Utility Monster Track

A Utility Monster Track (UMT) is a released song that is orders of magnitude better, more enjoyed, or higher in Thingonium than the vast majority, or even the entire rest of the discography of the artist(s) or band that released it. One of the most interesting things about UMTs is that they tend to be some the best songs of all time. Many people have at least one UMT they love, with the rest of the writer's discography being only glanced over, usually in disappointment when you realize that pales in comparison to the UMT, and doesn't even sound like it. UMTs are usually one-ofs, especially in the case of a mainstream pop artist that has that one completely ingenious banger you could deep listen to for 100 hours, but sometimes an artist or band will have several of them. A utility monster track is different from just a stand out song, where the difference is less extreme.

This concept can also apply to improvised solos, where a musician has a stroke of total genius and plays a solo out of no where seems to transcend reality itself with how incredible it is, though Michael League might disagree with this.

It is unknown how or why Utility Monster Tracks happen, but their implications could reveal important insights into how the human and specifically the artists' brain functions. Artistic output and how it works is still largely a mystery. It's easy to make fun of someone going full Rick Rubin about one of their tracks and going off about how they had no idea what they were doing when they were making it, but there is a lot of truth to these statements. There just seems to be these stars aligning moments that allow artists to output ingenious works, even if that isn't something they are regularly able to do reliably. "Ingenious" in this context is less likely to refer to technical facility (so not just someone suddenly and magically gaining 10 years of technical ability and specified musical vocabulary internalization overnight only to have it disappear into the void once the song or solo is over) and more likely to refer to internal structural consistency or cleverness of the ideas executed. Or if you're a Fizzhead: "it has The Thing".

One of the proposed reasons why this phenomenon happens is due to the hypothesis that artists are divided into two general groups: Those that cultivate inspiration (could be referred to affectionately as "right brained musicians"), and those have developed a reliable method for outputting music, even when not inspired (could be referred to affectionately as "left brained musicians"). Inspiration is that mystery thing no one fully understands, where artistic output just happens at a level beyond conscious knowledge via some crazy system 1 magic, or divine intervention, or whatever you believe in. A reliable method is a personal developed method of writing music formed through thousands of hours of consistent practice and forcing of output. Because inspiration/divine intervention/neurological-magic is of limited supply and is something that comes and goes without warning (or when you turn 30 if you are a doomer about this sort of thing), musicians that rely entirely on it only hit lightning in a bottle a few times in their life, thus resulting in these musical utility monsters. But this is just one hypothesis.

It should be noted that utility monster tracks are not to be ashamed of. By their very name and nature, they make an artists entire career worth it. It is difficult to spell out just how good some UMTs actually are. One UMT is worth 20 mediocre tracks having to be made just to get to it. The non-UMTs of a musican with UMTs in their library aren't definitionally bad either, they can be really good. It's just about relative difference. UMTs should be seen as very inspiring, and very good news; go make music. your next session could be a utility monster track!

The name "Utility Monster Track" is in reference to the philosophical idea of a utility monster, which is a hypothetical being that experiences orders of magnitude higher levels of pain or pleasure than all other agents in a system. Thought experiments around utility monsters ask us to think about to what degree do we give extra ethical weight to a single moral patient that is experiencing these logarithmically extreme valance (the intrinsic felt goodness or badness of a moment of experience or part of experience) states when looking at an entire population of moral patients and agents. Utility Monsters are usually used in reductio ad absurdums against classical utilitarianism, in which a hypothetical is raised such as "if there was a single person in the world named Georgo (Jor-joh) that received 40 trillion pleasure units when he listened to a new fizz track, does that mean we should enslave every single musician on earth and just force them to make fizz all day so that Georgo could experience his 40 trillion pleasure units per fizz song, which would bring the net happiness in the universe up by an order of magnitude? I mean surely we must, given that Georgo's happiness would dwarf the net suffering of our burnt out fizz musicians we're holding at gunpoint and forcing to mine thingonium all day".

The analogy to UMTs is just referencing that logarithmic difference of goodness in a population or set of things where a small percentage of those things have way more "good unites" than the others do. The name however was mostly selected because it's funny above any other reason.