we take on the burden of all these sad eyed children
A few months ago I went to see Los Campesinos! play at Thalia Hall in Chicago. A friend of mine was doing merch for them and had remarked to me about how there was a significantly younger crowd than she’d expected.
The idea there would be a young audience really sparked my interest because LC! is a band that came to me first about 11 years ago when I was 16 and first using spotify. Even then it seemed like I was late to forming an opinion.
I didn’t even like the songs Spotify was pushing on me then. On my old high school account that I stopped using in 2016 they’re still one of my blocked artists. I’d get severely into them in 2019, two years after their 6th album Sick Scenes came out, but I was wrong about them in 2013 and every year in between.
Many such cases.
My initial thought was kids of parents who have liked the band since inception. They’re kind of a band you can build your life around. A cult band in the truest of senses. Then I remembered something from a different segment of my internet poisoned brain. Minecraft Youtubers.
It’s hard to defend being a 27 year old woman with an in depth knowledge of popular Minecraft streamers, but we’ve all got our vices. I’ve never smoked a cigarette, but I have destroyed an untold number of brain cells watching videos on youtube made by people who call themselves things like WillNE and ChrisMD and other usernames more or less cringe than those. We all cause ourselves harm somehow.
The connection here is a guy named Wilbur. He fell into a narrow niche of popular internet figure who also wants to be a musician in a serious way. Youtube music is one thing— people who make songs because they have an audience and want to explore every avenue to exploit them, your “It’s Everyday Bro”s and other contrived YouTuber beef diss tracks to give one sort of example— but I would have put him in a slightly different category where there’s a demonstrated interest and investment in music that existed before internet fame. It’s where I’d place people like James Marriott or Arthur Hill or Talia Mar. They play live and they tour. It's not cynical in the way YouTube Music is cynical, but it's different than musicians whose internet content is exclusively dedicated to posting their songs.
In the least insulting way possible, these people are also usually accessories to more successful Youtubers– or in very public friend groups with them– and that’s why I know who they are. That is fully why I know their music. That’s why a lot of people know their music. They make internet content and they know people who make internet content. It’s not necessarily why they might like the music in question, but being internet figures with groups of non-musician internet figures around them is a tool for a livelihood and a tool for discovery. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that aside from it probably being a bit tough to be a musician in the earlier days of playing in front of audiences and having, well, an audience. It’s harder to fuck up and be unimpressive in front of people than it is to fuck up and be unimpressive in front of nobody.
Wilbur Soot became popular online through a group called Soothouse. They made this sort of capital C Content I've been referring to— reaction videos, reddit shit, gamer adjacent shit. He was also involved in the Minecraft server DreamSMP. I associate him mostly with my knowledge of that absorbed through osmosis. Minecraft streamer bullshit has just seemed to bleed into YouTube broadly for a long time. It's just very popular. It infects almost everybody who will eventually break through the mainstream internet barrier and make most of you think “wait am i supposed to know who that is?” I took greater note of him, though, because he also posted himself doing covers of bands I knew and didn’t associate with internet stuff of this realm— Slaughter Beach Dog, Los Campesinos!, Crywank.
Like a lot of musicians who get a head start through internet popularity, his actual band seemed to be mostly doing something that falls between homage to those influences and straight ripping them off. It wasn’t for me, someone who had already heard Los Campesinos and other British 2000s emo adjacent bands, but I was willing to not publicly make fun of it because at least it wasn’t bad indie pop ripping off the worst of The 1975.
The next I heard of him was because a former partner of his came out with credible allegations of abuse. As the aforementioned WillNE has said, Minecraft streamers can’t seem to get out of their own way for some reason. The pop punk front men of the internet set, it seems.
Fast forward to this summer, I was sitting near merch at the Los Campesinos! show and flagged down a few young looking people to ask them how they first heard of the band. Of the 10 or so people I asked, a couple said parents. One said some playlist website. One said they didn’t know. The rest gave me an uneasy look and, in universally hushed voices, mentioned Wilbur. One even called him “the bad man.”
It’s an answer I was expecting, but an almost universally embarrassed demeanor I wasn’t. I’m not sure if they were embarrassed to admit it was coming from a source that may be perceived as embarrassing— there’s something universally embarrassing to young people about admitting you had music shown to you through really any source— or fully objectionable because the source has since been "cancelled" to some degree. His band is still putting out music, but I also saw a clip where former closely associated streamer TommyInnit wouldn't play that new song when fans were requesting it while he was live. To me, that's about as cancelled as something like that can get.
My initial impulse is to say that it's just not embarrassing to have come to something that you love through something you may now be embarrassed by. I see so many people online express that they're embarrassed to admit they were shown a favorite artist by an ex-partner. Maybe I'm a little embarrassed that my interest in a whole world of music was sparked through Owl City as opposed to The Postal Service. Maybe I'm a little embarrassed to still prefer Owl City.
Of course nobody should be embarrassed by how they found anything, but the second prong here is the shame. I think young people just feel a much stronger sense of shame when they are faced with the self reflection aspect of having liked a now-disgraced musician, artist, internet figure, director, etc. The exposing of a harmful person, on the surface, is to do with protecting potential new partners or friends, but the reaction on a fan level has much more to do with the personal responsibility they feel to support people who reflect their values. The underlying complication in our current iteration of internet cancellation is the simple reality that it is not a pursuit without ego.
There is ego in the feeling that surely a bad person wouldn't be able to make something I would like, but of course these aren't connected and just reflect a preoccupations with maintaining your own sense of self. I think everybody should let go of that. I've written about it a lot.
But I think something new has come out of thinking about the aftermath of a social cancelation. I think there is more to it than wanting to be God's Favorite Consumer just internally and in the immediate time surrounding controversy and allegations. I think it reflects an attitude young people have toward their own experiences where they genuinely view discussing the works of people who have done objectionable things as the same as platforming.
I think social media has created an environment where everybody can view themself as sort of influencer until proven otherwise and the consequences of misstepping socially are flattened into what happens to people with actually significant followings and success. It feels like there is a new layer of social expectation to view you and everyone around you as having a reputation to protect the way famous people do. I'm sometimes a victim of that– I will choose not to name drop All Time Low in light of the allegations against that band and will list off different associated bands. Not because I think people will really care that I'm acknowledging I liked that band or be mean to me about it, it's just something internally signaling to me that I should avoid it even if there is no way it could be perceived as promoting their success. There's this blanket of feeling that in order for justice to be served, the morally right thing would be for the person in question to be forgotten in the mind of the public forever. The morally right thing is for you personally to stop ever saying their name. It's this mentality that comes about because there is so little actual accountability and so much constant surveillance of personal activity. It's the logical conclusion.
As with all things, though, the reality is tougher and it's ridiculous to expect people to erase the memory of almost anything. What if a woman at the Los Campesinos! merch table baits you into admitting you once liked a disgraced streamer.
A related but less interesting thing that seems to be happening with LC! is that they've garnered a new kind of young internet fan. I really believe Minecraft streamer internet fandom is responsible for almost all overbearing behavior online, but that's a conversation for a different day.
Now that I've exposed myself for knowing more about a certain kind of youtuber than I'd usually care to admit, I'd like to announce that the second issue of my very cool music magazine is now soliciting pitches! Please still think I'm cool and interesting! Check out the guidelines below!
Miranda Reinert is a music adjacent writer, zine maker, podcaster and law school drop out based in Chicago. Follow me on Twitter or Instagram for more subtle indications that I am a present tense fan of WillNE: @mirandareinert. This blog does have a paid option and I would so appreciate any money you would be willing to throw me! You may also send me small bits of money at @miranda-reinert on venmo/on Paypal if you want. As always, thanks for reading!