In my school, the internet is the setting in which everyone exists in: There is little to no sense of place or locality in people’s’ lives and their habits seem only marginally different to the habits of any member of Gen Z in any similarly sized metropolitan area.

The internet transformed every humans consciousness into a series of several of hundreds of trillions of billions of microwaves that were then transmitted to every corner of every place on planet Earth, from libraries, kitchens, dressing rooms, Targets, 7-11s, nightclubs, high schools, college, workplace to brains, arms, hair, jungles, eyes, amoebas, oceans and puddles. It is possible that I have seen 10,000 people’s lives, yet I have seen only a fraction, but it was a beautiful fraction, and to me that fraction is everything, and I can never compare to that fraction, and it does not feel like a fraction it feels like a whole.

Now when I go back to physical reality, it feels infinitely small, because I have seen the number of lives that exist and the amount of things that are out there and how magnificent they are. It is clear that everyone arounds me understands this too, and as we see a world that feels flattened by genericism, structured by violence, and maintained by environmental destruction, how can we be defined by our space.

Instead, it is safer to come to the internet where its perfectly structured chaos seems to reflect the breadth of information in the world and offer a forum not defined by physical reality.

What I have described may seem hopeless, but, in reality, the nature of being discontent with the world and escaping into scenes of unworldly beauty is obviously not unique to this generation (it’s the reason for religion, it’s the reason why artists die in pursuit of finding sublimity, its the reason why people think politicians will save the world, and it’s the reason why Gen-X displays fervent nostalgia) I do not say this solely to garner sympathy for Gen Z but also to offer context before I describe an aspect about this phenomenon that I believe is unique in the context of the internet.

That brings me to the topic of the essay today, the Jerk Rap Revival. Several areas across the United States have experienced the jerk rap revival, but the most prominent scene by far is in New York. I am wildly fascinated by this scene, not solely idealistically, the way that seemingly every young person is by the idea of creating art in a metropolitan setting, but because its origin reveal critical things about interacting with the internet.

The most popular group of producers behind the Jerk Rap revival sound is a collective of producers called Study Group, made up of reklus1ve, cranes, mag, votekk, orihime, st47ic, 1sadboii, clay10, and xtatus, the founder of which is cranes, whose journey I am going to focus on. Cranes is a Portland resident who was influenced by the growing electronic music scene in Portland but also by math rock, emo music, and Chicago footwork. They began by making ambient music, but then shifted to making beats simply as a result of interest and external influences. They would join Discord servers and make beats while watching other people make beats, and eventually got so skilled that they began to pioneer a lot of the initial jerk sounds. All the while, they were interacting with their influences, co-producers, and peers solely over the internet. Eventually, Cranes moved to New York with their peers and now all the production is in person.

Even the concept of the context I just described is pretty much solely a product of the last 20 years. The reason I point this out is because the phenomenon of escapism can be explained in large part by the fact that there are uncontrollable natural forces that are overwhelming causing people to seek escapes, and, given that aspects of people’s lives are not simply being changed but revolutionized on a yearly basis, the magnitude of the unruliness of daily life is exponentially increasing. This means, if nothing else the modern day is unique in that the problem outlined is more prevalent and larger.

Regardless, the context of Crane’s background fits similarly to aspects of the phenomenon I outlined in that they were exposed to massive amounts of information in a time of exponentially growing unruliness and, likely as a result, sought the internet as a place of solace. However, the nature of how Cranes dealt with the internet after the fact is the reason why I say the internet as an escape is is far different than any other forum.

Cranes entered the internet and sought people who thought similarly to them, a not uncommon thing in most engagement with escapes. However, all of them, engaged in the production of their art, had to filter what they made through their own internal consciousness simply due to the breadth of information they were exposed to. Unlike other escapes where you can be swallowed whole by the thrill of detachment, the internet offers a myriad of wildly different avenues to take that there is still a requirement of personal development to engage with it purposefully.

I do add a caveat to that, I think it is extremely easy to be swallowed whole by the internet if you are careless in your interaction with it, but I do think that carelessness is a hard thing to instill, and it is only the result of persistent despair. Take, for example, many aspects of the modern day, which can be characterized as careless (mindless scrolling, empty activism, and lack of curiosity). I think that level of carelessness is attributed to hopelessness: economic hopelessness, environmental hopelessness, relational hopelessness, and political hopelessness largely. I do not know the remedy to carelessness besides hope, which I can’t ask people to have as much as I can ask them to not think.

However, curiosity can be justified with baseline utilitarian logic (although still relying on the notion of hope) by the idea that to find the most pleasurable/fulfilling experiences, you need to seek them out. Going back to Jerk, through connecting their escape back to nourishment of the self, Cranes symbolically migrated the hyper-reality back to reality, the self (they also physically did it through creating the in-person study group)

This migration is evident in the music, which incorporates several different localities of sounds (ambient music, shoegaze, math rock, footwork, trap beats, etc.) that do not necessarily fit together by any external logic but instead fit by an internal, very personal logic. In this effort, Cranes was able to define the music with their own sense of self rather than letting the music they listened to define who they were, thus grounding their soul to reality.

The essential method of Cranes seems to me an interesting and hypothetically effective method to approach the disorientation of various methods of escapism: the idea of filtering information through an internal logic to take what you find pleasing and, in doing so, center yourself in your identity to have an anchor to approach daily life. Below is Cranes’s soundcloud full of sounds that I see as hopeful for everyone blindsided by the parallel journeys of developing a sense of self and accepting the disorder of reality.