About a month ago, I was stepping out of the Nashville Symphony Schermerhorn when I caught a flicker of a familiar face. Not one I could match to a specific voice, name, or glance shared in the past few weeks, but important enough to stir a vague sense of recognition. I took a double take while waiting for an Uber, running through all the faces I’ve seen enough times to recognize in passing. Maybe it was Mitski? She had the same look, the same complexion. But upon my double-take, I decided against approaching her, not out of certainty that it wasn’t her, but a quiet intuition that I really shouldn’t. I didn’t want to be that person—a Stan to her Eminem, one of those six… “fans” at Six Flags to her Tyler. And while a small part of me still regrets letting that potential moment pass, I’ve come to understand my hesitation in a way I hadn’t before—especially after what unfolded Beabadoobee about a week ago.
When you stack Bea’s delicate acoustic ballads against a deep-fried NBA YoungBoy edit spewing operatic tenor vocals and ocular laser beams… the joke writes itself. And sure, it’s funny in that over-the-top internet way, but it’s not exactly hard to imagine why she found it at least a little annoying. The internet expects Bea to just take it, to laugh along even as people deliberately mispronounce her name—contorting it into “Yabadabadoo” like some playground taunt—dismissing her as “an artist who can’t sing,” and dragging out a bit with the subtlety of, as Bea herself put it, “this one dude prodding you with a stick. There’s an unspoken rule in meme culture: if you react, you lose. The second you express frustration, the joke stops being about itself and becomes about you—your supposed fragility, your inability to “take it,” your new role as the internet’s latest main character in its never-ending spectacle of mockery. It’s not enough to be in on the joke; you have to embrace it, play along, and perform gratitude for the attention. Because the moment you push back, the narrative shifts; suddenly, you’re the uptight crashout, the humorless antagonist in someone else’s bit.
To become a meme is to be hollowed out into a vessel for whatever version of you the audience finds most entertaining. The internet is this virtual schoolyard where real people are reduced to caricatures in others’ relentless pursuit of engagement and attention afforded by vaguely amused exhales. The digital world detaches users from tangible consequences. What might typically restrain people from indulging in the lowest and laziest of pleasures—impulses of cruelty, derision, and amusement at someone else’s expense—is absent. Singers are rewritten as tone-deaf, trauma becomes an inconvenience, and self-worth is dismissed as mere cultural illiteracy. Under the guise of a joke, meme culture justifies disregarding authentic, embodied feelings and experiences, like Beabadoobee’s frustrations with hypersexualization, because acknowledging the harm would spoil the fun. Recognizing damage forces users to confront the very consequences that social media platforms are allegedly designed to shelter you from.
And then, just as quickly as it begins, it’s over. The “Beabadoobee can’t sing” meme has already run its course as I write this. By the time this is published, it’ll be a relic of the past. One day, you’re a public enemy, a darling, a villain, an icon; the next, you’re discarded, replaced. The internet moves on at a whim, while the real people rendered as disposable playthings don’t have the privilege of forgetting.
Thinking back to Mitski at the symphony—if it was even her, and if she really did feel the way I thought she did—I think I understand now. After everything she herself has endured—being flattened, spaghettified into a “black hole” for all of her fans’ feelings, their ugliness—it makes sense. She, Beabadoobee, and countless other public figures have experienced this great digital erosion of personal boundaries, forced to exist as projections rather than people. Now more than ever, there’s an instinct to carve out even the smallest space between the artist, one’s art, and the relentless scrutiny of an audience. The least we can do is to give it to them.
Image of Beabadoobee credited to Justin Higuchi. Licensed under CC Attribution 2.0
_(cropped).jpg){kind=link}
Leave a Reply