In many respects this is the sequel to the demtarialsiation thread.
Where that thread focussed on the physiological phenomenology of the internet age, this thread attempts to isolate its relationship with identity.
the internet has allowed us great degrees of fluidity when it comes to our identity. of course this can be seen in social media’s current preoccupation with gender fluidity and non-conformity, but it’s far more subtle than that. with access to the internet, your selection of stimuli is determined by factors like geography, class and race to a greatly diminished degree. more than that, the internet allows you infinite opportunities to inhabit fraudulent identities; parody twitter accounts, anonymous accounts free from social repercussion and ostracisation, bots, online trolls (fantastical, folkloric terminology that fits within my lexicon of ‘impish’ and ‘jinn'), etc.
corpsey is testament to the effect that this can have on your behaviour; he claims that he genuinely felt far less inhibited simply by adopting his alter ego corp$ey. likewise version displays the control you can assert over what you put out there; he’ll delete things he’s posted. that’s a mean of controlling who you are and how you come across that you're not able to do in real-world interaction.
this music reflects all of that.
alkaline, lil uzi and tommy lee sparta all flirt with white-boy gothic aesthetic sensibilities.
mumble rappers are all overtly flamboyant, with young thug explicitly and consciously being androgynous.
but far more remarkable than any of that race and gender stuff, is this lava lamp morphing of persona.
for example tommy lee starts his verse 18 seconds in as a gruff, guttural bloke, but within the space of a few seconds he's crossfaded into this brattish cyborg. he briefly dips back again at 29 seconds and by 39 seconds he’s become a muezzin from the 30th century, which quickly fades as he becomes a normal bloke and so on. like someone’s constantly changing the chanel on his personality.