Do you listen to Radiohead? Or how about The Smiths? Then, I’m sorry to inform you, you may be an insel. As with all strange online phenomena, this diagnosis comes in the form of a meme – a user-made musical compass @soundgeist, to be precise. For the past few months, people have been sharing the screenshot and surrounding their ‘top five’, usually accompanying them with the usual ‘So over.’ Even Anthony Fantano, YouTube’s music critic, did.
The format has indeed been around for a few years, with the earliest example dating back to 2020, but this recent burst of memes (also included: femcel, male manipulator, female manipulator) suggests some bigger changes in our listening habits, i.e. k. what is music if not a personality trait?
The Music Compass, like its cousin the Movie Compass, taps into a broader cliché of algorithmic trends in social media. These are online archetypes, like the sad girl with her Tumblr feed who sings Fiona Apple songs while sharing Stanley Kubrick footage Lolita. Or the male manipulator who wants to emulate the sociopathic behaviors of Patrick Bateman from American psychopath, blasting Elliott Smith’s “Ballad Of Big Nothing” between gym reps. It’s all a bit of fun: revealing how far you rank on the male manipulator chart or romanticizing your melancholic loneliness through the lens of Mitski are different ways to connect online, the same way you might repost a girl’s dinner. Perhaps more interesting is how it groups artists under certain aesthetic umbrellas, when for the most part they have very little in common, musically or otherwise.
The music you listen to has always been a way to express your allegiance to a certain social group. Beginning in the 1950s, the band’s t-shirt is one of the earliest examples of music merchandising and a staple of youth subcultures, each with its own unique sound and aesthetic associated with a particular era. Skinheads, soul boys, rasta, glam rockers, punks, heavy metallers, goths, ravers – these subcultures are formed in clubs and establishments in real places, almost always associated with some form of mainstream resistance. Whereas now culture almost always appears and exists online, scattered across the feed in the form of TikToks and algorithm-friendly playlists. Listening to certain music is no longer associated with any particular ideology or political allegiance, but rather a response to meme archetypes and online trends.
While there are still some associations between what you wear and the music you listen to – drainers have a different aesthetic, for example, as does indie slop – the way we consume music is the biggest change in our listening habits. While the average music lover before streaming could discover songs in the record store, through magazines, dedicated forums or even live concerts, the move away from this has created a listening culture built on metrics that prioritizes smaller artists in favor of the big hits (last week Spotify announced it would demonetize all songs under 1,000 streams). With the popularity of algorithmic playlists – a new report on why music is becoming simpler and more repetitive points to more people listening to playlists in the background at school or work – the music being recommended is optimized for mass appeal . It’s one of the main reasons why AI muzak is on the rise, and why you’re more likely to find the same handful of artists in every post’s year-end recaps.
But back to memes—or rather, why we associate certain artists and groups with meme archetypes like incels or femcels, which are themselves categories used to make sense of our increasingly online social environment. When music is largely dictated by a machine or by numbers-hungry tech executives, it can be tempting to find new connections. “People try to map the music they listen to onto these other categories to build visualizations or almost mental maps of their listening habits,” explains Gabriele de Seta, Internet culture researcher at the University of Bergen. “All these things provide a useful cartography for mapping things. If you know what an incel is, you can somehow translate that same vibe into music.
Of all the reasons behind the memification of our musical tastes, perhaps the most striking is how basic most of them are. It’s no secret by now that most young people are discovering music on social media – think: Kim Gordon going viral on TikTo or the comeback of 90s genres like nu-metal. Perhaps the repeated memeing of bands like Radiohead and The Beatles is a result of the younger generation discovering old music for the first time. But spend enough time on Spotify’s recommendations feature and you’ll find they’re the same artists pushed again and again. It can even lead you to create connections where none exist. For example, if I start listening to Grimes, the next artist to appear in my “recommended” might be Fiona Apple, followed by Ethel Cain, which might make me associate them with “sad girl” or “femcel.” “With endless access to any sound or style on the phone, kids have had to find social bridges between aesthetics that might have seemed completely at odds with each other 20 years ago,” agrees Max Alper, AKA La Meme Young, music educator and writer.
“With endless access to any sound or style on the phone, kids had to find social bridges between aesthetics that might have seemed completely at odds with each other 20 years ago” – Max Alper
The practice of folksonomy — “the digital folklore of building categories or larger systems of categorizing things” — has always existed online, whether it’s putting certain songs into special folders or sorting memes into different types. “Most of the internet relied on classifying things, and many of these huge platforms now use automated classification systems. But since the beginning of the Internet, people have built their own categories,” de Seta expands. In the 1960s, the philosopher Pierre Bourdieu used particularly complex mapping systems as a way of distinguishing people, tracing the relationship between taste and cultural capital. Nowadays, these formats have been stripped down for quick channel consumption in the form of compasses, pyramids and icebergs, their digestible formats serving as ways for younger generations to feel part of a shared moment (“I’m femcel because I listen Lana hahahaha”), while allowing people to assert their superiority over others (“I know X and Y artists on the music iceberg, which means I’m more esoteric than you”).
“Vibrations are a medium for feeling, the kind of abstract understanding that comes before words can name an experience,” writes Kyle Chaika in an article on the vibrational economy for The New Yorker. “This pre-linguistic quality makes them well-suited to a social media environment that increasingly prioritizes audio, video and images over text.” Music is similarly a curation of vibes broadcast across the screen and assigned to particular aesthetic groups. So whether you’re going into beast mode on a sigma male playlist or harnessing your inner dark femininity through the subliminal frequencies of Lana Del Rey, it’s all a way to make sense of the endless barrage of images and information flooding our screens. “My real question is why the hell are Deftones associated with incels?” asks Alper. “It’s dark because it’s human, it’s music fucking.”
