In Naoise Dolan’s recent novel Exciting Times, a noteworthy addition to the canon of millennial popular literature (think: Sally Rooney, lipsticked characters wielding laptops, plots about climate change and gender politics), Instagram Stories function as a narrative device. Dolan’s protagonist agonizes over whether to open a love interest’s story, worrying what it could signify if she’s seen viewing it. Technology is baked into the novel’s emotional framework, an extension of its characters’ brooding. It’s less an attempt to pander to a younger audience than it is an authentic representation of how it feels to live while anchored to at least two screens. In flickering moments, the rap-pop singer and producer blackbear reaches for that realism, too, narrating his relationships with the pulsing hyperactivity of the always-online. “Block my posts and my story,” he wails on the strum-heavy “queen of broken hearts.” “I’m sorry I can be annoying.” He doesn’t know what to do with a phone full of videos and photos of his ex. “Cracks in my heart/Got cracks in my phone,” he moans on the wincingly titled “sobbing in cabo.”
But blackbear’s latest album, everything means nothing, is also gracelessly Too Online, like a person explaining a meme, or verbalizing the words “heart emoji.” He speaks in hashtags. He regurgitates memes and stale tweets, slathering them in Auto-Tune and bleating them over beat drops. “Turn a big mood to a big mood swing,” he raps on “clown.” “You made me want to live, laugh, love, and now I want to die,” he howls on “i felt that,” as a diet trop-house beat shimmies under him. The album opens with “hot girl bummer,” a snarling bastardization of Megan Thee Stallion’s meme-turned-song released just two weeks after hers. In his version, women vomit into Birkins and sleep with strangers; they “buy [their] lips and buy [their] legs,” and, apparently, ignore blackbear.
The soggy self-pity gets old fast. “You’re so good/At making me feel bad,” he complains in the chorus of “i feel bad,” then clumsily doubles down: “You’re like a college grad that majored in the art of fucking over everything we had.” He moans about how he doesn’t want to have emotions; he yelps through Auto-Tune about how weak he feels, how the anonymous women haunting these songs are “punishing” him. All of it is rooted in a constant, stupefying misogyny. “Shoulda seen right through the gap between her thighs,” he rasps on the dubstep-flecked “half alive.” The plodding “why are girls?” doesn’t even attempt to disguise its inanity: “Why are girls so hot?/Take everything I’ve got,” he babbles. “Why are girls so cold? Why are girls so, why are girls so beautiful?”
everything means nothing feels like a time capsule for this awful, cursed year, a nauseating sludge of every “Study Beats” playlist on Spotify and every TikTok influencer-turned-pop-star’s attempt at writing a hit. Both Lauv, the 26-year-old pop singer who croons about loneliness, and Trevor Daniel, who scored a viral hit on TikTok in 2019, show up for guest spots; their slumped, algorithm-friendly pop, with its pitched vocals and skittery production flourishes, is the album’s dominant influence. blackbear’s songs aren’t trying to express an emotion, or even to come across as relatable—their main goal is to remind you of something else. “Oh, right,” you’re meant to think, listening to a meme from three months ago ooze into your headphones, “this again.”
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