No One Lives Forever on SoundCloud, and That’s the Point

Mitchell Weasel
Sep 7, 2018 · 4 min read

This story was originally published on June 21, 2018.

I saw XXXTentacion dead on Instagram before I had heard what happened. He was slumped over in his car — he could’ve been asleep. I knew better. The video was grainy, and had already been compressed and sent and croppd and uploaded and downloaded before it ever hit my feed. It had the exact quality that one might expect out of a video of a dead body. Minutes after his death announcement came, I saw people on Twitter talking about his work and his influence. But for every one person I saw decrying his death at 20 years old, I saw two people going in on him. In the internet, people live fast. Time goes by fast.

There was a story yesterday on The Ringer by Sean Fennessey about the future of rap music. The essay asserted that the recent efforts of Kanye, Pusha T, Was, and Jay-Z were already old hat. It went on to say that the new legacies of rap were being forged right in front of us, and that the gun that killed XXXTentacion encased him in bronze at the same moment. But X is not a new immortal. He will not join the leagues of gone-too-soon artists, and it has nothing to do with the quality of his work.

When pop culture was small, immortality was achievable. It didn’t necessarily take a premature death to do it, but it’s been known to help. Pop culture was born sometime in the 1950s and died sometime this decade. There are still TV shows, though. Popular artists, popular movies, popular YouTubers, popular Twitch streamers — people still get famous. In fact, big pop events are bigger than ever. Out of the top 20 highest-grossing movies of all time, 18 of them are less then a decade old. A lot of people end up seeing The Avengers movies, but nobody is part of the monoculture anymore. It doesn’t exist.

The cultural thoroughfares that people c hoose to follow are so diverse, even on the big platforms. It’s a galaxy of gigantic groups with colossal subdivisions. While it may seem like everyone I know is consuming the same things, it’s only because it’s easier than ever to curate the things and people one can subscribe to. The internet has shattered the prism of pop into a million tiny pieces, and everyone drifts between fragments of light without restriction.

SoundCloud, as both a scene and a service, is the most prolific entity in all of rap music. Rap used to be all about regional scenes, and now SoundCloud is a region of its own. There used to be West Coast rappers, and New York Rappers, and Dirty South rappers. Rappers from Atlanta and Houston — but rappers who come into being in modern times are basically just from the internet.

I first heard about the concept of “internet time” in the 2000s. The premise is that a YouTube video that was a big deal three weeks ago was 30 years old in internet time. In 2005, the world didn’t run by internet time. It does now.

I won’t celebrate the death of XXXTentacion even though he seemed like a piece of shit. There’s something to be said, something that’s been said, about him being young and misguided. Unfortunately I have nothing to gauge him by except for the actions he undertook while he was alive. Nonetheless, X has no legacy, because artists of any medium will no longer have storied multi-decade careers anymore.

Which isn’t to say that someone like A$AP Rocky won’t make albums until he dies of old age. He might produce music, sell albums, and tickets to shows for the rest of his life — but nobody will ever be Michael Jackson again. I mean, MJ was prolific for reasons both positive and negative for his entire life. There’s no room for that in the new world.

The quality of the art is not a factor. Someone in the near future will make an album as good as Thriller. Someone probably has. But the next time Thriller comes out, it won’t spend 300+ weeks on the charts. The charts might not exist, because people certainly aren’t buying music anymore, let alone albums. Brevity is the essence of the SoundCloud scene. It’s the essence of streaming. Right now it’s the essence of music.

All the same, a multitude of SoundCloud rappers who have broke through have released albums, but albums are no longer a crucial format. It seems like albums usually mean something, but what they mean is ever-changing.

The concept of the album itself is fragmenting, hence the rise of “mixtapes”, or playlists — other monikers sometimes attached to projects that are album-like in length. Migos out an album that was almost two-hours long. Conversely, the handful of projects that Kanye recently had a hand in are all under 30 minutes, which makes their album status especially pointed.

The post-modern wave of rap ushered in by this last class and a half of rappers is emblematic of a change not only in rap music, but in the structure of the way art is produced, delivered, and consumed. There is some chance that this SoundCloud era gives birth to something less anarchic; but the revolutionary changes it has imposed are here to stay.

Even when it deals in full-length releases, the beating heart of SoundCloud rap is nomadic and reactionary. It’s up-to-the-minute, intimate, and casual. It’s experimental and transgressive and pop. It’s here today and gone tomorrow. It’s everything at once, fast. It’s the internet — and that’s the world.

Mitchell Weasel

Written by

Big money hustler, proud father, and grateful husband. Freelance writer, seen on @waypoint

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