The same strain of shitposter syndrome afflicts hyperpop and zoomer electronica—just listen to the live sets. For Boiler Room earlier this year, 100 gecs blended their future-bass collab with Skrillex into a Five Nights at Freddy’s theme song into Chief Keef’s ferocious “Faneto.” At The Lot Radio, Frost Children wed novelty hits like Ylvis’ “What Does The Fox Say” to pristine house and the sort of vomity brostep every 7th-grader worshiped in 2010. The goal of most professional DJs is to keep listeners hypnotized with a seamless mix; the objective of these producers is to spark sloppy grins when you hear the campy chaos fading in. Attend any 100 gecs show and you’ll see scores of teens and twenty-somethings awash in wizard hats, furry costumes, and colorful fishnets, with Nintendo 3DS cameras flying in the air. These musicians offer not just slapstick music but a kind of light-hearted outlook toward life itself; it’s a childlike retreat from the strictures of seriousness and a refusal to abide by conservative etiquette.
The music is just one piece of what has become a sprawling shitpost-media complex. Another layer is the Instagram and Twitter meme accounts that pose as news sources and create Biblical mountains of lore about scenes. One of the most influential pages, Hyperpop Daily, is basically the zoomer’s Hipster Runoff, with a focus on the ascendant, fractured wave of underground music instead of indie rock. Launched in late 2020, the page zeroes in on the most astonishing news items (real or alleged) about an artist, like how Destroy Lonely apparently walked off the stage at an in-game Roblox show, using descriptions that fall closer to shitpoems than shitposts. The page’s 24-year-old, Seattle-based creator tells me that his writing style is partly inspired by the adolescent melodrama of stories on Wattpad, a fan-fiction forum. He points to one piece in particular where the author fantasizes that Swedish rappers Bladee and Yung Lean went to his high school. “For some reason, Bladee started self-harming, and I just was like, What the fuck is going on here?” he recalls thinking. “If someone did this ironically, it would make for god-tier content.”
Consuming music content online used to parallel the analog ways of reading magazines, watching music docs, and chatting with friends. The 2010s were ruled by the casual drop-in-when-you-want vibe of blogs, YouTube videos, and forums. That mode feels snail-paced compared to today’s vortex of startling stimuli, where every career update, review, and beef related to an artist is converted into feed-flooding posts by influencer-blogs like Hyperpop Daily. All the world has become a shitpost: 2023’s hottest “dance” account features the human equivalent of a graduated cylinder bopping ironically next to toilets.
