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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3365 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 1, 2023

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To my mind, most of the big trends in popular music in the last ten years have prominently featured a conscious embrace of ugliness and poor taste, whether it's the ear-splitting sonic assault of drill music; the self-aware tackiness and excess of hyperpop; the bored, amelodic, disaffected repetition of British and Irish sprechgesang bands; or the deliberate minimalism of modern trap and SoundCloud rap.

I don't see this as a fundamental lack of positivity and retreat to nihilism or misanthropy. At the risk of engaging in some serious "old man yells at clouds" style activities, I can't really emphasize enough how "irony" seems to have become the central social feature of Gen-Z. "Ugliness and poor taste?" No, I have great taste because I'm wearing this ugly outfit and my soundclap rap is mumbled gibberish. Kanye (before he want to planet Kanye) did this explicitly with one of his Yeezy lines that were specifically intended to look like dilapidated homeless people clothes. And have $1500+ prices per article.

But, wait, it gets worse! I'm seeing trends of irony-upon-irony. The embodiment of this is Pete Davidson who has made a career off of 1) Having a firefighter dad who died in 9/11 2) Joking about it 3) Talking about how it still makes him anxious and depressed 4) Making a horrible movie where he mixes both of these concepts 5) Being the heir to the Jimmy Fallon "I'm always breaking" role on SNL and 5) Dating megastars in Hollywood. That guy is incomprehensible to me because he doesn't ever seem to be serious even when he is professing huge sincerity. Again, the maybe-maybe-not self-awareness of that Taco Bell ad he's in where the extra says, at the end, "are you riffing or is this part of the bit?"

In my mind, I think pop culture, since about 2015 and the rise of real Gen-Z meme culture, has had a crisis of authenticity. It's now a rare commodity and, therefore, hard to reliable find and produce. The easy way is to double down on irony / sarcasm ... which further pollutes the message and so we get stuck into multi-layered cyclic irony. Trust disintegrates, people aren't sure if their emotions are common and understood or bizarrely unique personal hallucinations.

I don't see this as a fundamental lack of positivity and retreat to nihilism or misanthropy.

I think it certainly is in some cases. The dominant lyrical theme of drill music is "I am going to kill my rival drug dealers", while the dominant lyrical theme of cloud rap/emo rap/sadboi rap etc. is "I am abusing drugs because I am so miserable and depressed" (something which is acknowledged to be a stage persona in some instances, namely the late Lil Peep). Maybe these aren't nihilistic or misanthropic stances, but they're anything but "positive".

Hard disagree on Pete Davidson, I watched one of his recent Netflix specials and found him surprisingly candid and unpretentious. Perhaps a thick veneer of irony coated his earlier work but he seems to have grown out of it. Agree that, in the Anglosphere, ironic detachment is the air that we breathe (as a genre, the aforementioned hyperpop could not function without it).

"irony" seems to have become the central social feature of Gen-Z.

Posers just stole it from Gen-X. (Simpsons S07E24, May 1996)

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