This February, Father John Misty released I Love You, Honeybear, a pretty folk album that doubles as an exposé of our generation’s subconscious. Critics have zoned in on "Bored in the USA", a mournful white-guy ballad accompanied by laugh track—an apt and self-justifying touch. But the lyrical crux within the album is "Holy Shit". The song grandly reels off a chain of personal and political ruptures—revolutions, holocausts, incest dreams, original sin—which all emphasize the album’s driving concept: the unbearable heaviness of Josh Tillman’s divorce. After he’s tried on many rock-star guises—the chauvinist, the lothario, the "changed man"—it’s in "Holy Shit" that Tillman’s shape-shifting character crystallizes. Honeybear doesn’t just fuck with authenticity; it shows how, when an event shatters our everyday frames of reference, our identity splinters, and we grasp for a toehold in the familiar.
Tillman’s collapsing framework reflects our own, amid an insidious conflation of fantasy and reality. Last year the New Yorkerpublished an investigation that mentioned how a judge, hearing a reopened murder case, had rejected the defense’s new angle on the absurd grounds that "Perry Mason does this. Perry Mason proves the guy in the back of the court did it." Last week, in the UK, a group of onlookers watching a suicidal man atop a multi-story car park goaded him to jump to his death, before uploading footage to social media. Likewise the case of Vladislav Surkov, an eccentric political mastermind considered the second most powerful man in Russia: In the foreword to Almost Zero, a book believed to be pseudonymously autobiographical—and therefore representative of Russia’s real-life political narrative—he playfully claimed that "the author of this novel is an unoriginal Hamlet-obsessed hack."
What links these stories is a bizarre, postmodern rupture of perspectives. We’re constantly flitting between worlds—fact and fiction, simulation and original, digital and physical—and the conflict is shaping us. Web commenters routinely dismiss pop artists like Lana Del Rey, rolling eyes at her manufactured narratives and basic stereotype fulfilment—but manufactured narratives and stereotype fulfilment are precisely what characterize modern people’s lives. It’s possible to experience an ecstatic surrender to this new world’s possibilities, embracing its unruliness and abandoning self-discovery for a new era of total self-creation. Yet, all the same, it’s hard to hear that weirdly poignant buzz-term—are you even real?—without clocking its unnerving existential undertones.
In 1971, Rolling Stone published an interview with a dazed John Lennon, in which he autopsies reality, post-Beatlemania. "The dream is over," he proclaims at one point. "I'm not just talking about the Beatles, I'm talking about the generation thing. It's over, and we gotta—I have to personally—get down to so-called reality." Obsessively he invokes the language of reality—the real, realistic, "so-called reality"—to illustrate his staggering disillusionment with celebrity.
Wherever it’s sought, anonymity allures modern musicians like never before. Some, like the elusive MF DOOM, claim personality has overshadowed good music; others, like Slipknot, want to offer a more fantastical kind. Sia hides her face to avoid intrusion, Gorillaz invent new personas entirely, and countless producers, perhaps pining for the heyday of white-label culture, turn their noses at digital overshare. Burial, raised on rave’s anonymous collectivity, unmasked himself as soon as "the unknown thing became an issue" but never dropped the romance of being "in a symbol, a tune, the name of a tune." Over on the main stage, Radiohead’s Kid A saw Thom Yorke, who’d grown sick of his singing voice, descend into hiccupping half-sentences and computerized gibberish. "How to Disappear Completely", an alienated ballad about the inhumanity of headlining stadiums, is followed by "Treefingers", in which, across four ambient minutes, Yorke has indeed vanished.
Unlike other celebrities, musicians have an implicit duty to realness—ask why it’s pop stars, over more famous red-carpet actors, who comprise eight of the ten most-followed Twitter accounts. The point’s neatly made by Ester Dean, an actor and surrogate songwriter for Rihanna, in a 2012 New Yorker profile: "In the music industry, they don’t know the difference between the part and real life," she said. "If you’re a rapper and you’re talking about drug dealing, that’s not real. You don’t do that. You just talk about it. Your real life is when you walk out of the booth, but in music they intertwine it and in acting they don’t. Here we are, humble people, who have real lives and treat each other as such, and that’s the beautiful part of being in the film and TV world. I have friends there. I have a lot of them."
18+ are a visionary LA duo who, like most visionary LA duos, are bright, sonically dark and fluent in both visual arts and music. The sounds Justin and Samia make are disembodied yet confessional: Unlike other "post-Internet" aesthetics (glitch, seapunk) theirs draws on the minutiae of online relationships. If 18+’s in-song personas seem tacky ("the thug," "the bitch," etc.) that’s sort of the point—they aim, as Justin says, "To do something a little embarrassing that I wouldn't show my friends." These are the elements we suppress, often without realizing, in our shielded online interactions. And the result is an escalating self-consciousness. As the sociologist Laura Robinson puts it in The Cyberself, in online contexts "the ‘I’ is constantly redefined as the ‘me.’"
Another phenomenon that fascinated 18+ was that of the hard-hustling, teenage social media personality. Many have learned to monetize virtual popularity through sponsorship, a move you suspect would interest EMA, whose 2014 LP The Future’s Void is a cornerstone critique of online self-branding. In the midst of the NSA revelations, the record slammed the idea that the internet would tear down and democratize the system. Instead, Erika M. Anderson sang that the effect would be to accelerate commodification, not just of music and products but personalities. Anderson’s smartest on "3Jane", a song that, echoing Gang of Four’s "Anthrax", shuns naive resistance by implicating itself as a commodity. The last chorus, over sarcastically triumphant strings, blends meta-referential humor with a rallying cry of renunciation: "Refrain! Refrain! Refrain!"
Building any online relationship, despite constantly evolving dialects and emotional cues, we’re faced with a deep void of sensory data. Into that void we have nothing to project but parts of ourselves, inborn fantasies that might be positive or negative, but always stem from our own experiences and assumptions—a lens that points back. Likewise, most of us on Twitter address an imagined audience, not of our own followers but the users we follow. On some level we’re aware of all this, but all the same, our social fantasies persist. We have friends there. We have a lot of them.
Self-branding is nothing new—it stems from the basic impulse to make a good impression. Our social profiles are like suburban lawns, pretty fronts that hide a crawling frenzy of ugly reminders that fleshy, dirty nature is deeply unchill. The attitude sounds superficial, but our ability to craft better selves online is pretty beautiful. Like anything creative, it frees people uncomfortable elsewhere to more vividly express and define themselves. Besides, self-image is always part-fantasy, and that’s part of its truth. But at risk of sounding glib, perceived flaws aren’t always something to overcome.
On "When You're Smiling and Astride Me", halfway into Honeybear, Father John Misty briefly jumps out of his vindictive spiral. The escape hatch is a clever reversal of fantasy and reality: "I’d never try to change you," he sings gently, "as if I could—and if I were to, what’s the part that I’d miss most?" The message is that rather than beaming back our dreams, love has to exceed fantasy, so that what look like flaws can coalesce into a transcendent whole. If there’s a minor spectre to digital society, it is its quickness to confuse what we feel and what we say, who we are and who we feel—the reality and the representation. Where we’ll flourish are the fantastic cavities in-between.