Photo by Brendon Thorne/Getty Images
Can your survive "Modelland?"
This question has been on everyone's lips since a deep cut document from Tyra Banks's oeuvre reemerged on the niche, queer, brainrot side of the internet last week.
Modelland is the name of both a book and a song by supermodel, reality TV host, and general lightning rod, Tyra Banks. The 2011 book is reportedly a dense piece of dystopian fiction with a seemingly psychedelic bend to its plot. It's about a young woman named Tookie De La Crème who finds herself in the fictional world of Modelland after being discovered by a scout.
In Modelland she faces off with, among many other things, creatures named the LeGizzârds. If you are curious to hear a fuller summary and analysis of this patently bizarre book, you can read PAPER's full accounting of the book (which they read, so we didn't have to) here.
Banks paired the book with a promotional song and it's genuinely one of the more strange, unsettling and, if you're in the right mindset, thrilling pieces of audio you'll come across in your lifetime.
Part digitzed incantion, part serpentine vocoder-spell, and fully rhythmically and melodically nonsensical, it sounds like it was recorded under water before being filtered through another layer of liquid. Its thin, low-grade audio quality also sounds like it was processed through 10 layers of YouTube-to-mp3 degradation which, to be fair, could be a problem with the above video file. But given the nonsensical nature of the music itself, it could too be a stylistic choice. I can't really make out the lyrics, other than its central refrain, "Can you survive modelland?" If this song is any indication of the nature of this fantastical world, I don't believe I can.
Music theorist and TikTok user Will Geraint Drake did a more formal analysis of the song, and discovered that, while not in any traditional key, its closest label would be what is dubbed "The Jewish Scale" or the Phrygian dominant scale (used in Klezmer music and traditional Hebrew prayer). Maybe that's why "Modelland" awoke deep buried childhood memories of listening to music in synagogue for me.
Pot stirrers on X have also compared the song, with its electronic avant garde bend, to Tinashe's new song "Too Easy," which also has a cutting-edge, digital quality. But that's like trying to compare Jackson Pollock to a 5 year old's finger painting (Tyra is the child in this analogy). YouTube comments on Banks's Youtube channel post of the song also mention Beyoncé and her documented love for chaotic beats. (Bey using "pots and pans"-style beats that really shouldn't work as well as they do has become a big meme on the internet in recent years).
At the end of the day, if you've followed Tyra throughout her career, you know that above all: the woman loves a goofy bit. America's Next Top Model is filled with a litany of gags — insane challenges, long-running jokes, and a seemingly endless run of skits. Much of her work on ANTM went in a seriously dark direction (as documented in the recent Netflix documentary Reality Check: Inside America's Next Top Model, which Banks is suing Netflix over for defamation).
Controversy aside, it's best if we simply treat the Modelland project and song as simply one of Bank's many goofy jokes. If you're in the right mind, it's also a pretty fun one at that.
