Why We Should Take Internet Music Seriously

MØRNING. We know that internet music isn’t for everyone. But it keeps finding its way onto our feeds anyway. Weaving on and offline via the likes of small, sweaty PostParty nights, where artists like Sinn6r emerge from the shadows of the underground. And before you know it, they are your favourite artists favourite artist.

As our very own strategy lead @giorgiaaubrey argues, this might just be the closest thing we have to a new age of punk. As internet rapper 2Slimey captures “It’s just like the hardcore punk, fast-paced shit. It’s like an adrenaline rush. Some shit that makes me feel free”. Under the hood of this nebulous genre-term, artists seamlessly collapse sincerity and irony into the same note. As Giorgia explains in today’s newsletter, it may be time for us to listen up. She’s even made a playlist to get you started.

In the thumping bass and hazy lights of the cellar room in the Musikbrauerei, I feel a near religious reverence for the evening, prompted by the first shrill notes of Banshee by Munyunn. The screeching 808s are uncomfortably loud, and incredibly well received. I recognise the song from watching one of many On The Radar episodes, or perhaps from the 1000+ rap song clips I have in my saved folder on Instagram, just a highlight of the many current routes for discovering and engaging with modern rap, or shall we call it internet music?

In an effort to maintain the hearts, minds and attention of the masses, the Reels (and TikTok) algorithm have supported the platforming of increasingly experimental underground artists, who have fast been forming a chaotic cohort of musical pioneers. Swinging between the harsh edges of sincerity or pure irony sit artists like xaviersobased, Dragnutz and 2Slimey, each track providing a simultaneously delicious and disgusting sonic experience, which has no problem in retaining the attention of music nerds and doomscrollers alike. Perhaps I’m remiss to put artists like this into the same category, each fracturing into their own distinct lanes across Jerk, Pluggnb, Trap, Rage, and even EDM Drill, but they all uniquely occupy a space of experimentation, innovation and irony that is fast paving its way into the music mainstream.

Our central question is the sincerity of this music. The reductive answer is that the kids are untalented, clipfarming, and making ostentatious music to hack the algorithm and ascend the underground iceberg. That they hide a lack of craft behind vocal distortion, boosted 808s and a covered face. If you listen closely enough, though, the final result of these experimental and multidirectional projects is sincere and consistent at the center. Their supposed irony of execution congeals into an honesty that is more tangible for its internet-addicted fans, and more honest than the polished sincerity it replaced.

A challenge for the newly inducted, the vast expanse of musical genres with near-indistinguishable differentiation makes for subjective navigation for even the self-prescribed music fan. Despite these nuances and near weekly evolutions in sound, you can generally identify a lot of internet music by the sheer (and beautiful) ignorance with which most of it is produced.

The most common applications of this ignorance is found in bass boosted 808s, which are turned up to the max, and even to the point of sound waves being distorted by their own volume. The result of this is the buzzy, reverberating and infectious sound which underpins a lot of these tracks, making for an intensity of listening experience comparable to a 2 hour TikTok doomscroll. It’s the sort of sound that makes a guy punch you in the face when you weren’t even near the moshpit. The lack of care for what’s right, what sounds ‘good’, and what the speakers can handle is indicative of these artists’ detachment from traditional music production. The intention of the production isn’t to create the next Billboard top 10 hit, but to express an attitude, to make their audience feel something, and hopefully to round up a supergroup of underground music fans in the process.

Producer tags are an art form of their own. From ok’s ‘wegonbeok‘ heard across Nettspend, Osamason and 2slimey, to Wraith9’s competing, understated ‘ok‘, producers are gaining more recognition than ever for shaping these genres, and their tags often push into extreme, ironic territory: see DJ Smokey’s ‘I just shoved a nuke up my pussy‘ or ‘warning, nuke radio, we make your eardrums bleed‘, found across Joeyy, Shadow Wizard Money Gang and Christ Dillinger.

Maximalism is a central characteristic of modern internet rap, and its producers don’t much care whether you find it listenable. Its prerogative is to incite the interest of listeners, positive or not, and to act as a war cry for those who thrive on the sonic chaos.

To many existing and consuming music outside of this space it may read as ironic, and likely unlistenable, nodded to in a joke coined by the community of fans themselves accusing listeners of “not having trained ears”. Classic irony has a clear gap you can see across, saying one thing and meaning the opposite, trusting you to catch it. Here there is no space, no gap between what’s said and what’s meant, no opposite. When Joeyy compares a black bin bag to a Balenciaga coat he would buy, or RX Papi buries genuine vulnerability inside a chaotic, deadpan mess, you cannot separate the joke from the feeling. The apparent absurdity isn’t covering for the emotion, but the vehicle carrying it. The illegibility of sentiment is exactly how this generation smuggles feeling past their own terror of sincerity. As 2hollis put it, everyone’s petrified of being caught trying, of “aura farming,” of meaning it out loud. So you mean it sideways, at maximum volume, wrapped in a joke you’d never explain and buried beneath a distorted master channel. It’s the sonic expression of metamodernism, kids oscillating so fast between “I mean this” and “I’m joking” that the two collapse into one uncomfortable, distorted and deeply felt note.

This is where the accusation of ‘badness’ falls flat. Bad because it lacks music theory, because it resists radio polish, because the lyrics are buried in the mix, precisely the intentional ignorance with which they create. That ignorance is not a deficiency, but the engine for their output as it tips increasingly into the experimental realm. Not knowing the rules, or not caring, is what lets someone clip an 808 past what a speaker can survive, or make an entire project as an ode to a weapon, or title a track Anti Music. The innovation lies in the mess, facilitated by rejection of binary approaches to music making, and justly aligned with the democratised access of creation of music in this internet era. All it takes is a cracked version of FL and a dodgy free download of Serum, for some even it’s as simple as Garageband on an iPhone, to build the foundations of music at the most experimental edges of rap right now. It’s as clear as ever in music that tastemaking is not a top-down process. As Dan Fox argues, it’s just as often this working-class cultural energy, made without permission, that ends up setting the terms for what “cool” becomes. Every scene now considered foundational - punk, early hip hop, Memphis rap - sounded like noise and looked like a joke to the people it left behind.

So is it good? I think it’s the most alive, experimental and artistically interesting music being made right now. Not despite the irony but through it, a generation is building something sincere out of their friction laden life experiences and lack of clarity.

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Until next time readers!

Words by Giorgia Aubrey. Edit by Sui Donovan. Cover image Blow the Speaker, Fakemink. by Brought to you by @morning.fyi.