For whom the hotline blings
From Arab Spring to Arab Spring
For whom the Hotline blings
From Arab Spring to Arab Spring
Can only mean one thing
How can I connect my experiences with the world we live in, given the sludge, the goop, the slop, the hot take, the clap-back, the fact-check, the call-out, the post-truth? We sift through the garbage can of ideology, the trash heap of desire, the wreckage of history, in search of ourselves, scattered about. The gold we search is always hiding in silver. How did we get here? We are celebrating over a century of industrial modernity. The mass-produced object, the pencil sharpener as spaceship, the music box as memory, the moving picture as fantasy. How do we find meaning in an increasingly ubiquitous multiverse of multiverses? Must we canonise ourselves, through the stories we post, the images we edit, the articles we pretend to read? Is there any hope in rekindling the possibility of a possibility, the horizon of a world yet unborn, yet to be crushed?I started high school in the Obama years. Social media had just revolutionized how we engage with politics. Our history teacher gave Orientalist monologues on how Facebook had brought democracy to the Middle East, and how the Arab Spring would signal a change for summers to come. Between the ironic pessimism of the Mayan calendar and the very real optimism of the Kony 2012 campaign, I was blessed with a world of endless possibilities. Little did I know that window had been foreclosed, long before the splash of the Occupy Wall Street movement evaporated on the very pavement it sought to spit on. I thought I could do anything. And I did, in hopes I’d make it. Yung Lean had just blown up. I was garnering state-wide attention as the high school rapper that had dissed some poor fella in the same game. I was given the opportunity to perform on stages to large for me, in front of crowds I didn’t deserve.
The ensuing years felt like a manic attempt at reestablishing that hope, failure after failure: a failed song, an insufficiently promoted concert, and one underfunded music video production after another. Only the summer of 2016 managed to wake me from my slumber. The hopey-changey tone of the early 2010s came to a halt in the same Summer young digital natives were stuck inside the clubs, chanting Drake single after Drake single, right up until the Brexit results came out in June.
To many, such as a part of myself that I am arbitrarily suppressing for the sake of this story, summer 2016 was the last good summer of music. What many will scoff at as the summer of Drake (Hotline Bling, One Dance, Controlla were ubiquitous), there was an untarnished sense of optimism in the hot summer air: the over-saturation of tropical house, the global mainstreaming of UK grime within American Hip Hop, the legendary XXL Freshman’s Magazine Cipher that introduced the world to the roster of now-veteran rappers such as 21 Savage, Lil Uzi Vert, Kodak Black and more, the impact of which immortalized the new wave of Trap right before it started to cannibalize itself through increasingly indistinguishable names, faces and beats. (Ask any producer that has not yet become an algorithm in human flesh).
The type beat, the proletarianization of the producer, forced to compete with beat packs of 100 instrumentals for the truly unbeatable price of 5 dollars, the purchase of followers, likes, the playlist to billboard pipelines, the rise of viral marketing, all that made me see I’d never make it. The death of Harambe, to whom Angela Nagle attributes the moment in which traditional media loses its hold on politics entirely.
The fact that Hillary Clinton dabbed on live camera to garner support is, to the friend of Migos, insulting at worst, and hypocritical at best. Seeing her snub Bernie Sanders has indeed revealed her bad and boogie side, putting many such as myself in the awkward position of criticising the democratic party whilst fully aware of the alternative candidate yet to come. The summer of 2016 signalled the world that was to come: Drake and Brexit, Trap and Trump, Fake clout and Fake news. The shifts in the platform, elaborated by Taylor Lorenz in her recent book “extremely online”, are user-driven, and profit-driven, as advertisement regulations shifted, for better and worse. Additionally, the introduction of algorithms to social media and the removal of the chronological timeline was a conscious choice that may single-handedly be the root cause of the Cambridge Analytica fiasco, the lynchings in India, the Rohingya Genocide, the election of far-right nationalists, the mental health crisis, the uncle you don’t talk to anymore, the stoner who went too far in his conspiracies, the ripe and fertile soil on which any pandemic was sure to bestow the strangest of fruits.
4Chan started making more sense than Euronews. Harambe became the placeholder Greta Thunberg for a world that ignored Malala, a world that got tired of campaigns, movements, red brand products, and tipping McDonalds foundations. I started my undergrad in 2017, essentially devoting most of the time in classes that tried to piece together what exactly happened in 2016. Populism, echo chambers, fake news. These words started to smell horrible, coming from the mouths of liberal professors who preached Mill, Locke and Smith. They tried to force us to quantify truth, measure animosity, explain hopelessness, all without resorting to the stuff that mattered. The hardware, the money, the precariat who writes fake news to sustain themselves in Veres, Albania. The young soundcloud rapper who invested his entire personality in a short-lived career, too proud to give up. The cousin starting her online business, whose merch you initially bought to help out, but are now getting sick of supporting. The friend that oversells their skills on LinkedIn like the desperate lapdog whose paws they wish to lick. The age of catfishing; the desert of the real. I was born from a photo shop, I lived just to photoshop, I died, when the photos stopped. And now I pay the price. When the pictures are gone, all we have is words to describe them.
