Social Media to the Mainstream

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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.

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,

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 fictional narratives (Sandvoss 2005, 8). The popular music star is an embodiment of narratives (Ahonen 2008, 54; Goodwin 1992, 103), and must tell complex, “hyperdiegetic” (Duffett 2013, 213) tales to remain marketable. The impact of social media on pop star narratives has not previously been examined per se, and relevant scholarship on narrative is limited. Page’s concept of the “shared story” (2012; 2018) is the most useful vein of narrative research in this case. Page describes the shared story as a distinct genre (2018, 2). She develops this concept in relation to her pioneering approach, “mediated narrative analysis” (3). The term “shared story” is an amalgam of two prevalent concepts in online communication, where “sharing has become ubiquitous as an iconic action”

5 and “stories” constitute a “pervasive genre that people use to make sense of themselves and the surrounding world” (1). Indeed, this has been acknowledged in the structure of platforms like Snapchat and Instagram, which include “Stories” features—ephemeral slideshows that disappear after a set amount of time—to enable and encourage users to publicly share content about themselves (2). The shared story is presaged by other forms of narration, each studied in a different current of narrative research. Mediated narrative analysis grows out of work from mediated discourse analysis on print and TV news, and computer-mediated discourse analysis on smaller scale case studies (Page 2018, 4). However, mediated narrative analysis distinguishes itself by approaching narratives “as a form of social practice” (10). This has implications on the one hand for how stories are told—intertextually, sequentially, by many participants—so that attention is drawn “to the processes of storytelling, rather than focusing on a discrete narrative product” (Page 2012, 8); and on the other for how stories are contextualized. The concept of “small stories” is critical here. Small stories, [as opposed to “grand narratives” (Lyotard 1979)], are “often co-constructed…typically fleeting…[and] report events which are mundane and everyday” (Page 2018, 9). Yet shared stories create a situation in which small stories exist within other online contexts (10). Thus, small stories that are shared many times over—potentially by powerful actors (Page uses the example of the official Twitter account of the office of the U.S. President)—become part of widespread public interactions and “large-scale matters of public concern” (ibid). In general, small stories and personal narratives, so contextualized, differ substantially from “canonical forms elicited in interview…or life history contexts” (Page 2012, 11). Stars must tell personal narratives to a diverse audience of millions on a daily basis, and knowing what to share is a slippery task. Social media are environments of “context collapse” (boyd 2008), where multiple traditionally separate audiences exist in one space. Artists must cater self- presentation to fan and non-fan publics, celebrities and media, and “these multiple audiences complicate self-presentation” (Baym 2018, 158). The alluring difference between a celebrity’s public persona and their “authentic” self has typically been perpetuated by the tabloid press and navigated with a coterie of the celebrity’s assistants—PR teams, managers, bodyguards (Marwick and boyd 2011, 144). Social media preclude this system. Practicing celebrity in this context is a complex balancing act hinged on performing “backstage access” (ibid).

For pop stars, maintaining and identifying these boundaries is further complicated because “regular” social media users and celebrities now share a toolkit for the presentation of their public personae. Writing in 1997, Marshall invoked an essentially uncontested idea: The culture industry “re-presents” society “in the exchangeable, commodity form of the celebrity” (55). The celebrity forms part of a “stable structure of political and cultural legitimacy”—a “representational system” wherein a handful of public figures embody audiences and citizens, mediated by the culture industries (Marshall 2019, np., italics mine). Some 20 years later, Marshall is now writing about a “presentational” society ushered in by online culture (ibid.). Here, individuals have manifested a “pandemic will-to-public identity” that parallels the status of representational figures—what Marshall calls “pandemic persona.” As this new form of identity spreads, it changes the way collectives are constituted, leading to fissures in the representational system. Our “traditional” celebrities in this context represent a highly “visible, performative and pedagogic example of persona” (Marshall, Moore, and Barbour 2015, 289) that is practiced more widely by all social media users (291). Marwick and boyd (2011) adopt Theresa Senft’s (2008) term “microcelebrity” to discuss a related take on this state of affairs. They argue that “regular” social media users have adopted “celebrity” practices while “‘traditional’ celebrities have adopted techniques formerly characterized as ‘microcelebrity’” (141) [where microcelebrity involves the production of a public persona based in communicated authenticity, and the treatment of followers as “fans” (114)]. Celebrity, then, “has become a set of circulated strategies and practices that place fame on a continuum, rather than as a bright line that separates individuals” (140). When a celebrity invokes micro-celebrity strategies, Marshall might say she is responding to fissures in the representational system. The way fame operates via social media effects the way “celebrities embody audiences” (Marshall 2019, np.). The SoundCloud rapper, as an example of the spectrum of celebrity practice at play, deploys micro-celebrity on the road to fame, and then deploys that same skillset once he has achieved traditional celebrity. This indicates a broader shift in how traditional celebrities approach self-presentation. In the distinction between the SoundCloud rapper’s online ascendance and his achievement of traditional celebrity, it becomes clear that Marshall’s augured presentational regime has not been fully wrought. Instead, as Milner (2016) is adamant, conversations taking place in participatory media remain in the context of “established media and social systems”

(191). Being “internet famous” overlaps with old structures and practices (ibid.). Those who have achieved internet fame but want to leverage it must still rely on the traditional culture industries (199). Burgess and Green’s (2009) work on the early days of YouTube develops this point, and their conclusions can be applied to productive social networking site economies more broadly, such as those of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. While many accounts of the “participatory turn” (13) relay that talent and the affordances of digital media can translate seamlessly to mainstream fame (21–22), in fact, when social media does propel an “everyday” person to fame, “that person remains within the existing system of celebrity” (23). Their success is measured by the ability to enter the mainstream, to be legitimized by the mass media (24). In short, “The DIY myth is articulated onto the celebrity one” (25). Marshall and Morreale (2018) also discuss this point in relation to YouTube, with implications for social media more generally. That site, they argue, is dependent on the idea that it is a democratic creative space—perpetuating the myth that a combination of talent and the affordances of the platform are the recipe for mainstream success. In reality, only a very lucky few see any sustainable rewards (226–27). Those who do rise to fame via social media, like the early SoundCloud rappers, help maintain these myths. They act as “living instruction manuals for aspiring young pop stars” (Marwick 2013, 14–15). In the end, facts don’t really matter to the underlying legend of the self-made star, nor to the star’s quotidian narrative construction. Social media compel pop stars to self-revelation—or the performance of self-revelation. The difference between the two is “irrelevant” (Marwick and boyd 2011, 151). Using the examples of the pop singers Miley Cyrus and Demi Lovato, whose friendship was performed on Twitter, Marwick and boyd (2011) note that “the frequency and emotional tone of the messages mark them as performative—Cyrus and Lovato want their fans to know they are friends”: The performance and intention are what ultimately matter (151–152). In fact, the pleasures of audiencehood are often found in the obscure territory between the fictional and the real (Duffett 2013, 42), and these pleasures seem to be amplified “at moments of media in transition” (Jenkins 2009, 123). Major media publications themselves don’t always make the distinction as they translate social media events to traditional structures. Instead, they canonize the stories being told on social media, perpetuating the underlying myths of those platforms. Celebrity social media posts are often cited in traditional publications as official or authentic statements from the celebrity,

8 while posts by social media users are portrayed as the vox populi (Hermida 2018, 501–502).2 Publications seek out stories and sources on platforms, so that their “traditional gatekeeping function becomes one of gatewatching” (Bruns 2005, quoted in Hermida 2018, 503). Milner (2016) corroborates this explanation, arguing that the “mimetic dimensions”—the meta-levels at which memes, or the “the linguistic, image, audio, and video texts created, circulated, and transformed by countless cultural participants across vast networks and collectives” (1) exist— have often been more important to the mainstream media than the “specific factuality” of the mimetic content at hand (209–211). All of this can create a journalistic “echo chamber” of false reporting (213) that, as it perpetuates the daily narratives that unfold on social media, also perpetuates the underlying myth of the self-made man on those sites (Marshall and Morreale 2018, 215–216). Accordingly, music critics and journalists in the popular press tell an internally coherent story about SoundCloud rap’s mainstream “takeover.” That story reconfigures the broader narrative of popular music stardom as a reflection of social media technologies. The next section reviews the basic myths that major media publications have applied to SoundCloud rap.

The myth of the SoundCloud rapper An examination of feature articles and think pieces about SoundCloud rap’s ascendance yields the following narrative, summarized by Vulture writer Lauren Levy (2018):

“In the past, there were one or two ways most artists got discovered, and they’re all basically the plot of A Star Is Born…Today it works something like this: a guy who’s downloaded Ableton and a guy who writes raps (or wants to start rapping) meet at a local party, decide to ‘link and build,’ get together again at one of their houses, and record while huddled over a laptop. That night they upload the song on SoundCloud or YouTube. They turn themselves into a meme to start shit and gain attention on social media. Maybe the song ends up in the background of a Kylie Jenner Instagram post. It gets millions of listens literally overnight, and suddenly it’s the most popular song in the

2 Hermida is looking at Twitter, the “platform of choice” (503) for journalists, but we can extrapolate onto other platforms.

country. Labels chase after whoever made it, and scoop up all of their musically inclined friends, too.”

The rise of the loosely termed “SoundCloud rapper,” according to Levy’s framework, corresponds to a narrative about a new pop landscape in the streaming era, which critics have taken to calling Pop 2.0 (Caramanica 2018b). In this new model, for “the first time in decades…the playbook for pop success has been updated, and it has profoundly reshaped the sound of America.” New genres have found their way to the top as a result of how information is disseminated and travels on the Internet, and of updates to how the Billboard charts measure streaming (ibid.). Hip-hop is chief among these dominant genres, with SoundCloud rap a paradigmatic feature. The stars who succeed in this ecosystem are experts in self-presentation: “[T]hey learned to invent themselves online as much as in a studio” (Caramanica 2018b). They must hold the public’s attention not only with a constant stream of music, but with ever unfolding stories of romance, rivalries, rumors, meme-able moments and trolling. This firing-on-all-cylinders approach informs its own future, with extra-musical narratives influencing creative direction (Pareles 2019). Music competes for space in the attention economy, and social media have created distractions and difficulties for artists themselves, who face “pressure to keep offering new material, musical and nonmusical, making the promotional cycle as endless as the internet workday” (ibid). Echoing Jenkins’ “worldbuilding” and Duffett’s “hyperdiegesis,” music commentators understand social media to convert the spectacle traditionally associated with pop musicians into something “continuous, intimate and hyperactive on multiple fronts” (ibid.).

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These emerging cultural myths undergird the stardom narratives of SoundCloud rappers even as they are constructed on a daily basis. The remainder of this paper is dedicated to a study of how artist narratives are made in the exchange between social media and mainstream media publications. The results give us a sense of the daily work of narrative construction and how that work feeds into Dramatic Arcs. These levels are ultimately informed by, and in turn inform, the

10 story that music commentators tell about a “new” type of star at the nexus of streaming and social media.

Method Drawing on the research previously elaborated by Burgess and Green (2009), Marshall and Morreale (2018) and Milner (2016), this paper assumes artist narratives to be constructed through a feedback loop between social media and mainstream media, where social media events are articulated onto traditional structures. Data from mainstream media publications, Google Trends and the Billboard Charts was collected in order to visualize artist narratives as a series of arcs determined by aggregate attention. This data is plotted in what we will refer to as Aggregate Attention Graphs, a method elaborated in the next sections. Subsequently, qualitative data will be applied to further interpret these Graphs. This qualitative data will be made available through a Timeline of traditional media publications, and a Live Study of artist social media use.

Aggregate Attention Graphs News Database: A database of news articles from 30 relevant traditional media publications was created. Articles were collected going back as far as publicly available on each publication’s website, yielding nearly 10,000 entries. Sources included:

1) major publications covering pop culture: The New York Times, Time Magazine, Variety, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Vulture, The Cut, GQ, The Ringer, BuzzFeed News; 2) major hip-hop and music publications: Complex and its vertical Pigeons & Planes, XXL, Vibe, Spin, Stereogum, Pitchfork, The Fader, Genius; 3) and a subset of smaller, niche hip-hop blogs: AllHipHop, HipHopDX, Hypebeast, HotNewHipHop, Hip-Hop Wired, The Source, Rap-Up, RapCatchUp, HipHopOverload, Rap Radar.

Articles were distributed amongst the three types of sources as follows: Some 6,000 smaller hip- hop blog articles; 3,500 major hip-hop and music publications; and 300 major feature, think- piece or news stories from the nation’s most prominent pop culture publications. Articles were plotted on a graph for each artist. The sample graph below indicates the number of articles written about 6ix9ine between the first archived article available and the end of the collection period for this study, August 1, 2019. The horizontal axis here displays the date of publication, inclusive one week from the date displayed, and the vertical axis indicates the number of articles published that week. The maximum value denotes peak interest relative to 6ix9ine specifically. The maximum value for 6ix9ine may represent a higher real measure of attention for him than it does for another artist. The articles were not weighted by publication or content. In some ways, this reflects the flattened plane of the internet: There may be 500 articles about meme-able 6ix9ine posts on Instagram for every one major media profile of the artist; determining relative weight and the significance of stratification is a task for another project.

Figure 1.

Google Trends: Data from Google Trends provides a complementary indicator of aggregate attention. Google Trends measures “interest over time,” quantified as searches related to a given artist. Note that Google Trends measurements are determined by that company’s algorithms, which are opaque to the researcher.

Figure 2.

Billboard data: Each artist’s Billboard Hot 100 and Billboard 200 entries were also mapped. With recent finalizations to how Billboard measures streams (Billboard Staff 2018), these charts serve as an additional measure of aggregate online attention.

Figure 3.

Figure 3 shows all three measurements compared for 6ix9ine. The graphs for all nine artists indicate music-driven plotlines, where trends in news coverage and Google searches correspond to trends in Billboard data. Later, peaks in these graphs will be correlated with qualitative data—providing estimates as to which events led to spikes in attention. That qualitative data was gathered and analyzed by creating a Timeline of traditional media publications.

Timeline In order to analyze our publications database qualitatively, all articles were laid out on a Timeline.3 The Timeline linearly represents the publication of articles in a manner similar to our Aggregate Attention Graphs, but it also makes content analysis available, including a system for tagging important actors, publications and social media platforms corresponding to each article. This system facilitated an inquiry into how mainstream media qualitatively narrativize artists, and, more specifically, into the relationship between these narratives and social media. Figure 4. A snapshot of the Timeline.

3 The excluded blogs are most useful as a metric of total attention. A critical mass of coverage by these sites tends to correspond with growing interest from more mainstream publications; for instance, artists usually get their earliest coverage on these blogs, which may then coalesce into attention from actors like XXL and Pitchfork, and finally the New Yorker or the New York Times. However, these blogs skew toward coverage of social media “events,” and represent more “niche” interests than the other publications in our database.

To get a general idea of the prevalence of “social media events” in mainstream coverage, a tagging system was devised. A subset of some 4,000 articles, excluding articles sourced from the hip-hop blogs in the ultimate portion of the above list, were sorted into two groups: 1) significant relationship to social media, and 2) no significant relationship to social media. To qualify for categorization in the first group, social media needed to be either a major sourcing mechanism for the article, a site of the total reported event, or a significant contributor to an event that happened in “the real world.” Because essentially all traditional promotional activity related to music releases, touring, merchandise, etc. were filtered through social media, these activities were marked as a unique category. The results show that approximately 37% of the 4,000 articles had a prominent basis in social media; of those, 46% fell into the category of traditional music promotion. This left 53% of social-media-dependent articles that can broadly be thought of as concerning social media “events” to some degree. Looking at both the Timeline and the Aggregate Attention Graphs, what emerges is a potentially canonic narrative for each artist that is characteristic of convergence culture— reflecting a feedback loop between mainstream media and social media. Yet these metrics don’t necessarily reflect how social media events played out in real-time. A more limited Live Study serves as the final segment of our method, and allows us to nuance our hypotheses.

Live Study A Live Study of each artist’s social media activity was conducted over a two-week period, July 15 to 29, 2019. The study encompassed activity on Instagram and Twitter, the platforms of choice for these artists. Activity was noted based on real-time automatic updates from those platforms, in addition to which artist profile pages were regularly checked for content that might have been missed by updates. Thus, some data may have been overlooked, but the collection roughly mirrored the experience of an active follower of these artists. At the time of data collection, two of the artists were deceased, one was held in federal prison, and the other was on probation and banned from social media. The data collected therefore reflects the potential for direct social media use by five of the artists, and proxy use by estates and other management for the four indisposed subjects.

In total, the study yielded 240 data points (with outliers removed)—or discrete social media posts—with just five of those coming from the accounts of those artists unable to post themselves. Thus, the five remaining artists posted an average of 48 times each over the two weeks, or 3.4 times per day. Posts took the form of tweets and retweets; Instagram posts, consisting of pictures and videos on artists’ profile pages; Instagram Stories, slideshows that disappear after 24 hours; Instagram Live, a livestreaming feature that includes real-time comments from users; and Likes and Comments on both platforms. Artist activity over the two weeks is mapped in Figure 5, where each line represents one post. Table 1 shows a breakdown of activity by each artist. The number of tweets reported is not indicative of typical Twitter use: 20 of the 53 total tweets were ostensibly sent out during a hack of Juice WRLD’s account.

Figure 5.

Total Instagram Instagram Instagram Artist Posts Live Story Posts Tweets

A Boogie wit da 37 -- 26 7 4 Juice WRLD 81 3 21 10 47 Lil Pump 52 1 41 5 5 Table 1. Lil Skies 36 -- 21 3 12 Trippie Redd 49 1 24 20 4 Total 255 5 133 45 72

Results We can now return to our Aggregate Attention Graphs, using data from our Timeline to correlate peaks in these graphs with particular events. We will then compare analogous data from the Live Study. For each artist, peaks in attention have been identified to the best of the researcher’s ability. While this study can exactly pinpoint the news content and Billboard data that constituted spikes in the graphs, the data for Google searches is not available. However, looking at music and video releases, chart data and news articles can give us a reasonable estimation as to the events leading to spikes in Google searches. Together, these measures generate a general narrative for each artist. Correlating events with peaks in the graphs shows that “traditional” canonical extra- musical events such as artist deaths and arrests accounted for the most “dramatic” storylines— the highest peaks. Yet as we will see, such “traditional” peak events can be textured by social media. In addition, seemingly bizarre events that reflect the social media ecosystem entered artist mythologies. Artist narratives also involved additional layers of detail that were not necessarily reflected by climactic events. Many of these layers had to do with ongoing patterns of social media use, or events that grew steadily to familiar climaxes (arrests, deaths) in part on social media. Further, publications from hip-hop blogs like Rap-Up to centrist hip-hop heavyweights like XXL and Complex regularly covered artists’ mundane social media use, which in turn bled into the content of major media features and reporting in publications from Pitchfork to The New Yorker, thus legitimizing quotidian storylines across the spectrum of publications. When we delve into the Timeline, we get a sense of how social media was translated in mainstream media accounts of artist narratives. Several reoccurring Dramatic Arcs were suggested by peak events in the Aggregate Attention Graphs. These can be summarized as: I) crime and law enforcement; II) domestic abuse; III) beefing; IV) artist deaths; and V) the intersection of technology and music. Even at a surface level, social media tended to texture familiar Dramatic Arcs. Changes here were evident on three broad bases: the inclusion of direct “interjections” into, or contributions to, the narrative by non-traditional players; an unprecedented level of quotidian detail publicly broadcast and then archived about the artist; and narrative events specifically catered to garner attention according to the rewards structure of social media platforms. These changes are evident across what we will call Narrative

Templates—or story forms into which we can categorize artist social media events. We can examine how these Templates are applied in relation to our Timeline data and our Live Study data before returning briefly to their impact on the overarching Dramatic Arcs.

4 Narrative Templates Various Templates appeared repeatedly in a cross comparison of Live Study data and Timeline data, and, ultimately, in the Aggregate Attention Graphs. These forms include: I) music promotion; II) lifestyle flexing; III) trolling; IV) viral content; V) confessional content and lifestreaming; VI) interjections by other actors; and VII) aggregate public responses. These categories frequently occurred in conjunction, and their boundaries were often blurred. Some forms appeared more prominently in the Live Study than others. Keeping this in mind, the following section provides a general overview of these categories.

I. Music promotion The Timeline reveals a pattern of publications sourcing stories about music releases directly from artists’ social media. These stories re-publicized those announcements; they represent the 53% of social media-dependent articles that were noted earlier with respect to the Timeline data. This content differed in style and substance from posts that did more “personal” narrative work. Promotional activity involved, for instance: posts that centered around links to streaming, downloads, and merchandise stores; digital versions of traditional tour posters; and lists of credits and tracklists for upcoming releases. Teasing music was also common, for instance by giving audiences an “inside look” into the studio, or livestreaming the artist singing along to a track, understood as giving audiences a “taste” of a new product. Artists also took advantage of hierarchies of attention and participation on social media, for instance by promising a Like, Comment or Re-post in exchange for users promoting their sales. Less blatantly, artists invited

4 Evidence in the next two sections, “Narrative Templates” and “Dramatic Arcs,” is drawn from our Timeline. Where no source is attributed, the evidence represents information about a single event that can be gleaned from a conflation of headlines from multiple publications. The full database of articles used for qualitative analysis in this study is available at https://lilymarx.github.io/dissertation/. Attribution is given in the text where direct quotations are used, and where evidence is reliant on information as elaborated in the body of a particular article or articles.

18 users to share their own stories, for instance by encouraging them to post their favorite lyrics from a new single. Trippie Redd provides an excellent example of the range of explicitly promotional content evident between artists, and the distinct tone taken to differentiate this content from other narrative work. During the Live Study, Trippie used tweets, Instagram posts and Instagram Stories to publicize links to pre-order his upcoming album on major services like Apple Music (see Snapshot 1b.). He posted snippets of promo videos accompanied by links to YouTube streaming. He also conducted an Instagram Live session, in which he directly addressed his audience, promising the tit-for-tat of a Like and Comment in exchange for their promotion of his work on their profiles (see Snapshot 1a.).

Snapshot 1a. Snapshot 1b.

Music promotion was not a central feature of our Dramatic Arcs, but it did serve as an ambient feature in artist narratives: It represented a daily aspect of storytelling on social media. The next Template, “lifestyle flexing,” occupied a similar space.

II. Lifestyle flexing Lifestyle flexing on social media was frequently legitimized by the media, although, like music promotion, that legitimization served quotidian, not dramatic, narratives. Whereas previously such coverage might have looked like a staged photoshoot of an artist’s home in the pages of People Magazine, or pictures snapped by the paparazzi during a night out, headlines in this context were taken directly from social media posts, where artists uploaded videos and photos that constantly added to a body of evidence reminding the audience that they were wealthy and spectacular; that they conformed to genre norms, or to their specific self-brands and iconic images. This content usually featured displays of jewelry, sneakers, cars, houses, piles of cash, women; etc; as well as new tattoos and hairstyles.

Snapshot 2. Lifestyle flexing was evident in the Live Study data. Artists posted short videos featuring newly purchased sneakers and diamond-laden watches, for instance. Snapshot 2 is a still from a video posted to Trippie Redd’s Instagram. Trippie uses his phone camera to film his girlfriend.5 She is unclothed in bed, holding up a handful of cash, nodding affirmation as Trippie lists off all

5 The predominant communicated vantage for artist content involves the artist stationed behind their phone camera, whether the camera is directed at themselves (in the mode of a “selfie) or elsewhere. This first-person stance adds to a sense of authenticity, while also conforming to the norms of posting for “average” users.

20 the stores where they plan to go shopping. In the same vein, headlines like “Lil Pump Drops $350,000 on Chains for His Crew” (Montgomery 2018) and “Trippie Redd Gets New ‘Love Scars’ Face Tattoo” (Saponara 2018) were typical at mainstream hip-hop outlets, and, like coverage of music promotion, simply summarized social media posts.

III. Trolling In general, Internet trolling involves posting content that is intended—for personal entertainment or gain—to instigate disputes, sow confusion, cause shock and offense, or derail a conversation with off-topic commentary (Coles and West 2016; for an overview of trolling’s migration from a subcultural practice to the center of the mainstream see Phillips 2015). The artists in this study trolled various celebrities, institutions, collective publics and the occasional “regular” social media user in order to create dramatic storylines that did publicity work. Artists trolled the media by making dubious claims about their own narratives, or by posting culturally inflammatory content. For instance, our Timeline revealed that Lil Pump used his social media on multiple occasions to claim that he was quitting drugs. Outlets repeated the story as truth, at which point Pump would further antagonize them by claiming the whole thing had been a joke. In fact, Pump was the foremost troll during the period of our Live Study. Two Instagram Story posts illustrate his behavior: In the first, a four-second snippet of video, he brags that he will never quit codeine; in the second, Pump, who has previously faced criminal charges for driving without a license, brags that no one is going to stop him from driving in two lanes at once, which he proceeds to do. By building on existing storylines—his drug abuse and traffic violations—posts like these reward audiences who have been paying attention. They pique media interest, rile up audiences who “don’t get it” and wink at those who are “in on the joke.” Our Timeline revealed that trolling was prominently covered by traditional publications in relation to beefing (one of our Dramatic Arcs). Beefs are conflicts, traditionally between two rappers, expressed through a variety of texts (songs, social media posts, interviews, etc.). Like any conflict, they can create compelling narrative arcs; the cultural touchstone for rap beefing is the mythical feud between Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls. The possibility of live, direct, publicly broadcast communication between any two social media users means that more than ever beefing can be a tool to gin up a moment of publicity, as much as it can feed a greater story.

Dramatic and detailed beefs played out across our Timeline as artists posted messages to/about other social media users for audiences to witness. Trolling someone with more “clout” (power and influenced measured by attention) served to bestow some of that power on the artist. Artists often trolled others in the scene, in a mutually beneficial manner. Trolling could also be a one-sided joke, or a more aggressive form of antagonism. The lines between the three were intentionally blurry, and audiences actively used Comments sections on Twitter and Instagram to discuss whether artist beefing-qua-trolling was authentic or conspiratorial. For example, audiences theorized that an ongoing saga between one-time collaborators Trippie Redd and 6ix9ine was coordinated. The two performed a serialized narrative through video and text over a period of two years, garnering social media attention that was then converted into headlines— always guaranteeing coverage of the next episode in the feud. Artists also found their narratives disrupted by non-celebrity trolling. During the Live Study, for instance, Juice WRLD’s twitter account was hacked. The hackers used Juice’s megaphone to post non-sequitur content, beginning with links to leaked music, then transitioning to aggressive statements advocating conspiracy theories and jihad, next mocking users’ musical tastes while offering radical Islamist music videos as an alternative, and finally insulting the RIAA, before losing access to Juice’s account (see Snapshot 3). Snapshot 3. Trolling is an example of content that, at is most successful, goes “viral.” The next

section will cover two less antagonistic forms of viral content: the curated meme and viral trends.

IV. Viral content Many of these Narrative Templates incorporate elements of virality: In fact, if content goes viral, it is more likely to become part of an artist’s legitimized or canonized narrative. This section focuses on two particular types of viral content: the curated meme, and viral trends. The Timeline indicated that artists regularly posted content whose chief purposes was virality. These posts involved an artist turning himself into a meme. Such content could be playful, confessional or spectacular. Examples of artist memes regularly covered by traditional publications were most prominently associated with Lil Pump. Publications like XXL and Complex frequently ran headlines about the artist’s antics; for instance, “Lil Pump Shares Hilarious Experience of Getting His Wisdom Teeth Removed (Price 2018) and “Lil Pump Smashes a TV While Dancing to ‘Welcome to the Party’” (Mojica 2018). During the Live Study, Pump behaved similarly, posting a photo of himself holding two gas pumps—the latest iteration in a series of posts in which “Pump” posed with “pumps.” (The most scandalous of these made headlines in our Timeline—when the rapper blew marijuana smoke around the filling station— although this falls more in line with antagonistic trolling behavior). Artists also participated in more widespread viral trends taking place on social media platforms. Thus, during the Live Study, three of the artists participated in the so-called FaceApp Challenge. The challenge involved posting a photo to social media in which the user applied an “old-age filter” to a photo of himself. Interestingly, this trend converged with an unexpected cultural narrative: Worries were raised that the app might be uploading all the photos from user phones to Russian servers without permission (Swisher 2019).

Snapshot 4. Curated memes and viral trends in this mode exist at the meta-level of virality—their reason and substance is virality. For artists, this can mean disseminating caricatured and iconic versions of themselves across the culture: It’s all about maximum exposure. Other Narrative Templates encompass similar logics, but involve layers of additional meanings and intention that can be fruitfully parsed. Lil Pump makes himself into meme when he claims to quit drugs, for instance; however, layered onto that is a playfully antagonistic relationship with the media and the public.

V. Confessional content and lifestreaming Our definition of confessional content derives from Bennett’s (2014) application of Redmond’s (2008) “celebrity confessional.” Redmond defines confessional content as “any moment in which a star, celebrity, or fan engages in revelatory acts” (quoted in Bennett 2014, 140). Bennett adds that this content “lends itself powerfully to the social media platforms, which allow these confessions to be sent directly and immediately to fans” (140). In the Timeline, this type of content garnered headlines when it was particularly scandalous or revelatory; for instance: “Lil Peep Reveals He’s Bisexual” (Coe 2017); “Juice WRLD Quits Codeine, Apologizes for Scaring Girlfriend” (Centeno 2019); and “Lil Pump Posts Concerning Message, Leaves Fans Alarmed” (Coleman 2019).

During the Live Study, Lil Skies provided an example of particularly effective confessional content (see Snapshot 5). He blurred the lines between real and performative when he posted and then rapidly deleted messages with a depressive, even suicidal, tone. Users following Skies’ account received notifications to their devices with a portion of the content previewed, but links from those notifications led only to deleted posts. This created a worrying effect surrounding the artist’s wellbeing, and a mystery about how much he intended to reveal. Users took to the Comments section for the single remaining post to express love and support for the artist.

Snapshot 5.

This episode harkens to Baym’s (2018) work on how musicians see social media audiences: “The everyday nature of social media interaction means that fans can offer musicians much more mundane affirmation at the moments musicians most need it” (166). Skies’ posts, however, extend that hypothesis to its extremes, portraying an artist directly appealing to his audience for existential affirmation. While this constituted a particularly dramatic event, in general confessional content takes on the quality of “lifestreaming,” or the “‘always-on’ aspect of social media, the constant pings and alerts that make smartphones so hard to ignore” (Marwick 2013, 208). Small acts of self-

25 revelation and self-exposure—what the artist ate for breakfast—make up the bulk of confessional content on a daily basis. Confessional content can, for example, involve both the dramatic and the quotidian performance of a personal relationship. During the Live Study, Juice WRLD used Twitter to perform intimacy with his girlfriend on multiple occasions (see Snapshot 6). He responded directly to tweets from her account. The display created a sense of “backstage access,” and represented a serialized story that the audience could followed as it unfolded over time. At its most dramatic moments, this narrative made its way into the news coverage—for instance, when Juice directed an apology for his drug abuse to his girlfriend’s account.

Snapshot 6.

While self-revelation doesn’t have to be particularly enlightening, content must be “always on” and always confessional, to some degree.

VI. Interjections The environment of context collapse on social media leads to a wide range of what we are here calling “interjections” by other social media users directly into artist narratives. This is one of the most expansive and significant of our Narrative Templates. It corresponds to a vision of “small

26 stories” overtaking “grand histories,” though, of course, it falls far short of such democratic ideals. A wide array of celebrities inserted themselves into artists’ narratives across our Timeline by directly posting to/about that artist. The data showed that:

• Established celebrities “cosigned” up-and-coming artists directly on social media, publicly performing support and giving them a boost in attention. For instance, both rapper Lil Yachty and neo-soul icon Erykah Badu used their social media accounts to cosign XXXTentacion early in his career. • Celebrities inserted themselves directly into artist narratives in order to gin up some attention for themselves. This delivered unexpected pairings, as, for instance, when Maury Povich, host of a TV talk show focused on family issues, tweeted at NBA YoungBoy, offering to help the 18-year-old rapper after news broke that he was expecting his fifth child. • Celebrities took to social media to air grievances and hold artists directly accountable for perceived bad behavior. Geoff Barrow, famously of Portishead, used Twitter to accuse Lil Pump of sampling his music without permission on a “deeply fucking sexist song” (Helman 2019); and Snoop Dogg, Meek Mill and other hip-hop celebrities used Instagram and Twitter to publicly accuse 6ix9ine of being a “snitch.” • Artists also tried to regain control of these narratives after they had been held to account by other celebrities. For instance, Juice WRLD used Twitter to deliver a pacifying message as tensions escalated between his producer and rock star Sting over an unauthorized sample.

Social media also gave non-celebrities a platform to insert themselves directly into artist narratives. The phone camera, in tandem with social media, allowed users to distribute their own perspectives on artist interactions. That content had the potential to go viral. Live performances, and, less predictably, the shopping mall, were recurring settings in this type of content. Thus, a viral video of XXXTentacion being attacked onstage in San Diego, uploaded by a user, was attributed as the content that launched the artist to fame. Meanwhile, both Lil Pump and NBA

YoungBoy were covered by the news media as having “almost” gotten into fights at the mall after fan-captured videos went viral, while 6ix9ine was arrested after a teen uploaded a video in which the rapper apparently choked him at a Texas shopping center. Evidently, non-traditional players can create unexpected interruptions in an artist’s desired self-presentation. Some of the interruptions portrayed in the Timeline were status grabs—for instance the aforementioned hack of Juice WRLD’s Twitter account. Others leveraged the shock value of a hefty price tag to attract attention. For instance, a jeweler posted an Instagram video in which he accused 6ix9ine of stealing a $25,000 bracelet; a sneaker reseller used a tweet to accuse A Boogie wit da Hoodie of scamming him out of $10,000; and NBA YoungBoy and a pair of thieves who had stolen his jewelry exchanged taunting messages on Twitter and Instagram. A notable pattern in the Timeline also saw girlfriends and mothers able to insert themselves into artist narratives without going through traditional gatekeepers. A strain of activity here involved domestic abuse allegations; this will be discussed further with respect to Dramatic Arcs. However, activity also took less severe forms, including allowing women to hold artists accountable for less serious behavior. For instance, A Boogie wit da Hoodie posted confessional messages to Instagram and Twitter, expressing sadness at not being able to see his young daughter. The mother of his daughter then responded with messages of her own, in which she complained that his posts misled audiences to the conclusion that she was preventing him from contact with his child. A Boogie closed this narrative thread by posting a lengthy apology for his behavior. The mothers of XXXTentacion and Lil Peep were also able to forego traditional media gatekeepers as they publicly navigated their sons’ deaths. Both mothers took control of their sons’ social media accounts, using them as platforms to organize public memorials, update audiences about their sons’ personal lives (for instance, the birth of X’s son) and posthumous careers. During the Live Study, Lil Peep’s mother even used her late son’s account to crowdsource information about the whereabouts of a Peep collaborator (see Snapshot 7).

Snapshot 7.

While interjections on social media often remain the purview of the powerful, across the board they add an unprecedent level of “noise” to artist narratives. Artists must constantly be ready to respond to unexpected interjections, and uncertainty prevails about which perspectives will ultimately be canonized.

VII: Aggregate public responses “Aggregate public responses” refer to stories about how social media publics react to an artist. The music press often uses these waves of public opinion as a sample of the vox populi (Hermida 2018, 501–502), and reactions by communities of celebrities are likewise reported. Aggregate public responses were notably reported in our Timeline and Live Study with regard to the deaths of XXXTentacion and Lil Peep. Headlines ran about collective celebrity and fan reactions in the immediate wake of the news, and public feedback regarding posthumous releases also received consistent media attention. In other instances, public reactions threw a wrench in artists’ narratives, requiring them to address unexpected feedback and adapt their behavior going forward. Lil Pump, for instance, was the target of a social media backlash in which Chinese(-American) rappers, professional and amateur, accused him of including racist lyrics in a song he had previewed on Instagram. He was forced to issue a public apology and

29 change the lyrics before releasing the official version. Artists in the Live Study constituted this type of Twitter public. Lil Pump and Juice WRLD (Snapshot 8) added their voices to a social media-wide backlash in response to a joke made by a TV comedian about the late XXXTentacion (né Jasheh Onfrey). Snapshot 8.

Aggregate Twitter public responses are an excellent example of the constant overlap between the various Narrative Templates discussed. Twitter public responses may represent interjections into artist narratives; they may be responses to artist trolling; and they constantly provide feedback to lifestreamed confessional content, most visibly in Comment sections. They also clearly demonstrate the direct line between social media activity and mainstream media narratives. Public reactions point publications to “important” events, and tell those publications how “everyone” is responding to them. In this way, among others, social media events become embedded into the traditional legitimating structures for artist narratives.

***

The various Narrative Templates discussed in this section appeared repeatedly across the Timeline and Live Study data. While we have considered them as separate entities for the

30 purpose of clarity, in practice they are fluid categories. This fluidity is evident in the proceeding discussion of Dramatic Arcs.

Dramatic Arcs Returning briefly to the Dramatic Arcs we identified earlier, we can now apply the Templates that critically shape artist everyday narrative construction on social media. Dramatic Arcs included: I) crime and law enforcement; II) domestic abuse; III) beefing; IV) artist deaths; and V) the intersection of technology and music. The Aggregate Attention Graphs for 6ix9ine, Lil Pump and XXXTentacion,6 are examined below in greater detail. Each Graph is characterized by our Dramatic Arcs and is representative of the various mythologies attached to mainstream SoundCloud rappers. They exemplify the types of events that lead to spikes in attention (narrative climaxes) for all nine artists. The lists below break down the events labelled in the Aggregate Attention Graphs that precede them. Each bullet point in those lists represents a conflation of stories describing discrete events from the 30 traditional publications previously listed. Thus, the series of events, “Pump claims that he is giving the Harvard University Commencement Speech—a rumor which his label encourages, forcing the university to issue an official press release” represents three separate news events (the claim, the encouragement, the response), repeated by numerous publications. It does not necessarily represent the story as elaborated by any one article. In short, the narrative that emerges is constituted by serialized, not summarized, events. Each bullet point encompasses a week’s worth of content.

6 All nine artist graphs are available in the Appendix to this paper, and online at https://lilymarx.github.io/dissertation/.

6ix9ine

Figure 6.

Measures of aggregate attention lead to the following narrative for 6ix9ine, from his first appearance in mainstream consciousness in 2017 until the end of this study on August 1, 2019:

• 6ix9ine begins to garner major media attention when he pleads guilty to three felony counts of sexual misconduct with a child. • He drops his first mixtape, and the same week gets into a large brawl at Los Angeles Airport. • He denies any involvement in the attempted shooting of Chicago rapper Chief Keef, with whom he has an ongoing public rivalry, and continues trolling Keef on social media. • 6ix9ine spends the week trolling, first calling out hip-hop radio personality Ebro Darden, then turning his attention back to Keef. • 6ix9ine is attacked, kidnapped and robbed in Brooklyn. The same week, he drops the single “FEFE” featuring ten-time Grammy nominee Nicki Minaj, with accompanying video. • He is arrested on federal racketeering and firearms charges, and his album is pushed back. • He pleads not guilty in his federal case, and his trial date is set. That week he releases his debut studio album. • He changes his plea to guilty in his federal case. • His ex-girlfriend claims on social media, and then to the press, that 6ix9ine physically abused her. This comes in the context of the social media rap world denouncing 6ix9ine for cooperating with federal prosecutors.

XXXTentacion

Figure 7.

Measures of aggregate attention lead to the following narrative for XXXTentacion:

• XXXTentacion (hereafter, X) enters the attention of the mainstream media when he accuses the pop star Drake of stealing his material. The same week, the rapper Lil Yachty, a forefather of the SoundCloud rap scene, cosigns him in a Twitter post. • X is released from jail. He calls out Drake in his first post-jail interview, with Miami radio’s The Beat. • He is attacked onstage in San Diego, CA. The video goes viral. • He drops his album 17, and stirs controversy by posting a video on Instagram in which he appears to hang himself. • He gets put on house arrest for felony charges involving witness tampering in his domestic violence case. • His album ? debuts at number one on the Billboard 200. It is covered in the media as SoundCloud rap’s first number one album. The same week, video being reviewed by prosecutors in which X appears to hit a woman is leaked and goes viral. The woman speaks out about the issue in an Instagram post. • X is murdered in a robbery. His music sales and streams spike, breaking the Spotify streaming record. • His album Skins is released posthumously. It features Kanye West, who spends time that week defending the collaboration in light of the abuse allegations against X. • The mother of X’s infant son orders a paternity test, as leaked by a gossip website. • An album and accompanying documentary are announced on the anniversary of X’s death.

Lil Pump

Figure 8.

Measures of aggregate attention lead to the following narrative for Lil Pump:

• Lil Pump enters the mainstream news media consciousness in February 2017, when he and a fellow rapper release a track on SoundCloud. • He previews a diss track that takes aim at rap elder J. Cole. The track is the latest addition to an ongoing beef with Cole. • Lil Pump’s viral song “Gucci Gang” becomes the shortest top 10 hit since 1975. • He drops his eponymous debut studio album. • “Gucci Gang” is certified platinum. It is parodied on Saturday Night Live, and a YouTuber goes viral when he spends 15 days saying the title phrase for charity. The same week finds a bidding war waging on social media to sign Pump after his existing deal with Warner is voided. • J. Cole releases a video interview with Pump, marking the end of their beef. • Lil Pump performs on The Tonight Show. • Kanye West drops the video for his collaboration with Pump, “I Love It.” The same week, Pump posts a video to his Instagram, telling his audience that he is going to jail for parole violation. • The “I Love It” video inspires an internet challenge.7 The song breaks YouTube’s viewing record for debut of a hip-hop video. It is parodied on The Late Late Show with James Corden. • Body cam footage of an altercation between Pump and police at Miami Airport is released and goes viral, leading police to drop the charges that stemmed from the incident. The same week, Pump appears on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, announces a tour, and claims that he is giving the Harvard University Commencement Speech—a rumor which his label encourages, forcing the university to issue an official press release refuting the claim. • Pump drops his sophomore album Harverd Dropout

7 Internet challenges are phenomena that takes place when internet users recreate, and encourage others to recreate, popular videos.

We will now refer to these peak events to examine recurring Dramatic Arcs, applying what we have learned about Narrative Templates to understand the relationship of social media to canonical artist narratives.

I. Crime and law enforcement narratives Each of the three artists above is prominently involved in a crime and law enforcement narrative. Such narratives are not foreign to popular music stars, and especially not to hip-hop stars. Traditionally, such stories are filtered through the mainstream media. However, new phenomena of interest arise in the narratives above: For instance, Lil Pump is able to directly announce to his fans on social media that he will be going to jail, and 6ix9ine’s cooperation with federal prosecutors in his racketeering case leads to an outpouring of denouncements from celebrities on social media. The former represents a type of confessional content, while the latter is an example of the aggregate public’s response. Delving deeper into our Timeline, we find that, for example, 6ix9ine’s child sex abuse charges were levied after he posted an incriminating video on Instagram. He told his arresting officers that the incident had been a stunt “for his image.” Later, federal prosecutors would again refer to spectacularly incriminating posts on 6ix9ine’s public social media profiles as evidence in his federal racketeering case. His lawyers in that case argued that he was “an entertainer who portrays a ‘gangster image’ to promote his music” (Lockett 2018). Social media is positioned as the impetus and the medium in 6ix9ine’s crime and law enforcement arc—an ultimately miscalculated use of trolling.

II. Domestic abuse narratives Domestic abuse narratives characterized both 6ix9ine’s and XXXTentacion’s graphs. These allegations entered the mainstream narrative concurrent with the rise of the #MeToo movement on social media, which amplified the voices of victims of abuse and harassment. That said, the allegations against these artists were mediated by the criminal justice system and the media. Both XXXTentacion’s accuser and 6ix9ine’s accuser gave interviews detailing their accusations (Daly 2019; Hitt 2018). This strengthened their voices on the one hand, while putting them under scrutiny from hostile social media publics on the other. XXXTentacion’s accuser used her personal Instagram account to detail her maltreatment at the hands of X fans at his memorial.

Social media also gave the artists a platform to address domestic abuse allegations directly, and they were met with backlash from the opposite end of the spectrum. XXXTentacion took to Instagram to post a series of confessional videos in which he denied the allegations against him. But his aggressive quips about “domestically abusing” his detractors, resulted in headlines like “Watch XXXTentacion’s Disturbing Response To Domestic Abuse Allegations” (Estevez 2017). 6ix9ine, meanwhile, incited a firestorm when he seemed troll the public about his child sexual abuse case in a post which he quickly deleted. Various social media publics engaged in diverse cultural conversations surrounding abuse allegations against the two artists. Aggregate public support for these artists from a vocal fanbase acted to contest the automatic canonization of the stories the accusers had shared. Domestic abuse narratives were partially filtered through traditional media, but were also characterized by confessional content, trolling, aggregate Twitter public responses and interjections by the accusers.

III. Narratives about beefs All three artists were involved in prominent rivalries, or “beefs,” that led to peaks in aggregate attention. XXXTentacion utilized social media to “borrow” the attention and cultural capital that superstar Drake commanded, writing a potent public narrative for himself when he claimed, early in his career, that Drake had stolen his material. The beef between 6ix9ine and Chief Keef, meanwhile, escalated from a series of social media jabs and diss tracks into an alleged attempted shooting, later investigated by the NYPD. Even after the shooting, 6ix9ine continued to garner publicity by trolling Keef in a series of Instagram videos—facetiously offering to work with him on music and posting a video showing him on a shopping trip with Keef’s ex-girlfriend. Lil Pump’s beef with rapper J. Cole, a seemingly classic match-up between a young artist and the old guard, in fact contained elements of trolling, interjections and aggregate public responses. The feud began with a series of trolling tweets from Pump, whose constant refrain throughout the rivalry was the meme-able phrase, “Fuck J. Cole.” After that phrase had spread like wildfire on social media, the two artists ultimately settled their differences in a publicity- grabbing interview, hosted and distributed by Cole via YouTube (Lil Pump 2018). The two discussed the origins of their beef, which Pump described as “trolling” and “not serious,” and which Cole said he had initially taken as a personal affront before coming to understand its

39 cultural context. Pump then explained why he had taken aim at Cole in the first place: He was parroting fans online whom he saw posting the “Fuck J. Cole” refrain. The beef thus unfolds to reveal an interjection by an aggregate public in the form of trolling. Rap beefs are a classic Dramatic Arc, as old as the genre itself. XXXTentacion’s and Pump’s swipes at Drake and J. Cole are familiar as stories about young rappers marking their territory, while 6ix9ine’s dangerous rivalry with Chief Keef has echoes of Biggie and Tupac. In the social media age, however, beefs can also be haphazard ploys for clout or attention, and they are overwhelmingly characterized by trolling.

IV: Death and posthumous narratives Death and posthumous narratives were Dramatic Arcs in both XXXTentacion’s and Lil Peep’s graphs. These narratives involved management of, and public interaction with, the late artists’ social media profiles. Our Timeline included separate stories for each of the following events surrounding XXXTentacion’s death and posthumous narrative:

• The hip-hop community and fans react to XXXTentacion’s death on social media. • 6ix9ine reflects on his own trolling in the wake of X’s death. • The rappers Soldier Kidd and Soldier Jojo take to social media to deny involvement in X’s murder after rumors spread online. • X’s abuse accuser comments on his passing on Instagram. • X’s ex-girlfriend posts to Instagram claiming she was kicked out of his vigil by fans. • X’s mother advertises a public memorial through X’s social media profiles. • X’s mother takes to X’s social media to announce that his ex-girlfriend is pregnant with his child. • Rapper Lil Uzi Vert reaches out to the celebrity public on social media, asking for help to start a foundation for X’s family. • The Twitter public responds to the release of a posthumous X music video. • X’s mother posts an emotional message to X’s social media a month after his death. • X’s mother discusses a new X clothing collection on his social media.

XXXTentacion’s murder resulted in the highest peak in aggregate attention of any of the nine artists studied. Aggregate responses from celebrity and non-celebrity publics became a thoroughly documented part of this narrative. Interjections by XXXTentacion’s mother, by his ex-girlfriend and abuse accuser, and by celebrities like 6ix9ine and Lil Uzi Vert, also determined the trajectory of the story. Thus, while the peak datapoint connotes the fact of X’s murder, delving into the coverage surrounding this event reveals a more sprawling, serialized narrative, much of which unfolded publicly on social media.

V: Narratives at the intersection of music and technology Sustained interest in artists ultimately corresponded to Billboard data in our Aggregate Attention Graphs, indicating that there is still a connection between extra-musical narratives and the popularity of music products. However, peaks in the Graphs notably had to do with the relationship of digital technology—namely the concurrence of streaming and social media—and the SoundCloud rap “takeover.” For instance, spikes in attention corresponded with: Lil Pump’s “Gucci Gang” becoming the shortest Top 10 hit since 1975; the virality of Pump and Kanye West’s “I Love It”; XXXTentacion’s ? clearing the way for SoundCloud rap at the top of the Billboard 200; and the release of 6ix9ine and Nicki Minaj’s “FEFE,” which Minaj tacked onto the end of her own album in order to rectify disappointing streaming numbers (Leight 2018). An exemplary narrative about music and technology was built on the idea that artists had greater leverage with respect to labels as a result of the affordances of social media (i.e., direct access to an audience, independent distribution). The bidding war to sign Lil Pump represents an open-and-shut version of this narrative. Pump and others performed a dramatic public race to sign the artist after his deal with Warner was voided. The narrative played out in the following series of social media posts:

• Rapper Gucci Mane posts to Instagram that Lil Pump can “name the price” for a deal with his label 1017. • Lil Pump posts that he will not sign to any label for less than $12-15 million. • Celebrity producer DJ Khaled posts that he wants to sign Lil Pump.

• Lil Pump sparks rumors that he signed to Gucci Mane’s label in a series of Instagram videos. • Lil Pump posts that he is ready to announce a new deal. • Lil Pump posts the announcement of an $8 million deal with Warner.

As all of these players tried to gin up an aggregate public response in favor of a particular deal, audiences were left wondering how much of the fanfare was a coordinated stunt: Was Warner the target of Pump’s trolling, or was it his audience and the media? Similar narratives unfolded with respect to the other two artists, although they did not result in canonical peaks in attention. XXXTentacion, for instance, claimed on Instagram that he had terminated his deal with Capitol records, but expanded this narrative in a series of confessional posts in which he threatened to quit music unless his former friend and fellow rapper Ski Mask The Slump God would agree to mend their relationship. Capitol was forced to issue a statement in refutation, while X’s plea to “tell Ski Mask to be my friend again and I will make music” (Martinez 2017) apparently fell on deaf ears. 6ix9ine, meanwhile, leveraged the drama of this Dramatic Arc by co-opting it as a troll: He falsely claimed to have signed a $7.5 million deal with Cash Money Records, hurling him to the center of yet another attention cycle as social media publics and media outlets speculated on the veracity of the statement. The performance of a Dramatic Arc between artist and label, as an example of a narrative about music and technology, blurs the line between authentic dispute and drama manufactured for maximum viral impact. Artists may appear to use social media to leverage bargaining power with a label, or to garner publicity. These disputes play out as serialized narratives that audiences can follow in real-time, and can involve the spectrum of Narrative Templates.

***

Correlating events from the Timeline with peaks in the Aggregate Attention Graphs shows that “traditional” canonical extra-musical events such as artist deaths and arrests remain central to popular music stardom narratives. This section has provided an overview of Dramatic Arcs, to suggest that even familiar narratives are characterized by events born out of social media logics.

Dramatic Arcs are influenced by the Narrative Templates that are applied every day on social media and translated through traditional media publications.

Conclusions The popular music stardom narratives ascribed to SoundCloud rappers update classic cultural myths in accordance with the emergence of new technologies. This paper worked from the premise that social media narratives are articulated onto mass media narratives. Accordingly, it looked at how these stories are constructed in the exchange between social media and traditional media publications. It assessed nine artists: 6ix9ine; A Boogie wit da Hoodie; Juice WRLD; Lil Peep; Lil Pump; Lil Skies; Trippie Redd; NBA YoungBoy; and XXXTentacion. The methodology for this study involved collecting data from mainstream media publications, Google Trends and the Billboard Charts to visualize artist narratives as arcs determined by aggregate attention. Peaks in these graphs were then correlated with qualitative data. Qualitative analysis was made available by organizing publications along a Timeline. A more limited Live Study served as the final segment of our method, revealing the texture of social media events as they unfolded in real-time. The results revealed a number of recurring Dramatic Arcs, and a series of Narrative Templates through which those arcs were communicated. Dramatic Arcs included: I) crime and law enforcement; II) domestic abuse; III) beefing; IV) artist deaths; and V) the intersection of technology and music. Narrative Templates were discussed as I) music promotion; II) lifestyle flexing; III) trolling; IV) viral content; V) confessional content and lifestreaming; VI) interjections by other actors; VII) aggregate public responses. This endeavor was an experimental approach to artist social media use, which has previously been studied largely in relation to fan interaction and identification. Future directions for research might involve a less linear approach to narrative. Marshall, Moore, and Barbour (2015) propose network analysis and data visualization as one promising research method (though they are concerned with the field of persona studies). Network analysis allows the researcher to “look at networked structures of public identities and examine professional persona in the new paratextual roles created by social media” (291) in order to locate important individuals and their relative power within a network (299). Hartley (2009) suggests that we might apply this approach to a narrative framework: For him, social media is restoring collective

43 modes of storytelling that preclude the “linear performance of the authorial self” (138). Invoking Christopher Booker’s (2004) seven basic ancient plot structures, he experiments with the idea that:

“In the web [read: network] of storytelling, Booker’s seven basic plots are hubs, to which new events (plots) and agents (heroes) alike are ‘preferentially attracted…Stories are about how it feels and what it takes for a new ‘node’ to connect to a network, to navigate its topography, and to develop sufficient links to become a hub. There’s a name for failure to connect too. Booker calls it ‘tragedy’ (Hartley 2009, 140–41).

Figure 9.

As a cursory illustration of what this type of research might look like in practice, Figure 9 shows a networked view of the total catalog attributions for all of the nine artists covered in this study. This data is gathered from the crowdsourced music annotation website Genius. The resulting network represents a user-generated understanding of the various “characters” involved in the artists’ narratives as they relate to music and video releases. At a glance, Genius networks tell us the extent to which tuned-in internet users acknowledge major industry players like Warner, Sony, etc., as well as understandings about scene-specific characters. While this project has taken a more linear approach to artist narratives, the results nevertheless indicate changes even to traditional canonical pop star plotlines as they are co- created between social media and mainstream media publications. Changes here are evident on three broad bases: the inclusion of direct “interjections” into, or contributions to, the narrative by an unprecedented number and variety of actors; an unprecedented level of quotidian detail publicly broadcast and then archived about the artists; and narrative events specifically catered to garner attention according to the rewards structures of social media platforms.

The full database of traditional media publications used in this study is available at: https://lilymarx.github.io/dissertation/, along with interactive versions of charts and graphs, and more.

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Appendix