There’s a real feeling behind this sentiment. It can feel like each week, we’re being asked to care about some new shiny 20-something, and they usually disappear as quickly as they arrived. We call them “industry plants” because they seem to crop up out of nowhere, with major label backing and a group of fans we knew nothing about. However, is that what these tweets are actually revealing? Or perhaps it’s a lack of willingness to engage with a new wave of culture. Like it or not, Gen Z is getting older, and if us Gen Zers fail to learn what the next generation of kids are into (Gen Alpha), then we will risk becoming just as “cringe” as we claim millennials are.
Before researching this piece, I had only the foggiest idea who or what “sombr” was. I had only seen him made fun of on Twitter by people who, like me, probably also had no idea who he was. But it’s important that we move past the sting of feeling old and understand what this guy is about. Come with me. He was born in 2005? Ouch! Deep breaths, we must press on. We might actually learn something, and no, we won’t instantaneously spawn wrinkles. Okay, his song “back to friends” has over 1 billion streams on Spotify. So, it seems that we might be late to the party. He sort of sounds like The 1975 or The Neighbourhood, but looks like that guy from The Holdovers. Nothing crazy. It’s actually kind of catchy. Maybe I heard it on TikTok. Now, what about ROLE MODEL? He recently performed on SNL, so that has to mean something. He brought Charli xcx onstage to be his “Sally,” which is apparently the girl referenced in his song “Sally, When The Wine Runs Out.” I know who she is, so I feel a little more comfortable. Okay, exhale, we’ve taken the dive into the great unknown, and we didn’t spontaneously combust into dust. That wasn’t so bad, was it? Now, we at least have a cursory idea of what the kids are into and have avoided becoming cringe.
The internet feels like a young person’s game, and for Gen Z, a generation that grew up with the internet, we’re used to being the young ones. We’re used to being the inscrutable ones, the ones with slang that the world doesn’t seem to comprehend. But the nature of generations means that another one is coming up on our heels as quickly as we can say “ok boomer.” We’ve gotten a taste of that with the barrage of Gen Alpha brainrot (skibidi toilet and the like). But we learned that slang, we made our own memes about it, and folded it into the larger lexicon of the internet. But if we fail to treat the culture of the next generation seriously, it’s going to leave us behind, and we won’t know what hit us. That will be an incredibly destabilizing thing for a generation that prides itself on being in the loop.
That said, there is nothing necessarily wrong with being out of the loop. Keeping up with every new pop act, internet trend, or meme requires being in a near-constant state of anxiety, and that’s not healthy. But it’s also necessary to challenge oneself with new ideas. A recent study found that most people’s music discovery peaks at age 24 and stagnates by the time they turn 30. You settle into the music of your youth and aren’t likely to grow out of that. That seems like a bit of arrested development. Our brains aren’t even fully formed until our mid-20s. Why does our hunger for new music barely make it into adulthood? I think we can push against this. I think it’s our duty to do so.
It’s easy to fall into the comforts of the music we listened to when we were young. It reminds us of the people we used to be and the world we used to live in, which feels simpler. Listening to new music forces us to confront the world as it is now, which is a difficult task when the world is… what it is. We also tend to become less vulnerable as we get older, and it’s harder for art to worm its way into the depths of our hearts than it was when we were fourteen years old, thinking about our first crush. But that doesn’t mean we instantly become closed-off and impenetrable the second we’re off our parents’ health insurance. No, we’re still creatures of culture with hearts and minds that are willing to grow. It’s essential to stay flexible to new ideas so we can change with the times. Listening to music is a big part of that, and an easy one to do.
You don’t have to think that Sombr is the next Bob Dylan. You don’t even have to listen to him. I can’t promise that I will ever stream him again unless I have a younger cousin to impress. But if we fail to even recognize these acts as legitimate, and if we dismiss them without even learning their names, then we deserve to be called chopped uncs.
