sure, but also a brilliant takedown of our obsession with quantifying art. What’s the 'correct' score for 10 hours of static? The question itself mocks the whole premise of music 'quality.' And yet, isn’t that the point? By playing the game so literally, he exposes how ridiculous our metrics have become.
Why Gen Z Is Embracing The Unlistenable
- Short-form videos of Merzbow blasting through Alexa devices
- Memes comparing noise albums to K-pop choreography
- Cinematic edits of shattered electronics
Gen Z isn’t just discovering Merzbow—they’re weaponizing his music as cultural satire. But here’s the twist: This isn’t rebellion for rebellion’s sake. It’s a generational coping mechanism. When your entire adolescence has been filtered through screens, when AI-generated pop dominates the charts, the extreme becomes the authentic. Noise music isn’t edgy; it’s one of the last uncurated experiences left.
The Streaming Era’s Attention Span Crisis
Andrews claims deep listening 'does wonders for your attention span.' I’d argue it’s more radical than that. Sitting through a Merzbow album in 2025 is akin to digital asceticism. We’ve trained ourselves to skip, swipe, and skim—but what happens when you force your brain to confront 40 minutes of unrelenting sonic hostility? You rebuild neural pathways. You reclaim agency. It’s not masochism; it’s cognitive weightlifting.
Consider Spotify’s metrics: Merzbow has 23,000 monthly listeners. A rounding error, right? But what if those numbers matter precisely because they’re small? In an economy where 'value' equals 'virality,' niche art forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth: Popularity isn’t the same as impact. As Liz Pelly argues, algorithms can’t measure music that demands to be experienced once, not streamed 100 times.
Generational Dissonance: Why The Boomers Are Watching
Here’s the kicker: 80% of Andrews’ audience is over 30. Boomers nostalgic for their college noise-rock days, middle-aged critics dissecting his ratings… Why aren’t his peers tuning in? My theory: Gen Z’s relationship with 'extreme' culture is too meta. They weaponize Merzbow as meme素材 (material), while older generations still treat it as sacred text. It’s not that teens don’t care—they just see no difference between extreme metal, AI-generated lo-fi beats, and actual silence. To them, all music is equally absurd.
The Future Of Unlistenable Music
Maszami Akita (Merzbow’s human) once followed Andrews’ page, liked a post, then vanished. Was it criticism of his AI visuals? A rating dispute? Who knows. But the incident captures the tension at the heart of experimental art: Is innovation betrayal or evolution? When Akita uses AI to create 'noise,' is he embracing progress or selling out? And why does a teenager care enough to chart every album?
I’ll tell you why: Because Sam Andrews isn’t really listening to Merzbow. He’s listening for meaning. In the static, in the pain, in the 10-hour void of Merzbient, he’s finding something our filtered, optimized world has erased. Not music. Not even art. But resistance.
So here’s my final thought: In 50 years, when AI composes symphonies that make us cry on demand, when streaming algorithms predict our moods better than our partners, someone will still boot up an ancient .zip file of Pulse Demon and think, 'This is what it felt like to be unmanageably, inconveniently human.' And that, more than any chart metric, is legacy.
