The same strain of shitposter syndrome plagues hyperpop and zoomer electronica – just listen to the live sets. For Boiler Room earlier this year, 100 gecs combined their future bass collaboration with Skrillex into a Five Nights at Freddy's theme song to Chief Keef's wild 'Faneto'. On The Lot Radio, Frost Children married innovative hits like Ylvis' “What Does The Fox Say” to pristine house and the kind of vomit every 7th grader loved in 2010. The goal of most professional DJs is to keep their listeners mesmerized by a seamless blend; The goal of these productions is to elicit sloppy smiles as you listen to the mayhem fade away. Attend any 100 gecs show and you'll see dozens of teenagers and twenty-somethings bloated in wizard hats, fur suits and colorful fishnets, with Nintendo 3DS cameras flying through the air. These musicians offer not only slapstick music but a kind of light-hearted perspective on life itself. it is a childish retreat from the constraints of seriousness and a refusal to adhere to conservative etiquette.
Music is only one part of what has become a huge shitpost-media complex. Another layer is the Instagram and Twitter meme accounts that pose as news sources and create Biblical mountains of lore for scenes. One of the most influential pages, Hyperpop Daily, is basically zoomer's Hipster Runoff, focusing on the rising, broken wave of underground music instead of indie rock. Launched in late 2020, the page zeroes in on the most surprising news (real or supposed) about an artist, like how Destroy Lonely apparently walked off stage at a game Roblox Appearance, using descriptions that are closer to cracked poems than dark ones. The page's 24-year-old, Seattle-based creator tells me his writing style is partly inspired by the teenage melodrama of stories on Wattpad, a fan forum. He points to one track in particular where the writer fantasizes that Swedish rappers Bladee and Yung Lean went to his high school. “For some reason, Bladee started hurting himself and I was like What the hell is going on here?“, he remembers thinking. “If someone did this ironically, they would create divine content.”
The consumption of music content on the internet is used to parallel the analogue ways of reading magazines, watching music documents and chatting with friends. The 2010s were dominated by the occasional release of blogs, YouTube videos and forums. This mode feels like a snail's pace compared to today's maelstrom of amazing stimuli, where every career update, review, and beef related to an artist is turned into posts powered by influencer blogs like Hyperpop Daily. The whole world has become a shitpost: the hottest 'dance' bill of 2023 features the human equivalent of a graduated cylinder ironically popping next to toilets.
