On New An episode of the series was released on the Internet. Mavericks with Muff CarterTyler the Creator has been stirring up controversy in every corner of the internet in the rap world. In a video that’s been circulating online all week, he told host Maverick Carter: “There’s a lot of niggas right now who aren’t musicians and are being treated like musicians because they make meme records — they’ll say out in the open, ‘I don’t care about music. I just do this shit for the money.’”
The “meme records” label angered some who claimed that many of Odd Future’s early releases could be considered memes and others who saw the comments as evidence that Tyler, who turned 33 this year, was out of touch with reality. In the same interview, Tyler went on to comment on a white rapper he’d been seeing online who he believed was doing a mash-up of Atlanta rap icons like Gucci Mane and Future. Many online believed that Tyler was referring to Ian, a viral rapper who shares references to the likes of Lil Yachty and whose appeal is largely based on the dissonance between his appearance and his voice.
Tyler’s comments seemed to be gathering momentum online as a rebuke to the current generation of rappers. Po Thiam, Ian’s manager and executive vice president of Columbia Records, posted a response to Tyler’s comments on Instagram Stories last night: “I signed with Ian and I from Atlanta. He doesn’t look like Gucci or Future at all. That’s called influence,” he wrote. “But I never imagined I’d see the day when you’d be old and hate young people.” It’s a depressing defense that’s regularly deployed in this generation’s rap discourse (never mind that Po, an industry veteran, is nearly a decade older than Tyler). No one wants to be called “old,” and so people refuse to engage critically with anything shiny and new, attributing it instead to a vague and seemingly unflattering notion of youth culture.
But citing youthful whims is often a distraction. “The idea that youth culture is made by youth is a myth. Youth culture is made by people who are no longer young.” the New Yorker In 2019, Louis Menand, referring to his generation of baby boomers, wrote: “When you are really young, you can only consume what is there. This often becomes your ‘culture,’ but not because you created it.”
The distribution channels that dominate how today’s young people experience music—brokered by multibillion-dollar tech companies mostly run by older white men—do not represent the values of the younger generation, but the conditions under which they are forced to operate. Ian, or any viral star at the moment, is not a symbol of what’s happening in the world today. Movements Young people and others are the product of what works in an economic system that young people have no control over. The moment we are living in can be described as one of “context collapse,” the flattening of multiple audiences into a single context. This endless content, which consumes any tangible reality of modern culture, broadcasts in the background a dull, harmless noise that an entire generation has been trained to see as art.
Last month, UMG shares fell 30% after the company reported a slowdown in streaming growth, signaling the end of an era of seemingly limitless expansion in the industry. Thanks to deals with tech giants like Spotify, YouTube and Apple, much of the music industry’s success over the past decade has been tied to Silicon Valley. Now, approaches like artificial intelligence and licensing artists’ catalogs for use on social media platforms are bringing the music industry closer to the tech world, transforming its central product from a cultural concern to a technological one. In other words: meme music.
None of this is surprising. It’s no secret now that viral success has become a core part of any new musician’s marketing strategy. The flaw here, as Tyler rightly points out, is the belief that it has anything to do with music or art. More often than not, those trying to sell the increasingly soulless music that’s being spread across social media platforms as part of this generation’s culture are members of the old guard who stand to profit regardless.
