untitled / study
"free internet?"
If you're reading this, I want you to take a moment to understand where I am coming from. I was always a misfit. Not in the way Jaden Smith thinks he is — more like Tyler, the Creator and the rest of Odd Future. Just someone who didn’t really belong.
The best part about being a misfit is that nobody expects you to fit into a pretty little box. People mostly just pretend you don’t exist, which ends up being its own kind of freedom. When nobody expects anything from you, you get to experiment. You get to try things. And eventually something you do is going to offend somebody anyway, so you might as well explore.
So when I was digging around for new music and stumbled across a song called Down by an artist named Effie, it felt like a breath of fresh air.
The whole thing looks like lowres MacBook selfie footage filmed in someone’s bedroom — the kind of videos or photos most of us have sitting on Photobooth untouched for years. The editing feels closer to old Snapchat filters than anything you’d expect from a polished music video. Watching it reminded me of the nights my friends and I used to send each other freestyle rap clips at two in the morning, convinced we had just drop some bars.
The difference is Effie’s song is actually really good.
Maybe it’s a unique experience, but the song reminded me of how stupid I was for staying in a toxic relationship for too long. The bubbly beat makes me want to forgive myself for it. Because it’s okay to make mistakes. It’s okay to fail miserably. It’s okay to grow.
If life were perfect, that would be boring.
Effie actually explained the whole thing better than I could in an interview:
"We don’t need to be polished. We don’t have good gear, or a good studio — we just made a whole record in this messy room."
And that’s part of the reason I’ve started to hate the current state of media.
"the machine"
Effie felt refreshing because everything else right now is just slop. Whether that’s AI-generated slop, PR-stunted slop, or media strategically engineered to squeeze every second of attention out of us for profit... slop. It's all just so garbage.
We’re all familiar with “the algorithm” by now. That mysterious black box that hand-picks bite-sized hits of dopamine so you never really feel full. We’ve all interacted with it in one way or another — maybe it’s realizing what “side of TikTok” you’re on, or looking up “my style” on Pinterest to see what aesthetic its put you into. The concept itself isn’t new.
What has changed is how marketing teams and celebrities use it.
They know fans want to feel like they’re part of a secret. Like we discovered something first. Like we helped shape the moment. But if they actually gave up that control — theres a huge risk of it becoming a PR nightmare. So they found a workaround.
They stage authenticity.
They create moments that feel accidental, spontaneous, even messy — but only in the exact ways they planned for us to notice.
Take Hailey Bieber, who suddenly appeared in paparazzi photos wearing a plain white T-shirt that said “Nepo Baby.”
The photos were all over my feed — cue the fashion twitter discourse on whether this is iconic or insensitive. But what most people eventually realised was that the whole thing was staged. A photoshoot released as if it were a paparazzi photo.
It looked purposefully messy or problematic. It felt real enough for us to believe for a moment Hailey was willing to take all her public criticism and say “fuck you” to everyone who had something to say.
But it wasn’t just a spontaneous decision.
After those photos she went back in and changed. No one actually saw her wearing that shirt on that day.
The whole point wasn’t to send a message to her haters. The point was to make us feel like it did. And maybe the point was to send a message, but that message is so weak when you aren’t willing to truly stand behind it.
And that’s the trick the machine keeps pulling now. It doesn’t try to hide the marketing anymore — it just hides the fact that what you think doesn’t matter.
"trying anyway"
If NewJeans were only about happiness, they would be boring, and this would be a boring story.
The last place you’d expect to find authenticity is the K-pop industry. I know I’m not an expert, but I’ve been a fan since the SNSD era, so I’ve had the misfortune of watching how cruel that world can be.
K-pop is the machine at its finest. A system refined over decades to manufacture groups in the hope that one of them becomes the next global sensation.
BLACKPINK proved that formula could work internationally. By the time the fourth generation arrived, companies knew exactly how to design groups for a global audience.
Then NewJeans showed up.
Their sound felt different. Music critic Derrick Gee described it as drawing from UK garage and two-step rhythms, often shifting into Baltimore or Jersey club patterns in the chorus. The vocals float somewhere closer to the airy style you hear from artists like PinkPantheress than traditional K-pop power vocals.
And for a moment, it worked. They exploded. Charts, streams, global attention — *Siri, play Attention by NewJeans.*
Then the machine stepped in.
The moment something becomes bigger than the system can comfortably control, the system reasserts itself.
And when that happens, someone always gets blamed.
If you’ve followed the situation, you know Danielle’s contract was terminated and the label turned around and sued her.
But that’s how the machine works.
It doesn’t matter how talented you are. It doesn’t matter how kind you are.
The system always protects itself first.
Because the machine was never built for the artists.
It definitely wasn’t built for the fans either.
And if you’re one of those people ready to come at me with the “um actually she violated the terms of her contract—” argument, hiding behind legal technicalities while having zero remorse for someone who tried to push back against a broken system, then I honestly don’t know what to tell you.
Actually, I can think of one thing to say—
Suck a dick. Nobody gives a fuck about what you do. It doesn’t matter. Yeah I’m trying things — you tried it too. How you gonna knock somebody in the world for actually trying to do something? Trying. Since when was it not cool to try? Fucking loser. As a matter of fact suck another dick.
"greif / realness"
But thats the reality we live in and for the better or worse that messiness is what sparks creativity, what sparks people to want to speak out. To scream into a mic until someone listens.
No matter how much the machine tries to suppress realness, it always finds a way to slip through the cracks.
Just like Effie did.
If life were perfect, that would be boring, right?
Take Tyler, the Creator for example. The same artist people now idolise for albums like IGOR is the same kid who was rapping these lyrics on Oldie back in 2013.
He was never afraid to experiment or scared to say the wrong thing — honestly, he’s said plenty of stupid things over the years. He’s backlash for them too.
But he was also exactly the person he described in those lyrics. Someone the world thought was weird, loud, wrong, out of place. And despite that, he still managed to build something for himself.
Forcing people to conform makes for bad art.
Who cares if every song on an album is perfectly polished? Who cares if trying something new completely changes the trajectory of your career?
This is for the censored in the suburbs
And the white kids with censored friends who say the n-word
And the ones that got called weird, censored, bitch, nerd
Cause you was into jazz, kitty cats, and Steven Spielberg
They say we ain't acting right
Always try to turn our fucking color into black and white
But they'll never change 'em, never understand 'em
Radical's my anthem, turn my fucking amps up
So instead of critiquing and bitching, being mad as fuck
Just admit, not only are we talented, we're rad as fuck, bitches
Some of the most powerful moments in music aren’t even really songs.
One of the hardest things Ive ever listen to is barely even a song. Jah’s interlude.
Just a straight up rough recording of XXXTentacion (Jah) freestyling some bad lyrics, and suddenly he starts rapping about Ski Mask The Slump God (Ski) who’s just in the background of the audio laughing.
Jah, was murdered in 2018 and Jah’s Interlude was released in 2024.
It’s a memory that wasn’t meant for us, stored away for 6 years, yet he gave it away.
We’ll never fully understand what that loss meant to Ski. But that clip alone says more about missing your best friend than any perfectly written song ever could.
Music doesn’t have to always be deep, I know that, but it doesn’t always have to be pretty either.
Note: videos disappear; if one goes down, I’ll rotate in a new source.