1 / HAVE A PASSION IN A MILLION WAY

Who is “Morgan Wallen”?
It’s a question I’ve been asking everyone I know for months now, waiting for lulls in conversation, posing the query at random on Twitter, searching desperately for an answer I fear I already know. Who is “Morgan Wallen”? Anyone? Hello? 
I air-quote him because the name sounds like a Simpsons joke, a parody of a country singer Lisa Simpson would fall in love with only to discover he owned oil fields in Azerbaijan or something. Sure, you’ve got “Morgan”—normal enough, standard name if not super common. Morgan Freeman. Morgan Spurlock. Tracy Morgan. But my favorite website, famous birthdays dot com, shows me the twelve most algorithm-famous Morgans as of summer 2023 and only one of them rings a bell (guess who). I’m not sure the other 11 even truly exist; I can’t trust anything anymore:

Number one, of course, is Morgan Wallen. So that’s his face, allegedly. I probably don’t need to point out that famous birthdays dot com only includes headshots, so the usual method of catching AI-generated people by looking at the hands (“LOOK AT THE HANDS!!” Twitter is always yelling at me, like everyone is auditioning for a Soylent Green remake no one asked for) doesn’t apply here. He looks like a mulleted Jeremy Renner, which I mean as neither compliment nor insult but a third, less meaningful thing.
Anyway, my point is that it’s not the “Morgan” that sounds ridiculous—sorry to his lineage, but it’s the “Wallen.” Or the combination of the two, or whatever. “Morgan Wallen.” Apparently he’s the most famous musical artist in the United States. For 12 weeks now, which could be 20 weeks, 50 weeks for all I know, by the time you read this, he has had the number one album in the nation—the first time in over 30 years that a country album has dominated so thoroughly (hello/goodbye Billy Ray Cyrus). His latest album is one hour and 52 minutes long, which is insane no matter how much you love this stuff, and at one point all 36 of its tracks were charting on the Billboard Hot 100, which is even insaner. It means that there was a week in early March 2023 where more than one third of the most popular songs in the US were not only from the same artist but from the same album. AND they were from an album by someone named “Morgan Wallen” (again: ???), an artist by whom I still have not heard a single song. No clue what he sounds like. I’m guessing he has a Southern accent (again: neither compliment nor insult). I’m guessing there’s a slide guitar. I’m guessing it’s neither the worst nor the best thing in the world. I’m guessing it’s music I would classify as: sure!
I know what many of you are probably thinking about me. This guy just doesn’t listen to country music. And instead of rebutting that I do, just not contemporary country music, not really—other than that Miranda Lambert album last year with the B-52’s that was pretty sweet—I’ll just say you’re right, and that’s kind of my whole point. As someone who grew up more or less alongside the scary but inevitable Clear Channel radio takeover throughout the ‘90s and into the 2000s, it’s becoming more and more unfathomable to me that I no longer recognize the popular music landscape. 
I know that this happens to everyone as they get older and fall out of step with culture, but this is different. Like, famously so. We’ve got no true zeitgeist anymore unless you’re literally the Barbie marketing team or…actually, I can’t think of another recent example. Everything is splintered online now, so much so that even when Beyonce dropped a new album last summer—her best, in my opinion, or at least her Most—chatter online was so persistent and so effusive that I just assumed everyone was in agreement: New Beyonce Good. But that’s the interesting thing about having a “normal” (see also: offline) job. After Renaissance had been out for a couple of weeks, I had one person at work who could talk about it with me face to face; everyone else either a.) didn’t know what I was talking about, b.) had heard that Beyonce had released something but hadn’t listened to it yet (!!! imagine.), or c.) didn’t like the album very much. I felt like I was going insane, like the broken factions of the internet had turned the real world into one big gaslight.
Thus: “Morgan Wallen.” The most famous man in the world, apparently. Or, at least, the most famous Morgan.

2 / CYBER SYSTEM OVERLOAD

Because of the dreadful flattening of time that Covid’s wrought, it’s impossible to determine whether the concept of a “song of the summer” has been around for the past five years, my entire life, the history of recorded music, or somewhere in between all of that. People love having a song of the summer; it makes them feral. Even when you’re a full adult with a job, even when you haven’t had “summers off” in over a decade, something about the summer still feels like freedom, like endless possibility and Good Times. It’s also the time of year where we all work as hard as we can to find common ground in a world of front-facing video clips, vertical integration, and culture’s ouroboros-like eating of its own shedding tail. (When I say we, of course, I mean the internet, the only valid first-person plural of the past 20 years, and when I say we work to find common ground, of course, I mean we make BuzzFeed infographics on slow news days.) What I’m getting at I guess is that we want a song that embodies what summer means; more than that, maybe, we all just want to get along.
I think at this point, mid-August, it’s safe to say that we (again: internet) have decreed this year’s song of the summer to be New York comedian Kyle Gordon’s 50-second excerpt of a joke song “Planet of the Bass.” It’s just a chorus and a verse, but it’s also kind of a masterpiece, obviously. A year from now people will barely remember it even existed; Kyle Gordon will probably have made two more songs as this character (DJ Crazy Times (perfect, no notes)), neither of which will capture the public’s interest in the same way and the second of which will actively make many people angry. No one likes it when someone drives a bit into the ground, which is why some people hate Kristen Wiig (those people are wrong).

By now, the full version of “Planet of the Bass” has been released with an accompanying music video, and honestly? It’s pretty great—definitely funnier than expected, going into little specific corners of pastiche that you wouldn’t expect (the fake phone call at the end being my favorite touch). You can tell Gordon knows where the juice is because he hits the chorus twice and doesn’t try to add an extra verse for himself; there’s basically a new, pitch-perfect intro and a pitch-perfectly-serviceable new verse at the top for his accomplice, Ms. Biljana Electronica (performed on camera by Instagram influencer (“actress”) Audrey Trullinger, and sung by Chrissi Poland, neither of whom have seemed overly invested in the project—Poland in particular, whose social media is too busy advertising her own upcoming gigs and music releases (genuinely: good for her) to bother with literally being the voice of a massive summer anthem). The day the full version of the song came out, the Jonas Brothers invited Gordon and Trullinger to perform it on stage in the middle of their concert. They ran around on stage saying things like “Bratislava!” and “world peace!” to 18,000 befuddled Bostonians. In the world we live in, these things happen now.

Anyway, yes, there’s a full version—but that initial 50-second clip is the real song of the summer. It jumps in right before the chorus and gets out just quick enough to leave you wanting more. They filmed the first video somewhere iconic in New York that I won’t even pretend to recognize but lots of New York-centric look-at-mes know what it is and have made sure everyone else knows a hundred times over as well. The editing is impeccable, not only as a narrative device but as an indicator of the very specific era it’s parodying. Embarrassingly, the official MTV Instagram account posted a clip of the song and wrote that it would have gone number one on TRL in 2003—they’re not wrong; it’s just always embarrassing to see a brand posting anything full stop. Trullinger’s costuming and hair was so immediately iconic in this initial drop that when in the full video her character undergoes a transition and she winds up back in her white-and-pink get-up it feels like Iron Man suiting up in an Avengers movie (or Oppenheimer dramatically putting on his hat in Oppenheimer, a moment that made my audience laugh aloud at both of my otherwise very somber, very serious viewings of the film). There was some kind of ineffable magic in the first “Planet of the Bass” video that worked, which I guess is always the point of trying to go viral—and trust me, most days, most people are trying to go viral.

3 / THERE IS NOTHING TO BE SAD

For the past 10 years, to make money, I’ve taught English and History to middle and high school students. One of my favorite writing prompts is a pretty simple one: Did the invention of the internet bring more good or bad into this world? Why, and where? Get specific.
I love what this brings out of my students, and as you can imagine most of them are pretty astute—I’ve never yet received a response that puts the internet fully into the “pro” column. Most kids (would never call them “kids” to their faces) hover somewhere around the “well…it’s complicated” zone: yes, I use the internet literally constantly, oftentimes even while you’re talking directly to me, but I do think it’s mostly a hellhole. And as a full adult who grew up without social media (AIM doesn’t count) but who is now similarly online all the time, way too much, refuse to think too much about what it’s doing to me, etc., I can recognize a cry for help when I hear one. Maybe all that the internet promised came true (yay!), but then it just kept going (oh no…). Maybe when we lost any sense of the local we lost some sense of ourselves.
But, look. Without the internet, I wouldn’t have met a lot of people whom I admire so deeply and have come to call friends. Without the internet, I wouldn’t feel like I exist in nearly the same way. Like a lot of people, I’ve built a little corner for myself on the internet where I have a name, a being, a cyberspace to call my own. I’m proud of the things I’ve interneted; I have poured more hours and money than I care to recount into building online communities that I hope above all else feel personal and inviting, like little vehicles for joy. I have a life offline—we all do (...right?). But most of us of a certain age walk through the physical world embodying the meme of the guy in the corner at a party thinking “They don’t know I’m too online.” And everyone else, of course, is thinking “We do.” “We know.” “Us too.”
I do worry, though, that this is all there is unless we make something out of it, and the more that time goes by the more apparent it is to me that the scales are shifting. The balance is off. More “distanceness” than “togetherness.” More “what the fuck are you all talking about” than “I’m so glad we’re all in this together.” It seems almost too obvious and too simplistic to say, but the death of Twitter has a lot to do with it, with ad spaces becoming bigger, more frequent, harder to spot, and the general sinking ship vibe that AI has wrought on the whole enterprise over the course of the past year-plus. It’s why so many of us have been so thrilled to see this summer’s frantic and celebratory return to movie theaters—finally, it seems, in this one way at least, pandemic acknowledged, people seem to be waking up to the fact that community without the warmth of a shared physics, breath and bumped shoulders and bad haircuts and whispers in the dark, is an exercise only in ignoring what’s lacking.
So will “Planet of the Bass” give us anything more than a few weeks of joy? Did it ever need to? We’ll take any little excuse for a brief shared language; it’s an oasis in the wide and unrelenting online desert. The question I’m more interested in is whether or not we’ll ever find our way back to a life full of days like this. The desert used to be a decadent verdance, a collection of connected villages sharing the fruits of various labors and speaking in tongues that resonated, built up, sought a similar cadence. Even with the internet, we had this. A zeitgeist—zeitgeists, even—even amidst the eternal branching. I should know who Morgan Wallen is. Shouldn’t I? Is this just how the world works now? Are we so dedicated to “our people” that we’ve lost sight of…well…people? So focused on our selves that we’ve lost sight of ourselves? Anyone? Hello?

4 / HELLO, ARE YOU AT PHONE?

When I was a kid, my mom used to rollerblade around our neighborhood every day with a cassingle of Crystal Waters’ “100% Pure Love” running in a loop in her Walkman. It must have been the three-minute radio edit on side A and the eight-minute club mix on side B. After work and on weekends she’d strap on her blades and wrist guards in the driveway and hit the pavement, speeding around the cul-de-sac, heading down the hill and disappearing into the suburbs of central Virginia. These were not the happiest days of her life, and something about “100% Pure Love” must have unlocked a release in her that felt like power. The muscles in her legs. The sweat through her tank top. The drum machine. The bass.
It’s a good song, but more so than that when I listen to it I feel like a child. I picture my mother putting her hair into a ponytail and hear the crank of the plastic tightening belt on her rollerblades. I see the dog next door who once tore apart our cat. I remember my parents’ divorce not long after. I have no clue how well-known “100% Pure Love” actually is, whether it’s a lesser club hit or on the same level as “Gonna Make You Sweat” (the high watermark).
OK, I just cheated and looked it up: it peaked at number 11 on the Billboard charts in October 1994, behind masterpieces like “I’ll Make Love to You,” “All I Wanna Do,” and “Stay (I Missed You),” but also totally forgotten anomalies like “Stroke You Up” by Changing Faces and “Never Lie” by Immature (I wanted to be that 13-year-old boy in an eyepatch so bad…). If I played “100% Pure Love” for one of my students, they would have no clue what was happening. If I played it for someone my age, results may vary. For someone slightly older, they’d ask to turn it up. Sounds about right.
And what if I turned on the radio right now? Which Morgan Wallen song would be playing? Does some itinerant DJ have “Planet of the Bass” in their rotation, as a bit? I’m sure if you searched for it in your podcast app of choice you’d find a dozen people talking for an hour about its viral takeover. If I played it for one of my students, though, would they ask to turn it up? Do they put on Morgan Wallen when their mom hands them the aux on the drive home from school? Just kidding about that last one—no one shares music anymore. Boomer.
So I wonder if this is all we have now: a shared nostalgia to bring us together; a vague feeling we’re all constantly grasping at, shouting jokes into a void we call a community until someone shouts a better one back. I wonder if I’ll ever get used to it. I wonder if I need to. “Planet of the Bass” doesn’t give me hope, but it does make me laugh, and that’s better than despair. Sometimes, it can even feel like pure love. 100%.

Brad Efford edits the online journal wig-wag and co-hosts Film Fest, a podcast about movies. He lives in the Bay Area.