Social Media to the Mainstream

1 SoundCloud Rap Narratives as Pop Star Narratives: From Social Media to the Mainstream Popular music meanings are dependent on the artist understood as a “total star text” (Dyer 1979). There has been much discussion in academia of how digital technology transforms formerly auteurist narratives of popular music creation into stories about collective authorship (Ahonen 2008, 107). Yet central fictions continue to involve the singular figure of the popular music star. Like new technologies before it, social media change how pop music stardom narratives are constructed. Narrative arcs (stories) and narrative forms (how those stories are told) have transformed alongside changes to the communication structures between artist and audience, and shifts in the authenticating mechanisms applied to pop stars. The transition of so-called SoundCloud rappers to the center of the American pop music landscape over the last five years epitomizes these changes. This study looks at how the narratives of SoundCloud rappers are constructed in the exchange between social media and traditional media publications; it assumes artist narratives to be constructed in this dialogic space. Social media events are articulated onto traditional structures of legitimation, and mainstream media canonize social media narratives. The results of this study indicate how artist narratives regularly unfold online, and how those patterns feed into the more familiar dramatic story arcs. Between January 2015 and June 2019, approximately 5–6% of unique artists that appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 could be categorized as “SoundCloud rappers.” This research focuses on a subset of these, artists who entered mainstream consciousness between 2016 and 2018, and can be broadly thought of as the second generation of SoundCloud rappers to make the transition to the mainstream. This selection was further reduced to exclude artists who appeared on the charts fewer than three times. 1 In some ways this is an arbitrary cut-off; however, in general, it accurately reflects artists who have become part of the centrist pop landscape, corresponding to other metrics, like major media profiles, TV appearances and documentary features. The result is a study of nine artists: 6ix9ine; A Boogie wit da Hoodie; Juice WRLD; Lil Peep; Lil Pump; Lil Skies; Trippie Redd; NBA YoungBoy; and XXXTentacion. 1 The late rapper Lil Peep was included below this threshold because of his outsized impact on the genre, and significant mainstream media attention, including profiles in The New York Times (Caramanica 2018a) and Rolling Stone (Peisner 2019), and a feature-length documentary film which premiered at Sundance in 2019. 2 In general, “SoundCloud” rappers can be described as DIY artists who used the online audio distribution platform SoundCloud to grow their audiences to critical mass. That said, the launch and expansion of SoundCloud’s subscription streaming service in 2016 and 2017 means that what was popular on SoundCloud became mostly synonymous with what was popular on social media, curated YouTube channels (Pierre 2019). Thus, “pure” SoundCloud artists from this period merged with YouTube and social media stars, creating a situation where rappers like NBAYoungBoy and 6ix9ine, who came up through a combination of YouTube and social media savvy, were conflated with SoundCloud “natives” like Lil Pump and Lil Peep. Meanwhile, mainstream acceptance diminished the length of time some of these artists could genuinely claim the SoundCloud or DIY monikers before being swept up by major labels. Ultimately, some combination of self-identification, popular opinion and/or scene acceptance signifies membership more so than any hard-and-fast criteria. That said, the most prominent common denominator between the nine artists, apart from affiliation with SoundCloud, is reliance on social media like Twitter and Instagram as platforms to market, distribute and construct persona and product. The methodology for this study involved: 1) Collecting data from mainstream media publications (a database of 30 relevant publications was created), Google Trends and the Billboard Charts to visualize artist narratives as arcs, determined by aggregate attention. 2) Correlating peaks in these arcs with qualitative data in order to match events with spikes in attention. That qualitative data was analyzed by organizing traditional media publications along a Timeline. 3) Conducting a two-week Live Study of artist social media activity, in order to compare live events with the archived data made available through the Timeline. The results indicate a number of what this paper refers to as recurring Dramatic Arcs, and a series of Narrative Templates through which those Arcs are communicated. This endeavor is a novel approach to artist social media use, which has largely been studied outside of popular music scholarship per se, and mostly in relation to fan interaction and identification (see, e.g., Baym, Cavicchi and Coates 2017; Beer 2008; Bennett 2014; and Click, 3 Lee and Holladay 2013; as well as Baym 2018, for a study of musicians’ perspectives). The following section reviews the relevant literature. Stardom narratives in context The basic myths of pop stardom involve the extraordinary music star, especially the “everyday” person who is swept to fame by their own merits (Atkinson 1995, 21–22). Core to pop music is that “overnight you can be transformed into something superhuman” (Savage 1996, 133). The underlying emergent myths of pop stardom epitomized by SoundCloud rappers update this American-Dream-via-Elvis narrative. Today’s stars must be “effective neoliberal subject[s]” (Marwick 2013, 13): They are “apparent in Web 2.0 technologies, which idealize and reward a particular persona: highly visible, entrepreneurial and self-configured to be watched and consumed by others” (ibid.). Stardom narratives thus exist in the context of cultural narratives about technological change. The rewards structures of Web 2.0 are based on entrepreneurialism (a core value of the tech industry) and marketing strategies (from commercials and celebrity culture) (ibid.). Social media has dispersed those values worldwide, contextualizing the quotidian as part of the attention economy (10). This in turn has bled back into what audiences expect from stars: “The aloof-yet-authentic star has been replaced by a new ideal, musicians who openly share their private selves by routinely communicating with audiences around their everyday life” (Baym 2018, 173). The distance between audience and star has shrunk, and audience expectations for interaction with artists have changed (Duffett 2013, 239). Social media result in a demand for everyday, personal or pseudo-personal interaction (Baym 2018, 141). The Internet as a mediating technology has forced musicians to commodify themselves (Marshall 2019, np.). Concurrently, the music industry now understands social capital to be more valuable than music sales (Baym 2018, 71). This capital helps to sell various products and experiences, but to get it, artists must reveal themselves online personally and professionally, in order that users might “make them topics around which connections [are] formed” (ibid.). In a reversal of previous norms, it is artists today who must approach potential audiences, finding ways to become part of their daily lives (163). Thus, the pages on which artist narratives are written are no longer relegated to the new record or promo video, the press release, major media profile or TV appearance. Instead, they 4 include the social media post, the leaked direct message, the Twitter comment, the viral video circulated by an audience member. The demands on the star for quotidian communication— quotidian self-revelation—change the scale of what can constitute part of a canonized narrative. They also change the pace at which those narratives play out, and which players are bestowed with what level of authorial power. For one thing, social media mediate what was once ephemeral (the stock example being the details of what a user had for breakfast) in service of “bigger picture” narratives (Marwick 2013, 206). Such ephemera become part of the modern pop star’s public story. Writing in 2006, Jenkins predicted that going forward, “To be marketable…cultural works will have to provoke and reward collective meaning production through elaborate back stories, unresolved enigmas, excess information, and extratextual expansions of the program universe” (145). This is partly the result of the dissemination of “fan-like” practices throughout “mainstream” audiences. In 1998, Abercrombie and Longhurst noted that “given the increased contemporary salience of media fan-like and enthusiast-like qualities, sociation patterns [among ‘ordinary’ audience members] are increasingly likely to resemble some of the relationships identified in the fan literature” (122). This prediction has come to fruition as divides between central and para- texts have eroded, requiring a fan-like approach to texts from all audiences (Duffett 2013, 215). The circle is completed as those practices are co-opted by media industry strategies (Burgess and Green 2009, 13). The result is that “storytelling has turned into a complex art of world-building that is as much about creating an immersive cultural and artistic universe as it is about pursuing one central narrative” (Duffett 2013, 213). The “total star text” is no different in this context. As Sandvoss points out, audiences consume stars as mediated texts, in the same manner as they decode

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