Controversial opinion: I think social media is good and I love it. Facebook is my least favorite people publicly humiliating themselves for free. Twitter is a stream of gossip about people I don’t know doing things that don’t effect me. Instagram is an endless portal of attractive people and their butts. If these sites ever stress me off I just put my phone away and do something else. I don’t think about them. I don’t project my insecurities onto the things I see in the feed. I never get burnt out and I'm always having fun. Even when I’m not having fun it’s fantastic I’m loving it. I’ll doom scroll but these people can’t hurt me it’s light coming off my phone. Being overwhelmed kicks ass.
I found “Ibuprofen” sometime after the vaccine came out but before I got it. It was the first song that was able to find the pleasure button in the dead center of my brain forcing me to keep hitting “repeat” over and over again. It’s so deeply powered by hooks, and I suspect that it really isn’t about anything, but it’s beautifully written. Blaketheman1000 (I hate typing that) is writing hyperpop songs (I also hate typing that) in a way that reflects the knowledge of a traditional songwriter, which bucks a genre that at its worst is one of the best hooks you’ve heard on repeat for too long. Hyperpop is not about building a 3 and a half minute song with 3 verses and 2 choruses, but rather finding all the emotional buttons hidden behind your neurosis and smashing them like someone playing Mortal Kombat. Blake’s songs do that as good as anyone, but they never just do that.
In the video he is dressed as The Joker and running around New York with Harley Quinn. The Joker started off as a clown that was mean to Batman and then transitioned into becoming one of the consistently evil characters in comic books and then transitioned into being a symbol of the looming violence of disaffected masculinity amidst first world opulence and then transitioned into kind of just being, like, a thing that exists piss off women who went to liberal arts college. I’m sure by the time you read this what the idea of The Joker represents will have changed, but his later forms are becoming funhouse mirror of reactions with each form responding to the reaction of the last form. You cannot glean any meaning from that. It’s the perfect aesthetic symbol for this burgeoning style of music; one signal surrounded by the echos of infinite similar but unrelated symbols. That’s the world we live in now. Don’t fight it.
