The Aesthetics of Supersadness: Yung Lean & Japan
I. Meme Rap & Sadboy Aesthetics
Like most notions sourced in the protean sphere of the Internet, the concept of “meme rap” isn’t well-defined. Nevertheless, one can generally say of meme rap and meme rappers that, in contrast to mainstream or underground rap, meme rap relies on virality, irony culture and the internet in order to expedite its proliferation. The exemplary case is Lil B the Basedgod, a Berkeley-based rapper whose thousands of meandering, low-production value, bizarre tracks (with titles like ‘Wonton Soup’ and ‘Ellen Degeneres’), paired with his equally-bizarre and aggressive social media presence, have garnered the artist enough attention to elevate his status from little-known internet cult icon to an international phenomenon, who has given jampacked public lectures at NYU and more recently, MIT. Lil B exemplifies meme rap because most of his attention is ironic, i.e. the majority of his “fans” are hipsters who delight in listening to, sharing, and discussing what they believe is actually low quality art.
Yet within Lil B’s fandom exists a subfandom constituted by people who believe the opposite: that Lil B is actually a genius and a visionary. Collectively, they make up ‘The Basedworld’ and are organized into militant subgroups, such as the ‘Bitch Mob Task Force’ who use Facebook and Twitter to dogpile onto any of Lil B’s critics, notable examples including Kevin Durant and Joey Bada$$.
Another meme rapper who has cited influence from Lil B is Yung Lean, a teenaged Swedish artist who has seen a recent rise in attention. Like Lil B, Yung Lean’s music is highly unconventional for the genre of rap, mostly him toggling between rapping and singing in monotone through autotune. He also boasts a large ironic following as well as a subfollowing of truly dedicated fans, who refer to themselves as ‘Sadboys’ or Lonely Boys (modeled after Peter Pan’s Lost Boys. There is also the occasional Sadgirl.). The subject matter of Yung Lean’s music is diverse, but certain distinctive staples include rapping about marijuana, drinking Arizona-brand Ice Tea, apparently arbitrary Japanese references e.g. his tracks ‘Kyoto’, ‘Motorola’ and ‘Yoshi City’ and, most of all, the feeling of sadness.
Sadboy culture is structured entirely around Yung Lean in the way that BMTF and Basedworld are structured around Lil B. Yet instead of existing to defend Yung Lean from critics, Sadboy culture is more about participating in a collective artistic sentiment of sadness. One home-base for Sadboy culture is a Facebook group called SADBOYS 2001. Containing just under 10,000 members, the group is mostly a place where Sadboys post stories about depressing things in their life, pictures that they like of Yung Lean, images of clothing they might buy in the style of Yung Lean (esp. bucket hats and Adidas warm-wear), and images of themselves squatting with requests to ‘rate my squat’ since in many images of Yung Lean he is seen squatting.
To newcomers, Sadboy culture appears hopelessly nonsensical, an arbitrary melange of unrelated elements lacking any underlying ideology. This impression, however, is actually intentional, and the key to understanding it can be found by paying close attention to discussions around the most popular topic in Sadboy culture: ‘aesthetics.’
By ‘aesthetics,’ Sadboys do not mean what ordinary people or philosophers mean when they use the term. It might be better to say that Sadboys are interested in an ‘aesthetics of sadness’ — specifically a kind of postmodern sadness that arises from reflection on how internet culture has transformed the world into a carnival of arbitrary signifiers in which technology has erased the distinctions among high and low art and alienated people from one another.
Another popular thing to post in SADBOYS 2001 are so-called ‘Leanified’ graphics. These low-depth images are concocted by superimposing, among other elements: floral imagery, Greco-Roman art, items from mainstream rap culture (e.g. guns, money, drugs), containers of Arizona Ice Tea, Pokemon, Japanese text, and people, esp. Yung Lean. These graphics are intended to convey a specific aesthetic impression, one that is intentionally off-putting and decidedly melancholy. Leanified images are clearly inspired by the music videos of Yung Lean. The video for ‘Hurt’ for example, depicts Lean holding a Nintendo 64 controller, rapping against a background of low-quality animation, cans of Arizona, Pokemon cards, pieces of Japanese text, animated Greek temples and words like ‘emotions’ and ‘hurt.’
II. Sadboy Aesthetics & Japan
This ‘aesthetic of sadness’ bears a strong resemblance to the artistic movement known as ‘Superflat.’ Murakami, in the Superflat Manifesto, likens the images of Superflat to the process of creating graphics via the same process by which Leanified images are composed:
“One way to imagine super flatness is to think of the moment when, in creating a desktop graphic for your computer, you merge a number of distinct layers into one.”
Murakami’s metaphor is meant to illustrate a claim about the two-dimensionality of contemporary world culture conveyed by the artworks associated with Superflat. These artworks “line up the high and low of Japanese art” within a shallow space in order to raise concerns over the degeneration and hypersimplification of modern culture.
Machino’s 1999 Untitled (Green caterpillar’s girl), with its perverse arsenal of nipples and genitals, criticizes Japanese ‘lolicon’ culture.
If anything, Sadboy culture expresses Murakami’s metaphor of Superflatness more literally and overtly via the prominent formal quality of flatness in its media. While it is doubtful that Yung Lean and Sadboy culture are directly influenced by Murakami or Superflat, they seem to be responding to the same issues, though perhaps with a less critical attitude. It is also interesting to note the high quantity of Sadboy references to Japan and Japanese culture. In addition to the song titles and Leanified elements mentioned earlier, Lean’s lyrics contain a number of allusions to Japanese media, especially anime. In ‘Sunrise Angel’, for example, Lean describes writing the lyrics while riding the train, stating:
Ego big as my phone breaking I don’t ever sleep cos
Thick stack racked up
Spend my money on a catbus
On a subway smoking green like a cactus
My life’s too real, fuck an actor
Say what you want you need to practice
I power up like King Kai
I’m smoking wind I’m flying high
The ‘catbus’ is a reference to the many-legged supernatural feline vehicle in Miyazaki’s international classic anime ‘My Neighbor Totoro’ and King Kai is a character from the anime TV show Dragonball Z. Perhaps the most idiosyncratic and indirect mode in which Sadboy culture cites Japan is in its frequent discussion of the aesthetics of beverage containers. While Arizona Ice Tea is named after an American state, the decoration of the ‘Green Tea with Honey’ variety seems to directly imitate Japanese ukiyo-e painting. The other favorite beverage container that features in Lean’s lyrics and other Sadboy media is Fiji water, named after the Japanese waterfall.
What explains the pervasive presence of recognizably Japanese elements within the melange of Sadboy aesthetics? One explanation could be that Lean, who is Swedish, deliberately juxtaposes Asiatic images with artifacts of Western antiquity all within a distinctly American medium (hip hop) in order to evoke a sense that his artistic vision transcends temporal and geographic cultural distinctions. This may be true, but it leaves unanswered the question of why, with so many Asian cultures to choose from, Lean draws heavily and exclusively from Japan and not, for instance, China, India or Korea. It might be that Sadboy culture is a faction of American otaku (intense fans of Japanese culture), or, to use the Internet’s term, Weeaboos. But this seems incorrect if only because Weeaboos at least purport to be obsessed with Japanese culture for its own sake, whereas Lean never actually praises or discusses Japan in depth. He only appropriates superficial, vague images or names out of context. Why does Sadboy culture cite Japan in this specific mode?
III. Superflatness & Supersadness
I contend that the best explanation is that Sadboy aesthetics draws upon Japanese media and culture because, like Murakami, it senses Japans Superflatness and the ensuing feelings of isolation and alienation Superflatness generates. For Sadboys, there are unlimited reasons to be sad. The foremost reason, however, is loneliness. Sadboys are also often called ‘Lonely Boys’ and Lean refers to himself as a ‘lonely clown.’ While loneliness has many causes, a major cause of the kind of loneliness that matters to Lean is the type engendered by technology. This is not a new theme; we can see it in, for example, Charlie Chaplin’s famous speech in ‘The Great Dictator’:
“We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity.”
Or early in ‘Civilization and Its Discontents,’ where Freud notes the irony in praising technological innovations like the telephone that allow us to be brought close together, since it is technological innovations that have enabled fathers to be separated by millions of miles from their sons in the first place. The tragedy of technology is that, while it promises unity and the collapse of distance, it actually has the reverse effect of breeding addiction to superficial contact and the unreflective consumption of mass-produced images. This ultimately leaves us feeling more lonely and alienated from our culture and media than we were before. Likewise, the artworks of Superflat and Leanified images share in the practice of assembling diverse cultural elements within shallow aesthetic spaces in order to emphasize their meaningless and disconnectedness.
The advent of the internet has mutated and seriously worsened this phenomenon, and Sadboy culture recognizes this. One extremely popular article of clothing that appeared briefly and sold out to the Sadboy market was a baseball cap decorated with the image of a screenshot of an iPhone text conversation. The user has sent the message ‘I miss you’ and it is labeled ‘Read 1:43 AM’ with no reply. In the chorus of Lean’s track, ‘Sunrise Angel’ he sings “Sunrise Angel / Page Unavailable / Sad money dirty heaven / Everything is painful”. The ‘I miss you’ hat, along with the lyrical inclusion of the phrase ‘page unavailable’ — the text printed by a web browser when one’s console has failed to connect — signal a type of isolation and ensuing anxiety unique to the era of the internet. Critics and newcomers of Sadboy culture observe the seemingly arbitrary affixation of the years 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004 to song titles and Leanified graphics. Yet, considering that most Sadboys are between the ages of 14 and 21, these are the years when internet culture — and its incipient forms of anguish — began for them.
An artwork that both chronologically and thematically straddles the earlier, general repulsion of the alienating effect of technology (Chaplin, Freud) and the very recent focus on the post-2004 internet is the track ‘Computer Love’ by Kraftwerk. Kraftwerk’s relationship with technology is teasingly fraught. While they were pioneers in creating music generated exclusively from machines, creating what was certainly a novel aesthetic for the era (the 1970s), much of their output appeared to criticized technological innovation, albeit half-heartedly. ‘Radioactivity’ is a nightmarish exposition of the uses of nuclear power as well as the incipient disasters (Sellafield, Harrisburg, Hiroshima) while ironically repeating “[radioactivity is] in the air for you and me”. ‘Computer Love’, on the other hand, deals with the more intimate and human tragedy of early computer technology. In a long and beautifully melancholy track, its narrator describes spending ‘another lonely night’ staring at the TV screen, calling a number for a ‘data date’ before repeating the phrase ‘computer love’ over and over until the track is complete. Here we can see evidence of an artistic sensitivity to the way in which humanity’s technology-induced loneliness has evolved and worsened thanks to the innovation of computers.
The internet has also facilitated the spread of culture and images faster than their intrinsic value might warrant. Instead of gaining popular and critical approval slowly and entirely because of its genuine virtues, a piece of media in 2015 can explode in popularity, subjected to universal dissemination, and then vanish into oblivion. Cultural production bets on the uncritical ephemerality of consumer’s attention, and reflections on the shallow, arbitrary Superflatness of contemporary media give rise to similar feelings of common disenchantment. Ironically, this is why “meme rap” is even a possible genre in the first place. Consumers are attracted to the gimmick, but the real fans are the ones who interpret the genre as essentially commenting on the gimmickry.
So, contrary to first impressions, there is a kind of sincere underlying ideology to Sadboy culture that makes sense of its apparent nonsense. Sadboy culture creates a space for people sensitive to ‘Supersadness’: all the unique, post-2004 feelings of cultural vapidity, internet-induced isolation and loneliness. While Sadboys are not the same as otaku, they nevertheless resemble otaku insofar as they are a community of alienated outcasts, people who can be “lonely together.” It may seem like this is a culture of defeatism, one that has already given up on criticizing and eventually reversing the negative effects of technology upon human flourishing. Yet Sadboy culture’s response is to treat Supersadness as something that has positive aesthetic value, just as the artworks of Superflat are worth executing and appreciating. The emotions elicited by living in a flat, arbitrary world are not themselves arbitrary, but worthy of artistic expression and commiseration.
