Music

Elon Musk's new EDM single reviewed – 'Bringing erectile dysfunction to the masses!'

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO has dropped Don’t Doubt Ur Vibe on Soundcloud – a wannabe dancefloor banger that somehow manages to doubt its own vibe

Like Charles Foster Kane splashing his millions on promoting his mistress’s disastrous opera career, very rich men have, in recent years, displayed a certain tendency to come to grief when dabbling in the field of music. First, the now-incarcerated pharma bro Martin Shkreli bought the only extant copy of the Wu-Tang Clan’s album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin and, as a result, was first called “a shithead”, “the Michael Jackson nose kid”, “the man with the 12-year-old body” and “a fake super-villain” by the group’s Ghostface Killah, and then became the subject of a Wu-Tang Clan diss track. Not, one suspects, the response he expected when he ponied up $2m for their CD. Now Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk – net worth $34.4bn – has launched a parallel career as an EDM artist, posting a track called Don’t Doubt Ur Vibe on Soundcloud.

It’s bootless to point out that if it wasn’t by a tech billionaire, no one would give Don’t Doubt Ur Vibe a second thought, indistinguishable as it is from umpteen competent but unthrilling bits of bedroom electronica posted elsewhere on Soundcloud. But it is by a tech billionaire, so it racked up 270,000 plays in four hours. What they’ve heard is a vocal – apparently by Musk himself – that repeats a dreadful little motivational-poster homily ad infinitum through a vocorder over wafty mid-tempo Euro-trance. There’s a kind of rounded-edged take on an old-fashioned 303 acid line that appears about two minutes in and reappears at the track’s conclusion, and the occasional pitch-bent racing-car-speeding-past drone, but it’s been made by someone with what you might charitably describe as a shaky grasp of musical dynamics. It keeps going in for lengthy buildups that don’t actually build up to anything: the drums roll, the tension mounts, then the track just picks up where it left off. Curiously, something about the way the vocal is placed over the backing track makes it feel oddly hesitant: “Don’t doubt your vibe”, it keeps insisting, doubtfully.

Ironically, what Don’t Doubt Ur Vibe really sounds like isn’t a primetime dancefloor banger, but the kind of atmospheric, inoffensive music that might play in the background at the launch of a new car. Still, at least it comes with an unexpected bonus: if you leave Soundcloud running after the track ends, the app, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear (algorithms? Mischievous intent?) immediately moves from the nascent oeuvre of Elon Musk to the work of a rapper called almndjoy, automatically playing his track Erectile Dysfunction, with its diverting opening line “I’m sorry my dick doesn’t work”. Languishing unnoticed on Soundcloud for a year, it’s seen a vast upsurge in plays since Musk’s track made its debut, replete with a series of comments indicating that “Elon brought me here”. Perhaps that will be Elon Musk’s most lasting musical legacy: he’s brought Erectile Dysfunction to the masses.