Metamodern Things #2 - Music
- Troy Campbell
- Jan 28
- 11 min read
By Troy Hiduke Campbell
This series presents a wide range of things that are metamodern to help you better understand and create for the metamodern people of today.
As this series begins, my main goal continues to be to share mainstream and/or overt examples of the metamodern sensibility. And to do that there may be no better place than music.
With music it so easy to see the metamodern themes of oscillation, ironesty, positive meta, a focus on the interior, life as movie, and so much more right in the lyrics (like literally the words like "pendulum" and titles like "Hit Me Hard and Soft." Plus, a lot of artists today like Billie Eilish and the 1975's Matty Healy really like telling you exactly what they are doing, and what they are doing is very metamodern.
So prepare for some fun, some weirdness, some darkness, and one hot take about country music.
Always in my feelings,
-Troy-
I. Ren’s Pendulum Rap
This rapper concludes an internal rap battle with a literal pendulum analogy about the human experience.
Throughout most of the music video for his over nine-minute track, “Hi Ren,” the musical artist Ren argues back and forth between his dark and hopeful sides while sitting in a chair playing guitar, chaotically emoting, and theatrically rapping. At the end of the song he emerges from the chair, drops his guitar, and leaves the personas of his characters behind while looking directly in the camera to deliver a measured spoken word conclusion, stating:
“It wasn't David versus Goliath, it was a pendulum / Eternally swayin' from the dark to the light . . . It is this eternal dance that separates human beings / From angels, from demons, from gods / And I must not forget, we must not forget / That we are human beings.”
I often choose examples that most blatantly and literally show metamodern sensibilities, and this fits that bill with its literal language and how the song uses fourth wall breaks.
During the rap battle, we have fourth wall breaks (including one where dark Ren says, “Let me break the fourth wall by acknowledging this song”), but those meta moments are different from the point where Ren turns to the camera at the end and drops the rap to speak about the pendulum. Here, Ren breaks the fourth wall again but does so in a way that is more revealing to his intimate felt experience and more earnest and vulnerable in the way it is trying to find sincere value. The result is something that doesn’t just feel postmodern clever, but is constructively metamodern, where the spoken word version of Ren we get at the end is critical and appreciative of both the mean, snarky, dark Ren and the naive, hopeful, light Ren, and is ultimately arguing for the necessity of both with a literal use of the word “pendulum.”
II. Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard Soft and Hard
This pop star tells Rolling Stone her album title is “a really good way to describe me, and I love that it’s not possible.”
In an interview summarized here on Audacy, Billie Eilish explains her album title, Hit Me Hard and Soft, stating, “I’m a pretty extremist person, and I really like when things are really intense physically, but I also love when things are very tender and sweet. I want two things at once. So I thought that was a really good way to describe me, and I love that it’s not possible.”
The “bad guy” singer further states, “It’s an impossible request . . . You can’t do anything hard and soft at the same time.” However, given her music, it actually seems that Billie can be both at once, as she balances a commitment to a delicate sound while often wearing a shirt with a gruesome death god from the anime Death Note on it or posing on the cover of Rolling Stone looking very tough.
III. Doechii’s Conversational Rap
This rapper ironically and sincerely admits, “Honestly, I can’t even fucking cap no more / This is a really dark time for me / I’m going through a lot.”
These dark and silly lyrics are from a Doechii song titled, “Denial is a River,” where the rapper begins a rap by having a voice confront her and say, “You know it’s been a lil minute since you and I have had a chat.”
Then Doechii speaks back and forth with that voice that feels part friend, part therapist, and part podcast host, and we get a conversation that is obviously written entirely by Doechii to be meta self-therapy that culminates with a calming breathing exercise that also becomes an aggressive and breathy dance beat.
At times, the song feels ironically self-aware and self-indulgently shallow, but with an air of irony she journeys into what she really feels with complete honesty and details how she has been romantically betrayed, professionally pushed into making TikTok music, and has possibly harmed herself, and, thus, it seems a fine time for a chaotic therapy rap song about her experience with it all.
IV. Poppy’s Girly Pop Meets Hardcore
This singer skipped on the stage in a pretty dress to scream a metal song.
In the clip above, the artist Poppy joined the band Knocked Loose to perform her guest verse on their aggressive metal track, “Suffocate.” The singer, whose 2018 album was titled Am I a Girl?, continues her trend of oscillation between personal, gender, and aesthetic identities in quite intentional ways.
The concept that anyone could sing a metal song while acting so “happy” that they are lightly skipping and appearing as “feminine” in a pretty, fun, innocent-looking, white dress as Poppy does in this video, still seems a bit radical, but due to the rise of the metamodern sensibility, it also has become so much more commonplace that it can happen on Jimmy Kimmel Live.
V. Sabrina Carpenter's Sexiness
This pop star is sexy for herself and her female fans, not for men.
The world’s newest, biggest pop star, Sabrina Carpenter, has taken the “sexy girl” trope and used it in a way that has felt empowering to women. As the quote above explains (with a bit of shock), Carpenter is “performing in lingerie” and “still feel[s] like it's not for men at all” and is keeping “women as her target audience.”
As Spencer Kornhaber writes in The Atlantic, “So often in pop history, feminine performances of sexual power have seemed, on some level, shaped by and for men,” but now it is like, “the girl ditched guys altogether and threw a party about it.” It’s not the first time women have reinterpreted classic gender roles in new ways and, who knows, it might not even be genuine or good to do, but it is happening now and it fits so very well with a metamodern sensibility.
VI. The 1975's Origin
This lead singer says, “We were hated for being a band that was the opposite of heavy,” but now, “culture has caught up to The 1975.”
In this clip, Matty Healy explains that he felt it was impossible to do something truly punk or hard, and so he started The 1975 as a way to be alternative by being softer and exploring the emerging “everything, everywhere, all at once” culture of the internet.
Whether or not you like Matty Healy, his band The 1975 has become one of the UK’s most important 2010s bands, in part because it embodied a soft sensibility and exploration of the oscillating, overwhelming internet that was rising, until, as the always confident Matty Healy put it, “culture has caught up to The 1975.” In other words, The 1975 explored many flavours of the metamodern sensibility before that sensibility became so mainstream.
VII. Yard Act's Song About Hippie Bullshit
This band says, “it's hippy bullshit but it's true.”
Yard Act is a band that often finds meaning in simplicity and oscillations.
In their song “100% Endurance,” the band describes the discovery of many species of clueless aliens as a way to question objective, grand narratives and meanings by noting that earth “interviewed all of them [Aliens] and everyone of them / Not one could give any hint of a clue what they were doing here either.”
But then, of course, as a song with a metamodern sensibility, the response to this is partially positive, as the song goes on to say, “It's all so pointless, ah, but it's not though is it?” The song also has lines like, “that's beautiful / l find it humbling,” “No need to be blue,” and the felt experience-focused line, “/ It's really real and when you feel it.” And, for good measure, the singer adds the literal word “sincerely” to describe his feelings in a silly song that features aliens and people pissing themselves.
And, if all that sounds like “hippy bullshit,” don’t worry, Yard Act agrees with you and is here with the meta humor to clap back with the line, “It's hippy bullshit but it's true.”
VIII. Yard Act's Song About Hits
This singer says, “I’m still an anti-C-A-P-I-T-A-L-I-S-T / It just so happens that there's other things I happen to be.”
Sorry folk, I couldn't help but give Yard Act two entries, but it is definitely worth it for once again, how literally it is with the metamodern sensibility.
In “We Make Hits,” the band Yard Act ends the first verse singing, “there was one singular ambition we had / That most musicians of our ilk aren't willing to admit / And it was to this mantra we would commit,” before explosively shouting, “We make hits” at the start of the chorus, and then later ending the song by joking, “And if it's not a hit, we were being ironic.”
This song is full of honesty, irony, critiques, genuine dreams, realism, and oscillations, and, thus, provides one of the bluntest songs to show parts of the metamodern sensibility, especially as it relates to being punk, post-punk, anti-capitalist, or edgy in contemporary times, with telling lines like,“’Cause the water keeps on rising / And we know there's no surprising / Anyone with eyes and ears 'round here / That we're all gonna sink / And we just wanna have some fun before we're sunk.”
IX. Eminem’s “Lace It” Guest Verse
This veteran rapper warns about drug use on a new song by the late Juice WRLD who died young from drug use.
Alright this ones needs a longer explanation.
“I’m not lecturing you, but man, just be careful when you,” is how Emimen ends his long, largely anti-drug-use verse on a 2024 Juice WRLD song, which is then immediately followed by the late Juice WRLD triumphantly singing, “Roll it up, lace it, pop a few to chase it / I've been in the Matrix, none of this shit makes sense All you humans basic, you ain't even got home trainin'/ Codeine by the cases, I've been purple rainin'.” Juice WRLD more or less is celebrating the power of the drugs to augment his art, while confessing to losing his mind with substances that would later end up killing him.
Juice WRLD was a very prolific Gen-Z rapper who tragically died from drug use at the age of 21 in 2019. Since his death, his large vault of unreleased tracks have been released, often featuring rappers adding their own verse to complete, and in some cases like this one, add quite a lot to those unfinished tracks.
Iconically, before the rapper’s death, he made songs about his problematic relationship with drugs, and, on this new track, Eminem delivers a long “warning” verse about the problem of drug use, where he lists rappers that have died from the usage of drugs and recounts his own personal battles with drug use.
What results is a track that almost feels wrong, but has a visceral immediacy to it. Juice WRLD sung in many of his tracks that he was harming himself and might kill himself with the drugs, and then he did. This track approaches that with a meta-awareness, oscillation, and deep focus on the felt experience of drug use that ticks so many of the metamodern boxes in a way that you may dislike, think is not well constructed, or even think is morally wrong, but that is undeniably fitting with a metamodern sensibility.
XI. Alan Jackson's "Little Bitty" Manifesto
This country music video romanticizes a little bitty life with special effects like The Matrix.
Okay so here's my hot take: Has country always had a metamodern sensibility? It confronts the difficulties of being alive while romanticize a simple life, all while being quite tongue-in-cheek (ironic?) while being earnestly sincere. I'll return to this idea in the future, but for now let's just look at this one song.
The chorus of this 1996 Alan Jackson song begins with, “Well, it's alright to be little bitty / A little hometown or a big old city,” and the music video is set on little farm house that uses a pause-and-spin effect that resembles the bullet time moments in the 1999 film The Matrix.
Using such grand special effects on this little bitty life romanticizes it in a very much “life as movie” style. The song also is also further metamodern in its acceptance of the shortness and maybe even cosmically insignificance of a life and concludes in the chorus by stating “Might as well share, might as well smile / Life goes on for a little bitty while.”
Change a few of the world choices in the lyrics, alter the music a bit, and change the location of a modest farm house to a modest suburban home, and the music video could seem like the ending scene of an early 2000s indie film or an episode of Scrubs Scrubs about people romanticizing their individual lives.
I'm not sure about this, but I'm definitely coming back to the idea of that country is often quite metamodern in its forms.
XI. Tim Minchin's "If I Didn't Have You" Love Song
This singer attacks the idea of destined love to produce something that feels just as deep.
As always I like to end with a little metamodern joy, so here is one my favorite love songs from back in the day.
In this love song, the quirky comedian and songwriter Tim Minchin sings to his wife the shocking core refrain: “If I didn’t have you . . . I really think that I would probably have somebody else.” He then further elaborates that "It's abstruse to deduce I found my soul mate at the age of 17 / It's just mathematically unlikely that at a university in Perth / I happened to stumble on the one girl on earth / Definitively designed for me."
But then, after ironic and realistic deconstruction, he sincerely and optimistically sings, "Love is nothing to do with destined perfection / The connection is strengthened; the affection simply grows over time” and then inserts quirky comedy by adding, “Like a flower or a mushroom or a guinea pig or a vine / Or a sponge or bigotry or a banana / And love is made more powerful by the ongoing / Drama of shared experience / And the synergy of a kind of symbiotic empathy or something . . . "
Minchin, who has always oscillated between comedy and sincerity as well as certainty and an inability to find the right words, appropriately concludes the song with summary lines, "But with all my heart and all my mind I know one thing is true / I have just one life and just one love and my love that love is you / And if it wasn't for you, darling you / I really think that I would probably have somebody else."
As a science-minded realist steeped in postmodernism, Minchin is unable to break away from what he sees as the truth that his wife and him is not destined for each other, but in “the role chaos inevitably plays,” he finds meaning in the personal felt-experience, so much so that by the end of the song, he triumphant can end with the realistic line "I would probably have somebody else" because instead of it that line taking the magic away from their marriage, it actually gives magic to their marriage because that truth of that line is irrelevant to experience of their love.
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