Taste boundaries have also eroded and exploded over the last few years as increasingly far-out hits hurtled out from niche siloes. Shocking sounds that provoke polarizing reactions hold more currency than ever. There’s nothing particularly egregious about SEBii’s brand of hyper-rap with dopey rhyme schemes, but without fail his clips end up spiraling into full-on discourses because detractors quote-tweet him and say he’s ruining the genre. Today’s shitposters have the advantage of Twitter timelines and TikTok’s ForYou page, where personalized algorithms are designed for maximum engagement. When eccentric artists like Lil B, IceJJFish, and James Ferraro were rising in the 2000s and 2010s, they were mostly confined to having small cult fanbases who loved their idiosyncrasies. The result is a feast of freakiness that’s perfect for zoomer brains that have hatched to (im)maturity in a vat of digital absurdism. So instead of trying to appeal to the everyman or the critic, a mass of young musicians are fucking around. In a streaming world that prioritizes ephemeral dopamine hits and algorithm-piercing smashes, ideas like radio-readiness or conceptual heft can feel quaint. What also separates this era of artfully inane music is the sheer volume of it and its wide-scale popularity. Rather than straight-up comedy music, the shitpost modernists aren’t often explicitly branded as “funny.” The humor and innovation is more oblique: It’s in the degraded structure of the track, the mutant vocals, the shock of a surreal high-low juxtaposition. There are modern precursors to this torrent of outlandish brilliance: Dadaist-gibberish cloud rap the shoddy shimmer of vaporwave “PISSCORE” Myspace users and bloggers coining parodic genre names juvenile YouTube glitch-graffiti. Her zaniest song to date, “Bikini Bottom,” features her moonwalking over a SpongeBob sample so slapstick it’s like sample drill Charlie Chaplin. Kendrick Lamar vexed oldheads in 2022 when he repeated the phrase “top of the morning” seven times, for no reason, in a fierce tone on the Baby Keem collaboration “ range brothers.” Ice Spice’s willfully weird slang has spawned endless memes: “I’m the shit, I’m that bitch, I’m Miss Poopie” is a recent highlight. Or whatever is going on with the stupendously unpredictable rapper RXK Nephew, whose catalog is a banquet of the bizarre, from a conspiracy-rap odyssey to a track he spends dissing its beatmaker.Įven megastars have gone silly under the shitpost spell, sidestepping polished musicality in favor of high-low anarchy. That’s what we’re seeing with things like Yeat’s gospel of gibberish and the viral jazz cluster’s filthy gags, or the surprise hits of Lil Yachty’s “Poland” and Saint Mercator’s “Da Biggest Bird,” a pluggnB tribute to ornithology. Imagine if “shitpost” didn’t mean far-right 4channers spamming Dark Brandon GIFs but instead became a zeitgeist-defining aesthetic for music, a new frontier of profane genius that walks the tightrope between cringe and cool. Agus’ music is just one dispatch from the strange new world of what I’m calling shitpost modernism.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |