Souncloud Rap, Generational Warfare & Identity Politics
Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was recorded in the shadow of the 2008 financial crash and released a full year before Occupy Wall street. A generation defining album that cruxes on its own immensity and opulence. A labyrinth of the decrepitudes of wealth and widely considered the greatest album of the 2000’s up until this point.
Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly came out around a resurgence and recollection of power around anti-black violence that rocked America in the early 2010’s. An anthemic rebuttal to the myth of American excellence, informed by and informing the nascent Black Lives Matter movement.
Both of these albums are effective conveyances of their moment, the kind of hip-hop that speaks to the scope of millennial disappointment. You can almost hear Kanye walking around his mansion, Gatsby-esque in the ruins of America, calling out to the hollow fragility of wealth.
Spike Jonze's short film We Were Once a Fairytale, starring West as himself, ends with him staring into a bathroom mirror and cutting out a grotesque, rat like creature out of his abdomen, and giving it a knife so it may kill itself. It is the evolution of the optimistic bear mascot that defined Wests early iconography, a purely Lacanian expression of understanding the (mirror) self, finally clarified for Kanye. In this video, and in the song, he finally understands his I. He’s been delivering on that grotesque rat ever since, a bipolar explosion of Id-ish thoughts, feelings, and rhetorics that confound and assault the cultural imagination. This is something millennials, in a way, have all had to do as the vice grip of economic precarity unseats our comfortable lives.
We do it with less explosiveness than Kanye does.
An aside: This is one of the reasons Kanye is so confounding. Supporting Trump but being an outspoken advocate and actualizer of prison reform. Saying George Bush doesn’t care about black people, and then positing slavery as a choice. Speaking at length about his issues with debt when capitalism is understood to be a system in which debt has no meaning for the wealthy until it begins to undermine the institution itself. Fortunately Deleuze already has already answered this: Schizophrenia is a product of capitalism, and understanding Kanye’s positionality within capitalism alongside his mental disorder totally demystifies the enigma of Mr. West, our society's most immense cultural juggernaut..
West and Lamar represent the logical endpoints of millennial thought, in this case, to be brought up in an era of unbridled (and completely disingenuous) optimism informed by neoliberalism, and to have the foundations of that rocked once by 9/11 and again by total collapse of the financial sector, it’s a generation that has resigned itself to trying to understand what’s gone wrong, either through a function of political activism (Lamar) or individualist soul searching (West) that was inculcated through the Clinton and Obama years, interrupted by a unified opposition to the Bush era that ended in an abject failure to oppose of the state and was finally neutered by Prez 44. Millennial alienation and its capacity to organize against it is hamstrung by the precarity of the millennial economic position, and limited by total sublimation from grounded careers to ephemeral gig work.
Generational warfare isn’t real in a sense of one generation being better than the other, but the value of generational signifiers lies in the way they give clarity to how age interprets the world, in how old cliches like “You’ll get more conservative as you get older” are demonstrated to be false relics of Reagan era thought.
Which brings me to Soundcloud Rap, the music of now. A genre defined by its baseness in terms of musical style, equally hedonistic, consumerist and earnestly emotional sad boy lyricism, face tattoos, proliferation online, and a streak of death that seems to follow major artists in the genre. Perhaps the first true Gen Z musical genre, Soundcloud Rap has exploded to a degree of misunderstanding and denigration by musical elders.
But it is the zeitgeist.
Put simply, Soundcloud Rap is the best path to understanding the emerging generational divide between Gen-Z and Millennials. A form that emerged out of the democratization of the musical means of production and defined by a winking, deeply ironic knowledge of the world around them as one of abject collapse, Soundcloud Rap is a reaction (But not reactionary) to the understanding that Gen-Z is the second generation in a row that will be worse off than its parents. It’s a reaction generated by people born in an era where their formative view of the world wasn’t defined by Clinton Era neoliberal optimism, but rather, an expression of hopelessness, both economic, cultural, and existential. Climate change has been around for a long time, but what does it mean to be brought, full brunt, into a world choked by climate anxiety? Its reductive qualities lash out at the apathy towards the immense, unprecedented amount of information sitting uselessly at our fingertips, at the neverending wars that pervade our lives, at the catastrophe that remains perpetually on an ever encroaching horizon.
The solution, of course, is musical expressions of nihilism and depression cloaked in empty materialism. Even the face tattoo trend that is key to the semiotics of Soundcloud Rap understands this: Who cares if I won’t get hired with these? I was never going to get a job worth having anyway. Face tattoos also speak to its ideas of authenticity as being external markers, not necessarily upbringing. Drake’s anxiety of being authentically from the hood would mean nothing in the Soundcloud Rap world, as long as he had the look down.
In effect, Soundcloud Rap can be summed up as, I’m here for a good time, not a long time, because none of us will be here for a long time anyway.
Compare two songs by the recently deceased Lil Peep:
The Way I See Things, released two years before his death:
I got a feelin' that I'm not gonna be here for next year
So, let's laugh a little before I'm gone
I’ve been dreamin' of this shit for a while now
Got me high now
She don't love me, but she's singin' my songs (Oh, no)
I don't feel much pain
Got a knife in my back, and a bullet in my brain
I’m clinically insane
Walkin' home alone, I see faces in the rain
Where did all the time go?
Spend it gettin' high while I hide from the 5-0
Where did all the lines go?
And Beamer Boy, released the following year:
I'm a mothafuckin' schema boy, I'm a dreamer boy
I love a girl that don't even fuckin' need a boy
Baby, I'm a beamer boy, I need a beamer, boy
I want a Z3, that's a two-seater, boy
Okay, I pull my cash out, shawty pass out
Take her ass out, then I spaz out
Okay, yeah, I hit that, shawty, get back
I got death notes, where my list at?
One is an honest assessment of his own mental health, his deteriorating drug habit, and understanding of his own fragility, the other is a genuinely ridiculous, hollow anthem to the artifice of wealth that’s impossible to be a banger outside of irony because it is really just that ridiculous. Lil Peep died of a fentanyl overdose in 2017. He was 21 years old.
The final line in the excerpt from Beamer Boy (I got death notes, where my list at?) is also telling. It takes a glance at tik-tok to see a Gen Z obsession with anime that passes beyond the boundaries of millennial era maladjusted weeabooisms and casual Ghibli interest. Consider the late Juice WRLD’s music video for Come & Go, off his posthumous album Legends Never Die. The video contrasts a real life depiction of him in solitudinal moments surrounded by seemingly happy friends and lovers with him as a Shonen anime hero, ripping apart demons with a sword. A legitimate expression of control, heroism, and change explored in the minds eye. Foucault may have referred to the idea of an idealized self as a “Californian cult,” but cults rely on an approach that tells people they can transcend their material positions through external means; a retreat into anime, and the emergent megapopularity of shonen among zoomers, a genre marked by the intensity of its wish fulfilment, is completely understandable.
This is part of the lingering legacy of artists like Kid Cudi and in parallel with someone like Travis Scott (Who is really, an artist for millennials). Cudi’s elegaic tone and aspirational-from-the-gutter wallowing is a form of millennial soul searching - his quest is perpetually one of finding the source of his problems and removing himself from them. Soundcloud rap knows the source of the problems, and acknowledges them as insurmountable.
Of course, Kudi also can’t help but fall back on the optimism he grew up on, like all of us millennials.
Consider the lines from Up Up & Away, the closer on his immaculate Man On The Moon: The End of Day:
Turn around
See myself in the mirror, I guess I'm cool
And those happy thoughts in my head
I'm feeling like I'm Peter Pan
Minus the tights and the fairies
Happy to see how far I've come
To the same place it began
My dreams and imagination
Perfectly at peace
So I move along a bit higher
How many Soundcloud Artists can present this sort of optimism? None that I know. Compare it to Juice WRLD’s Up Up and Away from Legends Never Die. Apropos of absolutely nothing, I’m sure this song is an elliptical tribute to Cudi’s:
I'm walkin' in Prada, tryna solve my problems
Through the night, finding vibes, Moonlight Sonata
I try to deny, but you see the pills in my eyes
I tell her that I'm high, but she don't seem surprised
Walkin' in Prada, tryna solve my problems
Through the night, finding vibes, Moonlight Sonata
I try to deny, but you see the pills in my eyes
I tell her that I'm high, but she don't seem surprised (Uh)
The dissonance between materialism and oblivion isn’t usually as pronounced as it is in the earlier Lil Peep example. It often takes this form, a Prada flex peeling back to reveal abject sadness.
Regarding optimism, I understand many of these artists came from difficult socioeconomic background, but I’d like to isolate the idea of neoliberal economics that we were hurtling towards something greater and better. Consider the Obama election and the hope that followed it. Consider the Clinton years, and the idea that this train could not stop rolling. My own (Muslim) family’s notion of security was irrevocably shattered by 9/11, and so was every middle class white family’s. The superstructure of our media class and the values it preaches inculcate most of us to think we’re going to the end of the rainbow, and the journey is hard. The expressions of this line of thinking lead to despair, soul searching, and utter mental breakdown. Once again, Deleuze gets it.
So what does this all speak to?
It takes one look at leftist and online circles, or even more mainstream progressive media, to be deluged with articles about how the younger generations will save. “I’m so proud of the youth.” “The kids are alright.” “Zoomers are good.”
Pathetic. Delusional. Inane.
This outsized sampling is an obvious (This is not new) displacing of responsibility onto a group that doesn’t want it forced on them, and that should take it on their own terms. It obscures the real harm entire generations of people are currently in, and completely obliviates them as a group that can be organized, educated and spoken to. It obscures the fact that a majority of Zoomers growing up right now are gripped and crippled by a sense of pervasive, paralyzing hopelessness, which as a provable thesis is matched to the enormous popularity of Soundcloud Rap. For all its expressions of anti-capitalism, woke queerness, and social justice, politically active zoomers remain a minority, and one that has come up in an age where liberal media has identified symbols, expressions, and virtue signalling as an ultimate political act, driven by expressions of capitalism over earnest solidarity and ORGANIZING (consider the words, “It’s not my job to educate you, pay me.)
This is even more expressive in a cultural rejection of the elder (Consider the weight many “leftists” give to generational warfare as an expression of class war). Maybe we need fewer ad-hoc facilitators and more trained educators and organizers. Many exist, but the way we treat our informal teachers on the streets and in our leftward spaces speaks to the enormous, manufactured difficulty of passing knowledge down.
Boomer is a state of mind meant to be challenged, not an actual generation meant to be waged war on, and an outright rejection of older people who have been in the political trenches is a skillful manipulation of progressive value statements in order to cripple future generations from organizing against their economic masters. There’s a reason Zoomers picked it up first, and it betrays the lack of organizing power being inculcated from one generation to the next - and this is an explicit move by capital to ensure that power is diminishing, not building.
For all the political and cultural weight given by the online left to politically motivated artists like Ravyn Lenae, she is effectively a non-starter against the total pervasiveness of Soundcloud Rap.
Compare Ravyn to the Hypebeast Zoomer youtuber, a dead-eyed click farm that is an ultimate expression of material subsumption, opening boxes of similar looking Supreme goods and manufacturing drama in their personal lives that people hang onto and watch, for the ad-approved ten minutes, seven days a week. Quick, statistically poor sampling to prove a point: A sad little shit like Blazendary has 1.7 million Youtube followers. Ravyn Lenae has 48 thousand.
Consider the handwringing around TikTok’s privacy concerns. A xenophobic speaking point that seems to think Chinese capital stealing your data is more dangerous than American capital doing the same thing, set in stark relief against American feds stealing people off the street in Portland. Going on Reddit, its easy to find criticisms of Zoomers, handwringing about “Their dumb entertainment is worth the Chinese stealing their data?” “They give a shit!”
Yeah, they don’t give a shit. What reason have they ever been offered to give one?
I’m here for a good time, not a long time, because none of us will be here for a long time anyway.
Soundcloud Rap’s most upsetting element, something carried over from the world of 90’s grunge but understands its own motivations better, is its elements of death - there’s a tacit acknowledgement within the scene that only a few lucky ones are going to make it to thirty. Many haven’t. This is a function of Zoomer alienation above all else. The kids aren’t alright, fuckers, stop saying they are. Disingenuous triumphalism, once again, denies our ability to assess, react to, and organize against the harm inflicted by capitalism.
The black socialist theorist Cedric Robinson often wrote at length about Capitalism’s role in defining racial hierarchy, independent - but extremely close to - its separate construction of class. This is an essential point. Hierarchies were emergent pre-capitalism, patriarchy most likely being the earliest one. In his book Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump, Asad Haider speaks to an idea of “insurgent universality,” one that asks not for identitarian emancipation but a universal one. It’s an argument I appreciate, one that considers and allows for reparations, landback, and other demands of particularly marginalized people in the service of an ultimate egality. The power of capitalism to create identitarian silos is often ignored by class first reactionaries, and should be embraced by leftists who are at odds with reactionary identitarian organizing but also understand the holistic importance of identity within an organizing framework. It’s important to consider that this idea also goes across generation and age. Looking at Robinson and Haider together, it’s important to consider two things:
A non-reactionary critique of identity politics has to primarily push back against the idea of Wakanda mindset, and, perhaps counterintuitively, center identity within it.
Examinations of identity within capitalism, while primarily and rightfully occupied with questions of race, also extend to things such as generational identity as well. Obviously, one is more important than the other, but in an emancipatory framework, all identities must be considered, and economic restitution must be metered out according to harm done. And believe me, harm has been done to all of us, although it is unequal in measure across lines of race, gender, class, ability and age.
The generational Zoomer has more in common with the stereotypical idea of a boomer. Two generations, an economic alpha and a human omega both marked by the idea of nihilism. For the first it is a selfish imperative, for the second, it is something unwillingly handed to them. For the selfishness and neoliberal brainwashing of boomers, the redheaded stepchild inferiority complex of Gen-X, the soul searching disappointment and depression of the Millennial, and the feverish, nihilistic glee of the Zoomer, we are all ultimately victims of an economic order that silos us, depresses us, mistreats us, and finally, turns us against each other off the most banal of cultural signifiers, and then weaponizes them. Consider your dad’s relationship to rap music. Consider your own relationship to Soundcloud Rap. Consider what you leave behind. Consider what the world is for someone just brought into it, amidst a pandemic, social insurgency, and an economic collapse that could reinvent, bolster, or take down capitalism, and we don’t know which one yet.
Cultural warfare might be second to economic liberation, but culture is a key element of understanding the particularities certain groups and segments are confronted by in our cruel economic framework. It is vital. Very few cultural markers express this as well as Soundcloud rap.
I thought a lot about what the thesis of this piece was, as I was writing it.
Maybe I can sum it up as such: Don’t reject what you don’t know, it’s condescending as fuck. Soundcloud Rap is ultimately about how one generation has failed the next. Those failures are not individual, they’re systemic. Zoomers are not an avatar for your hopes and dreams, they’re another group to meet, organize, empathize, and build power with.
Unless all of us are alright, the kids will never be.