#I don’t feel like tagging the whole cast zzzz

[electricsynthesis]

lance - sorry to teenagers in fanon in 2016 but I don’t think lance would listen to the pop hits of the 2010s. I think lance is too hip for that. He is not listening to pop from 100~ years ago. (Or more, nobody can agree on when the show takes place & I think that’s beautiful). lance is listening to the billboard top 100. He’s listening to what people are talking about . I imagine their pop music as very synthetic, almost edm, with loud vocals over top of it. Less bass than we have in our pop music, more tenor. he’s into particular celebrities and while he likes their music, and he says it’s about the music, he’s more into the celebrities really than the music. he’s into his eras version of, like, Britney Spears. Because they’ve gotta have an edge to them. Some controversy. if they’re too squeaky clean he gets bored

hunk - whatever the sci fi future equivalent of melancholy, heavily vocal guitar indie music. the kind of music that’s more poetry than it is really music. Stuff made by underground artists. it’s all emotional, ranging from sappy to comforting to sad. he likes love songs about pining but they make him really emotional . He also likes pop music generally, soft hip hop and r&b. also atmospheric music. He strikes me as the type of nerd to listen to a lot of video game osts because of the sweeping orchestral vibes, but for some reason refuses to just listen to actual classical music. Feels too pretentious but then he just listens to orchestras perform the video game osts anyway so lol

pidge - god’s most annoying electronica. I think 100 years of sci fi future is going to make hyperpop one of the whackiest music genres and pidge is right there with it. She wants pitchy, bit-crushed squealing. she wants electronic shrieking. she wants voices autotuned to the point of nigh unrecognizability. I think she also listens to more normal electronica, which I think is more mainstream in their era. Stuff we would associate with weird youtube electronica is a whole cast genre. She’s really into it. She knows all the bands, all the subgenres, all the specific sounds of each one. Matt finds this so fucking annoying because she plays it out loud and he h a t e s it. After she joins team voltron lance gets to take over matts place here

keith - forgive me for this, but I do think keith listens to what WE would call numetal. But it’s like. Classic metal, to him. Og metal. Like I think he literally listens to linkin park. I’m saying that keith kogane listens to 100 year old music. He heard it all from his crazy ass paranoid conspiracy theorist father, who only uses analogue tech because he’s terrified of the garrison finding out about his fuzzy purple alien long distance wife and his alien hybrid child. so he plays like, breaking Benjamin cds on an old boombox. This is the only kind of music keith likes . He’s ok with modern metal but he prefers what we would call classic metal. he doesn’t like emo music

allura -

So I have really detailed thoughts on what constitutes “music” and how that may be defined for alien cultures in sci fi. I’ve thought about this extensively since I was 14 and the conclusion I’ve come to is that altean music is the most industrial, heavy, absolutely dark fast paced noisemusic ever conceived. Metal grinding against metal. Plates shrieking against each other. Dull thumping on thick glass. String instruments that squeak and squeal. sudden starts and stops. Heavy drums you can feel in your teeth. clanking. whistling. wheezing. All the kinds of noises you hear in altean music. coran prefers more “classical” altean music, which entails more drums and strings (of the shrieking variety). allura prefers the “modern” (of her youth) altean music, their equivalent to pop, which is more industrial & metal grindy.

She excitedly shows the humans some altean music only to find them absolutely repulsed. Just, like, they’re trying to be nice. But when I say industrial I mean like, a collection of noises that we wouldn’t even categorize as music. so they can’t help the just inherent misunderstanding. except keith, he fucking LOVES it. He goes WILD for it. Allura convinces him to actually dance to it and they just flail around wildly.

he tries to show allura the music that he likes but sadly divorced dad rock doesn’t do much for her. But through their & pidge’s combined efforts into the forays of Abrasive Human Music they discover that allura also really likes death metal