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*Note: This story contains spoilers for the current seasons of *Twin Peaks: The Return and American Gods.

Diane, I'm lost: For the last week and a half, I've been been wrapped in the spastic world of Showtime's Twin Peaks: The Return, the new 18-hour series from gleeful zig-zagger and noted nightmare sommelier David Lynch. Though only four hours in, The Return is already my favorite new series of the year, full of exquisite terrors, concussion-quick humor, and lovingly reintroduced old faces (surely I'm not the only fan who gets near-weepy whenever a Peaks pal like Bobby or the Log Lady wanders back into view after all these years). Here's a show in which Kyle MacLachlan gets to apply his parched comedic skills to, at last count, three different iterations of Dale Cooper; in which an akimbo-limbed tree speaks via a fleshy, bobbing brain-maw-thingee; and in which Michael Cera lisps his way through an impression of a Wild One-era Marlon Brando. Each episode of the new Twin Peaks is a dark hoot of the highest order, and I feel like Mr. Jackpots just for being able to watch them.

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I should also mention that, for the most part, I have no idea what is going on with this show. There are a few plot outlines you can pick up with each installment—like all of Lynch's work, The Return has a forward momentum, even if it's not always discernible—but every new sequence in Twin Peaks sires at least a half-dozen questions: What was the space-floating metal contraption that Cooper visited? Who was the oil-slicked, ghost-like figure sitting in that South Dakota jail cell? Will we ever gaze upon Sam and Tracey's mysterious glass box again? (Speaking of which: Rest in Peaks, Sam and Tracey! Unless, of course, you're somehow still alive, which I suppose is very possible at this point!)

These are the kind of queries that might normally send one to the internet, where an ever-teeming team of culture experts—re-cappers, explainers, best-guessers—stand by every Sunday night at 10:01 pm, ready to tell you What Just Happened. In some ways, this kind of forensics-first approach can be traced back directly to Twin Peaks. In the early '90s, when the first series debuted on ABC, it was an instructive bit of deconstructionism: A network series made to be discussed and scrutinized, with Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost inspiring questions about the show's narrative (Who killed Laura Palmer?) as well as the medium itself (If a TV drama can get away with flashbacks and dream sequences, then what else can you get away with?). The modern web didn't exist when Twin Peaks premiered, but those sorts of thoughtful debates both predicted and informed the way we'd eventually talk about TV online.

But in the case of Twin Peaks: The Return, such well-intentioned hunches feel pointless—and, at least for me, totally joyless. Twitter and Facebook have made it possible for us to lob opinions and theories as soon the closing credits roll, but they've also made it tough to become giddily, utterly caught in the grasp of an immersive piece of art. Twin Peaks: The Return has that sort of lingering hold, in part because it's such a goofy marvel to behold, but also because the episodes never come to any sort of definitive conclusion. Instead, they simply float away on the back of a Chromatics synth or some Cactus Brothers harmonies, then remain lodged in your subconscious while you await the next Return. Asking "Wait, what's really going on here?" in the middle of this of ever-rare reverie feels like the exact opposite of curiosity. After all, the more you know what's going to appear in the big glass box—my lazy box-as-TV analogy, not Lynch's—the less face-chewed you'll be by the results.

Such let's-just-see-where-this-goes immersion is also one of the pleasures of the *other * current Sunday-night TV fun house: Starz's American Gods. Unlike Twin Peaks, Bryan Fuller and Michael Green's Gods—which depicts a planet-threatening power-struggle between its titular titans—is theoretically knowable, having been adapted from the 2001 novel by Neil Gaiman. For anyone who, like me, finds themselves occasionally confounded by the show's expansive cast, metaphysics-bending laws of nature, and pop-culture riffage, there are countless *Gods *primers and decoders available online.

Yet it's hard to imagine why anyone would even want to figure out everything that's going on in this gorgeous brain-poker of a show. On Gods, heroes and villains are introduced without hand-holding or hand-wringing; they simply show up and plunge into the action, their greater motivations sometimes not made clear for weeks, if at all. The world of Gods is less surreal than the world of Peaks, but it's just as ravishingly cuckoo: There's a bar-brawling leprechaun and a literally firey-eyed taxi driver; a morph-happy god, played by Gillian Anderson, who inhabits the form of Lucille Ball, Marilyn Monroe, and Aladdin Sane-era Bowie; and a roof-dwelling watcher who, at one point, plucks the moon out of an impossibly perfect nighttime sky. To get an idea of just how strange this show is, consider that one of American Gods' most relatively normal characters is played by Crispin Glover.

And, like Twin Peaks, the stunning-looking Gods casts a small-screen spell that's best left unexamined, in order for it to remain unbroken. The show has a hard-to-pin rhythm—some characters appear only in brief vignettes; others, like Ricky Whittles' Shadow Moon, can take over entire episodes—that allows Green and Fuller to make each episode as narratively elastic as possible. And every scene in Gods is saturated in a daring, beyond-garish visual palette that makes its most out-there moments (like a nighttime desert-sex scene between two fire-consumed, liquid-skinned men) all the more grandly hypnotic. To stray too far away from this version of Gods by wiki-seeking every still-undisclosed detail would be like pinching yourself awake during an especially dazzling dream. For now, the best way to enjoy both Twin Peaks: The Return and American Gods might be to surrender to their utter weirdness, maybe even try to savor it—ideally, with a piece of pie and some damn good coffee.

The question was simple enough: “Where the hell is Kendall Jenner with her Pepsi 12 packs?” As terror enveloped Charlottesville during the “Unite the Right” rally on Saturday, where hundreds of neo-Nazis and Klansmen violently mobilized in a mutinous showing of white pride to challenge the removal of confederate statues, that was all it took to resonate with tens of thousands. Though cloaked in humor, its meaning cut deep, the mockery of Pepsi’s ill-conceived April TV ad distilling how racial and social harmony in America remains something of a joke.

The reaction was neither unexpected nor the exception—on Twitter, the binding of anguish, cynicism, and satire has become a shared lingua franca in the wake of national torment.

I spent the weekend in Cleveland, mostly offline, celebrating a friend's wedding. What news I did consume, as I attempted to make sense of the Charlottesville protest turned melee, came via Twitter: images depicted ghoul-faced white men hoisting torches in medieval defiance, of bodies being launched into the air, and of extremists bludgeoning Deandre Harris, a young black man, as he fell to the concrete. There were people who assembled to honor the life of Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old woman killed during the rally’s fallout. Tweets, too, memorialized the names of individuals like Heyer who were victims of recent incidents grounded in gruesome racial contempt.

In spite of Twitter's capacity to rapidly disseminate news like few other digital rostrums, many of its critics (and users) fear that the social hub has largely become a cesspool of snark and nonsense; “everyone is bad” and “never tweet” are frequent rejoinders to the madness that the platform has been known to spur. In the wake of an occurrence like Charlottesville, one of such ferocity—when deep hatred, out-and-out racism, and death foment in disastrous concert—Twitter becomes a conduit for externalized grief. My feed turned into a tempest of trauma and humor, an emotional battleground yoked by what writer Hilton Als once solemnly described as “a reality I didn’t want to know.”

Rampant denial of America’s past—with its history of slavery, redlining, and mass incarceration— led to tongue-in-cheek tweets about shallow white allyship and President Trump’s equivocating “on many sides” statement. In the aftermath of homegrown extremism or tragedy, a new contagion often emerges, built on innocence and patriotism; stock expressions like “I can’t believe this is happening” or “We are better than this” become a handy, if fictitious, narrative. But on Twitter, such sentiments are relentlessly met with a chorus of ridicule and truth.

There’s also the exhaustion many feel at having to address white ignorance in moments of racial conflict.

The jokes, and their surprisingly codified form, are all part of the Twitter cycle—the news and the grief never outweigh or dilute the humor, and vice versa. And for many of Twitter’s marginalized participants, be they black or gay or female, humor functions as a necessary safeguard. “The absurdity of reality—the only way for many people to deal with that is satire and comedy,” says Charisse L’Pree, who teaches media psychology at Syracuse University.

L’Pree believes microblogging platforms like Tumblr and Twitter have become overwhelmed with people’s desire to share, which often escalates in times of crisis. “This is a process by which we cope with tragedy when there is a very visible white power movement happening,” she says of tweets like Jenkins’. But she is careful to clarify: “It’s a pretty standard reaction; we just see the evidence more because of social media. But the frequency of retweets demonstrates that what this person is saying is actually reaching and resonating with people.”

How we’ve learned to shoulder the terror, in the real world and the world we construct online, is perhaps the most telling. The footage and first-hand accounts out of Charlottesville have been at once crushing and completely unsurprising, a reflection of an America many have endured before and are likely to endure again. For those geographically removed from the mayhem, Twitter acts as a necessary remedy. It is a coarse statement, but a no less true one: humor soothes.

Early Sunday morning, I came across an image on my timeline. The photograph had been taken a month before, at a similar "save the statue" Klan rally, but it couldn't have felt more timely. A black man in jean shorts sits somewhere in the vicinity of the protest, smoking a cigarette. He looks untroubled, calm. Wholly unbothered. In his hand he holds a sign that reads “Fuck yo statue.” I laughed for a second, thinking of Chappelle’s Show’s watershed sketch about funk musician Rick James, and then I did what I always do. I kept scrolling.

The anatomy of a Little Simz song doesn’t offer itself up easily. On the recent “Good For What,” a whir of tough North London bristle, the rapper born Simbiatu Ajikawo contemplates early successes. “Look at young Simbi in Vogue/Look at young Simbi in Forbes,” she says in the video, merrily skating through the streets of Los Angeles. “Well someone’s gotta do it right/Someone’s gotta open doors.” As British rap has found more footing in US markets over the last handful of years, taking a bigger share in the international mainstream—partially owed to a greater cross-cultural exchange among artists themselves—Simz has come to represent how music can best travel among divergent cultures in our increasingly globalized world.

One argument, familiar to anyone privy to the nativism of Donald Trump and his ilk, contends that globalization actually dilutes local cultures. In popularizing the customs of a given community, the thinking goes, these things in some way lose their truer essence. We've seen that argument play out with Drake, whose ardent obsession with UK culture has granted artists like Jorja Smith, Skepta, and Giggs more mainstream visibility in North America. Simz’s rise is, in part, a rebuke to that thinking, taking the independent route with the creation of her own label: she proves that the best conduit can still be the self, even when it’s away from home.

Metaphor or not, “Good For What” finds the young Brit looking back even as she pilots forward, taking solace in the palm-treed environs of Southern California but still every bit the girl who grew up under the metal skies of Islington. The music, all backbone and unflinching emotional lucidity, may have changed locations, but it’s remained unmistakably Simz, a posture that is no mere performance. “I was made for this shit,” she declares, over Astronote’s murky, atmospheric production. And later attests: “Cause this is bigger than you thought/Thought I was finished, let me give you more.”

“More” has never been a problem for Simz. She is a covetous creator, having collaborated with artists like reggae revivalist Chronixx, Rihanna songwriter Bibi Bourelly, and soul experimentalist Iman Omari; toured with the Gorillaz; and dropped 11 projects since 2010 (a blend of albums, mixtapes, and EPs). There’s been no disconnect in Simz’s presence stateside, either. When she initiated one of the several freestyle cyphers at the BET Hip-Hop Awards in mid October, she did so as the only black woman artist hailing from the UK. With a pinch of English cool, the 23-year-old rapper spoke of her adolescence and the tirelessness it took to overcome the likelihood of turning into just another cultural data point. “Who’d thought this would happen/ teachers would tap me funny when I said I’d make it from rapping,” she offered in the minute-long verse.

Though the cypher included brash ascendants like Detroit's Tee Grizzley and Atlanta sing-rap polymath 6lack, Simz held court like a seasoned pro: dynamic and levelheaded, if exceedingly expeditious in her layered delivery. Her authority carries little surprise to anyone who has followed the young rapper's continued climb, gaining traction in the US since issuing her seductively ruminative E.D.G.E. EP on SoundCloud in 2014 (the breakout track “Devour” has since amassed 3.65 million streams).

Still, the most radical element of Simz’s arsenal may be her grandiosity. A song like “Good For What”—with its puffed-up moxie and tales of shrewd diligence—provides another roadway into her appeal by better refining the many avatars she dons so effortlessly, accentuating the social realities of black women. Simz’s sustained output has also allowed her to be even more elastic in her selfhood. There is a vulnerable intensity alive in her work; it satiates but jars the soul, lines so ordinary you forget how much power they hold in one’s own life. “My imperfections make me who I plan to be” she sang on “Doorway + Trust Issues,” from January’s Stillness In Wonderland (the deluxe edition, which features seven new songs including “Good For What,” releases November 4).

The final shot in the video for “Good For What” zeroes in on Little Simz, standing by herself in the middle of a nondescript LA street, the line “Look at me, once again I was made for this shit” looping in the background. The message is unmissable: no matter where she’s at, it’s best we leave the translation up to her.

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Edgar Wright's Baby Driver begins the way most capers end: three goons pulling off a bank heist, then their getaway driver leaving the cops in his rearview. Unlike most capers, though, the escapade goes down to the pulse-pounding strains of The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion's "Bellbottoms." It’s a whiplash-inducing rush that lays more than a dozen cars to waste and doesn’t let up for the song’s entire 5:16 runtime, each screeching turn and crash perfectly timed to the track's churning rhythm. And it ought to be—Wright’s been plotting it ever since he heard "Bellbottoms" in 1995. “That moment was the closest I’ve ever come to synesthesia,” the writer-director says. “I would listen to that song and start visualizing a car chase.” As a result, he made a movie perfect for a song, instead of finding a song perfect for his movie.

What’s incredible, though, is that when he dreamed up Baby Driver—arguably the first film to make the iPod a central character—most people were still making each other mixtapes. Back when “Bellbottoms” was released, folks couldn’t dance down the street with 3,000 songs at their disposal. Even with the 15 you could cram onto a single side of a cassette, cuing up the right track at the right time was just about impossible. Portable CD players helped deliver music faster and more accurately, but they skipped constantly if you tried to walk with them having anything more than the slightest spring in your step. iPods and their non-Apple mp3-playing ilk changed all that, allowing hundreds of hours of music to be stuffed in your pocket ready to be cued up during just the right moment.

“For the first time, which wasn’t the case with the Walkman or the Discman, the iPod meant people could basically start soundtracking their own lives,” says Wright.

That’s what getaway driver Baby does throughout the movie. Looking to fulfill a debt to the crime boss Doc (Kevin Spacey), he times every heist to a specific song. A sufferer of tinnitus, he needs the music focus on the road—to drown out the hum in his ears and the chaos around him. That leads to some exquisitely crafted car chases, but it also leads to some moments more relatable to folks who don’t know how to execute proper donuts. Like, for example, the time Baby goes on a coffee run set entirely to Bob & Earl’s “Harlem Shuffle.” We've all had that moment, all known instinctively based on the weather, mood, or activity just what song to cue up, then timed every footstep or lane change to that said song. For music fans, getting it right feels like high-fiving a million angels. For a director like Wright, making a movie that way is downright genius.

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Lots of directors make movies with soundtracks in mind—and often have songs in mind when they develop their films. Quentin Tarantino and Cameron Crowe are both known for this, but Wright took it a step further, timing scenes to the songs he knew he was going to use. Instead of syncing the action to a track as the movie was being edited, it was shot to be beat-for-beat—just like we all do when we time our morning run to Beyoncé’s “Ring the Alarm” (or, you know, whatever is on your sprint mix).

“When life starts to sync up with your soundtrack, it’s a magical moment," Wright says. "If it’s something where you’re walking and it’s cloudy and the sun comes out in time with a bit in the song you feel like you’re omnipotent—so Baby Driver is an entire movie made up of moments like that.”

As a result, Baby Driver feels like a rollicking action movie that just happens to plays like the fantasy everyone has experienced when the bassline of their favorite song times perfectly to their footfall—it’s just that when Baby’s foot falls its dropping the pedal to the floor.

The next time you watch George A. Romero’s classic 1968 creepshow Night of the Living Dead, do your best not to look away. It won’t be easy, as the zombie-zeitgeist-defining shocker—filmed in stark black-and-white, and populated with terrifyingly dead-eyed human-hunters—still has the power to unnerve, nearly 50 years after its release. But take a closer look, and you might get a sense of just how much low-budget derring-do and luck was involved in making one of the most epochal horror films of all time. “There’s a copy of the script visible in one of the frames!” Romero told the New York Times last year. “I won’t tell where. It will be a little challenge for fans to spot it.”

Romero, who died Sunday at the age of 77 after a brief bout with lung cancer, directed several smart-schlock joy-rides during his decades-long stint as a director and writer, including 1973’s bio-shock thriller The Crazies, the 1978 blood-sucking drama Martin, and 1982’s lovingly yucky comics adaptation Creepshow. But his long-running career was always better off dead, thanks to a series of socially minded zombie movies that began with Night—which Romero and a bunch of friends shot in rural Pennsylvania at a reported cost of just $114,000. (The production was so commando that, at one point, a member of the film’s production team borrowed his mother’s car to shoot a scene, and wound up smashing the windshield; he repaired the damage before she could find out).

Romero didn’t invent the zombie movie, but he did reanimate it, using cheap-but-effective effects, patient camerawork, and amateur actors to give the movie an almost documentary-like urgency. As a result, Night went on to earn millions at drive-ins and college theaters across the country, making it one of the biggest independent smashes of the century, and a clear influence on everything from 28 Days Later to World War Z to The Walking Dead.

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Still, it wasn’t just the movie’s eerily determined flesh-eaters that made Night of the Living Dead a hit; it was the suffocating on- and off-screen mood it captured. Released during one of the most divisive and paranoia-prone years of the ’60s, Night climaxed with a harrowing finale, in which an African-American survivor (played by Duane Jones) survives a bloody night of zombie-fighting—only to be shot dead by a white gunman. It was a savage bit of social commentary snuck into a midnight movie, and though Romero maintained that the movie wasn’t supposed to be a racial allegory, Night nonetheless proved that horror films were an ideal vessel with which to examine the nightmares of our real world. As Get Out writer-director Jordan Peele noted earlier this year, “the way [Night of the Living Dead] handles race is so essential to what makes it great.”

Romero would make five follow-ups to his shambling breakout, and though 1985’s barf-cajoling Day of the Dead and 2005’s Land of the Dead were both gross, groovy B-movie fun, his greatest work was 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, which followed a team of survivors as they hid out in a zombie-infested shopping mall. Dawn’s anti-consumerism message was a hoot, and the movie could have functioned as pure camp alone—except it remains downright terrifying, full of anatomically detailed gore (all hail gross-out king Tom Savini!), believably desperate heroes (and baddies), and hordes of lurching, formerly luxury-seeking zombies whose dead-eyed lust for more, more, more! seemed awfully human. Dawn comes to mind every time I drive by an empty shopping center, or gaze at a dead-mall photo gallery, and it proved that few other filmmakers understood our base desires—and their ruinous effects—quite as well as Romero. "When there's no more room in hell,” a character says in the movie’s most famous quote, “the dead will walk the Earth." Thanks to Romero, we all got to experience that hell from a safe, scared-brainless distance.

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Just over a month ago, Fusion reporter Emma Roller did exactly what the far-right internet wanted her to do: she believed 4chan. For months, the online message board had been engaging in an informal propaganda operation, discussing innocuous gestures and symbols as though they were secret signals among white-supremacist groups. The "OK" symbol emerged as a favorite of those gestures, and the ultra-far-right media got in on the joke. So when Roller saw an image of self-described "national security reporter" Mike Cernovich and his colleague Cassandra Fairbanks doing it, she retweeted it—along with the message, "just two people doing a white power hand gesture in the White House."

Now she's facing a defamation lawsuit. While both Cernovich and Fairbanks have been open about intentionally participating in the troll, Fairbanks—at the time an employee of Kremlin-owned site Sputnik, and now working for the Breitbart-alum run Big League Politics—is now suing Roller for falsely claiming that she's a white supremacist. (Roller's tweet has since been deleted.)

If you've spent much time on social media, you've seen this tactic before: someone trying to slip out of their rhetorical bind by claiming that their offending statement had been a joke, and that you're just being hypersensitive. That thing where someone wears irony as a defense, hiding their true motives? What is that?

That, friend, is Poe's Law: On the internet, it's impossible to tell who is joking. In other words, it's the thinking person's ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. But Poe's Law isn't only useful as a defense against pearl-clutching reactions. It's also a diagnosis of exactly how the troll mentality has weakened internet culture. If nobody knows what anyone means, then every denial is plausible.

A degree of ambiguity has always been baked into internet exchanges. "Usenet in the '80s, community guidelines would often indicate that it was hard to tell if someone was being silly or sincere," says Ryan Milner, author of The World Made Meme. But the first person to codify this particular digital phenomenon was a user calling himself "Nathan Poe," on a creationist forum in 2005. During a discussion about perceived flaws in the theory of evolution, people began bemoaning how difficult it was to divine if participants were for real. Then Poe (who has never been identified IRL) posted this axiom: "POE’S LAW: Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won’t mistake for the genuine article."

Since then, the concept has grown far from its creationist origins. "It's a big part of the culture of collective spaces like 4chan or Reddit, where people don’t know each other interpersonally and you can't gauge intention," Milner says. There's even a subreddit called /r/poeslawinaction ____ where users document and discuss ambiguous internet moments. Take, for example, 4chan's infamous /pol/ (short for "politically incorrect") board, where people routinely post obscene and hateful content. Guess how they justify their actions:

It's also spawned pictorial memes of its own.

But because the internet has changed in innumerable ways since 2005, expanding and accelerating all the while, Poe's Law applies to more and more internet interactions. “When social networks used to be bounded by interests, the joke teller could expect that their audience was in on the joke," says Whitney Phillips, author of This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Internet Culture. "Now a single retweet can cause spontaneous global amplification.” That's a lot of people who don't have context for your in-joke.

Meanwhile, 4chan's reach has continued to grow, either through its own profile—thanks to ____ hand-wringing news stories—or the emergence of the alt-right and other troll-leaning groups. With Poe's Law serving as a refuge for more and more scoundrels, it has effectively been weaponized, like so many other memes.

To wit: Breitbart tech editor and "provocateur" Milo Yiannopolous, who clearly understands the escape hatch that ambiguity offers from accusations of prejudice. Yiannopoulos took to Breitbart to make this Poe-etic claim: "Are [the alt-right] actually bigots? No more than death metal devotees in the 80s were actually Satanists. For them, it’s simply a means to fluster their grandparents." He used similar logic to justify actions like leading a racist harassment campaign against actress Leslie Jones, which culminated in his ousting from Twitter. And to plenty of people, that just looked like Twitter not being able to take a joke.

4chan's /b/ board—the original home of 4chan's trolls and their shitposting shock tactics—has an internet-famous boilerplate to the same effect: "The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything written here as fact." (So you can imagine 4chan's delight at mainstream journalists like Roller taking their activities seriously despite the disclaimer.)

Poe's Law doesn't end online, either. “People talking about 'spin in the era of Trump' and 'post truth' don’t talk about politics in terms of Poe’s Law," Phillips says. "But it's there, whenever you’re not sure if you should be mad or just roll your eyes.” It's as present in Julian Assange stoking the Seth Rich conspiracy or Kellyanne Conway's "kidding" about telling people to buy Ivanka Trump's clothing as it is in YouTuber PewDiePie's attempts to justify racism as satire.

Just being able to name the phenomenon makes it a little easier to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ off the little stuff. But it also points to less apathetic way forward. Once you know it's there, Poe's Law begins to lose its potency—especially as a shield for trolls to hide behind. As Milner says, "When all you have are people’s words, then the words and their effect are all that matters."

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Last year the self-professed “communist farmer” and “saxophone kisser” known as Oedipus uploaded a song to SoundCloud, the artist-first music streaming platform that launched in 2008. Titled “Please B Okay”, it was a bright horn-driven melody that sampled vocals from Japanese soul-pop singer Taeko Ohnuki’s 1977 album Sunshower. I first came across the song because I’d been having an atypically unfavorable week and a friend messaged it with the hope of it being a momentary cure-all. “This instantly makes me feel better,” she said. Looking back, her remark shouldn’t have been a surprise: Oedipus had tagged the two-minute track as “selfcarecore”—a sure nod to its calming, feel-good properties.

By conventional industry standards, selfcarecore is not an established music genre, but it carries significance just the same. On SoundCloud, genres thrive on amorphism, defined more by a song’s uncompromising sentiment—rage, anxiety, body-rolling euphoria—than the pulse of the beat or musical composition. (A casual listener might be inclined to label “Please B Okay” as simply house music.) This has given the Berlin-based platform a unique advantage not just in breaking unknown talent but in becoming a breeding ground for experimental sounds.

A cursory scan of the streaming service reveals a deluge of genres: from kawaii trap and Nu Soul to
swooz, broken beat, and
stresswave. There are also artists like Sugg Savage, an ascendant Maryland newcomer who’s creating some of the best music of the moment and has become something of a Picasso in this regard: She has mothered genres as disparate as lowkey gospel (“Let’z”), spirit bounce (“Funk Bounce”), midnight boogie (“Party Dawg”), and bleep bloop blop pop (“Fill In The Blank”). Collectively, her songs could fit somewhere within the expanse of R&B, but a truer estimation of her work shows how each song belongs to a singular classification. “Let’z” draws from a multitude of sources—a Motown-soul-meets-Chicago-juke jambalaya of sonic bliss—but its core is imbued with the essence of gospel music: uplift, faith, a dogged optimism. “You better know he’s got a plan for you,” she croons just before the song’s conclusion, a sweetly sung aphorism that could just as easily have been pulled from the Bible. Hence: lowkey.

In early July, SoundCloud was reported to be on its last leg, having laid off 40 percent of its workforce in a move that, at best, felt reasonably apocalyptic. But cofounder Alexander Ljung remained confident, saying the digital music service, which had hoisted cultural forces like Chance the Rapper and Lorde to national audiences, was still solvent. SoundCloud was “completely unique,” he said. “You can can find artists there that don’t exist anywhere else. Many are the next ones to accept Grammys. There is tremendous financial and cultural impact on SoundCloud. It will stay strong.”

In spite of the company’s nebulous future, Ljung was right about one thing. The platform is an utterly one-of-a-kind domain. If SoundCloud set out to build a business model on community-oriented music streaming for DJs, musicians, nascent podcasters, and mixed-media artists, it soon reflected that plurality in every regard, a network whose parameters seemed borderless. There was a sound for everybody. Stresswave not your thing? Try chillwave. Or funk wave. Or future wave. You would be hard-pressed to find a platform that has allowed for organic discovery as seamlessly as SoundCloud. A handful of my current favorite artists—Nick Hakim, Kwabs, Sonder, and Kaytranada, whose novel flip of Janet Jackson’s enduring ballad “If” I still spin weekly—I first came across on the platform.

In time, too, the service fulfilled its own pledge, becoming a genre itself: SoundCloud rap, or what The New York Times recently deemed “the most vital and disruptive new movement in hip hop thanks to rebellious music, volcanic energy, and occasional acts of malevolence.” It’s a sound predicated on dissonance that prioritizes “abandon over structure, rawness over dexterity” and has been adopted by a crop of Florida upstarts, including Smokepurpp and Lil Pump, whose track “Molly” was one of the highest-played on the platform this month.

Like Chance the Rapper and Lorde before him, the Philadelphia-born rager Lil Uzi Vert parlayed his titanic success on SoundCloud—the company anointed him its most followed artist of 2016—into mainstream sustainability, a major-label deal, and a headlining tour. I shadowed Uzi for a day last summer, from the edges of New Jersey into the heart of the Lower Manhattan, just moments before he took the stage for a sold-out show. He’s been compared to Young Thug and Lil Yachty, rap eccentrics who have come to define a nontraditional hip hop sound. Currently, Uzi’s “XO Tour Llif3” ranks as the fourth-most-played song for the final week of July—coasting just above 1.4 million listens in the span of seven days. It’s a hazy melody about suicide, substance abuse, and his rocky relationship with his ex-girlfriend. But it’s not rap. Not really. On his SoundCloud page, Uzi tagged the song “alternative rock.”

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