At times JVKE sounds like an old person's idea of how young people talk, or at least how people who purport to be young end up speaking on the internet. The boy is authentically a boy, so I have to assume he comes by it honestly, but it does make me wonder if people still talk to each other face to face in the cold air where saying something like "It simply doesn't hit the same" has to justify itself against the weight of air. Or maybe the lexicon has moved past me. As it should. He sounds of his time, which he is. Do not fear the present for it is the only gift you will receive.
The truth of the social internet is that it is made for children. Videos are optimized to appeal to not just the young, but the unable to vote. Pop culture has to an extent always been this way. Its job is to manufacture entertainment for children. As individuals age out and around childhood, that interaction changes, but the product is static. Money was at one time the primary metric for success of pop culture's creations, and it still largely is, but the social internet now allows for a suite of other metrics to be introduced into the alchemy of success measurement. Where the idea was once "how many parents will buy this for their children," the idea now is now closer to "how many parents will buy this for their children but also how many children can we get to watch or listen to this." Do not fear this fact anymore than one might fear death, for it is as iron clad and immutable as the cycle of life. This matters since JVKE has the common story of "breaking on the internet." I will look with great interest on the scholarship that will be done about the social and cultural effects COVID-19 and its lockdowns have had on all our brains, but especially young brains. I presume it will be the cultural moment that a generation cannot overcome. Every generation gets the 9/11 it deserves.
JVKE claims his first album will also be his last. His "only," probably more charitable to say. It is not a good practice to uniformly assume that people do not mean what they say but it is reasonable to recognize that people change their minds and there is no such thing as an absolute especially when the person making the absolute statement is in their early 20s. I sincerely hope that JVKE lives long enough and well enough to look back at the things he thought were concrete while his brain was finishing its development with a smile and a chuckle. I hope he knows that the way he was is the way everyone was, and he brings kindness to himself along with whatever twinges or waves of embarrassment or shame might come first.
Religion is the secret engine running underneath the grid. The obvious secret truth of America is its underlying belief in and conscription to the higher power, the worship of God in whatever form that happens to make wherever you are. Those who can nod or feint to religion without bathing themselves in the waters stand to cross over in a way that the edgiest of pop stars will never be able to. This is most commonly manifested in the idea of "not using curse words," or "songs about nice ideas." JVKE goes out of his way to point out, in the loudest and most obvious possible terms both textually and subtextually, that his music is not just about nice ideas, but it does use the safe and approved lexicon of religion to tell its sad tale, which means this music for children gets to be approved by the wallets while still tapping into the overdriven hormonal throbs that all children experience while being young.
In that Earmilk interview, JVKE says his non-religious influences are Kanye West and Drake. I was never all that deep into the alternative music economy of religious music even in my most evangelical days, but I would be very interested to know which religious pop artists he was into. The general way Christian music works is that it provides an extremely faded photo printout of whatever secular music is popular at the time. Want something that sounds like Eminem but puts the worship of god at the center, then you should listen to KJ-52. Want something that sounds like blink-182, then you should listen to Relient K. This is the promise of the christian bookstore, but it also provides an interesting fragmentation into how dominant pop sounds of the moment filter out and rain down like radioactive dust, affecting and mutating all that they touch. And, like his secular heroes, JVKE synthesizes the sounds of the moment into a sellable package. Authenticity will rarely overcome packaging and marketing, another thing to make your peace with.
The most pernicious effect of the evolution of "vibes" from a noun into an adjective, adverb, and verb, is that it is robbing people of the faculty of common poetry we must all use to describe ourselves to each other. Point to "vibes," and let the work of explanation fall on whatever subtextual emotional reality is conveyed by the music or the image. It removes the burden of description, the burden of coding and decoding, and relies on forces outside ourselves to be agreed up and express what we have given up trying to convey ourselves. It allows us to be miles wide and inches deep, to be ice cubes, not icebergs. Pop music does not often support depth, but is consumed width. Let JVKE then take his place as the next springboard, a place from which to hope for or better or more.
One last thought: the back half of "this is what sadness feels like" is both digital blackface and the most comprehensive argument against Future that I can remember hearing.
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