Unfinished essay excerpt

[...] that the current phenomenon of aesthetic-oriented soundcloud rap is a kind of un/intentional attempt at articulating hyperspecific cultural states as a way of orienting oneself in an increasingly schizophrenic and disorienting (pop) cultural landscape. The early years of the self-aware post-internet music scene (post-sunsetcorp/Ryder Ripps basically) is by nature very cognizant of its post-post-ironic / neo-sincere state, placement within the internet itself, and its aspirations to a kind of modern art status; and this “post-internet” scene can be entirely bisected into two separate waves - late 00s until 2020, and 2020 onward. The former was primarily the product of more underground or idiosyncratic producers / artists, as the attitudes and aesthetics inherent to the post-internet “movement” was not yet mainstream, whereas post-COVID it, its aesthetics, and its ethos has completely infiltrated culture (albeit in a highly bastardized state,) as it is essentially the only way to successfully orient oneself within culture as it presently exists, given that mainstream culture is a rotting corpse and anything that under normal conditions would come to replace it is now dead on arrival. The increasing number of artists deliberately invoking even the recency of 2010s imagery (ex. #twilight, Snow Strippers, Citadell, “indie sleaze”, fakemink, uncounted Soundcloud collectives and microscenes) specifically is symptomatic of an unstated yearning for literally anything other than the present state of affairs. It is a traumatic regression into any state in the past in which something resembling a coherent future could be projected forward, as opposed to the futureless, self-mutilating culture that has existed since March 2020 in which nothing but further content-ex-content can be derived.