The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Wednesday, April 7, 2021 — 7

What first comes to mind when 

you hear the term SoundCloud rap? 
Perhaps you envision an immature 
group of teens with colorfully-dyed 
hair and face tattoos, rapping about 
prescription drugs. Maybe the term 
connotes a sense of rebelliousness that 
brings to mind exciting, unfiltered 
discoveries found on the internet. 
It could remind you of your own 
blunders and self-produced lo-fi beats 
you wish will never see the light of day. 
Regardless of your relationship to the 
genre, it seems that this simple two-
word phrase elicits strong reactions 
from every Gen Z, tech-savvy music 
listener.

However, though mentions of the 

genre are a staple in music discourse, 
defining the short-lived moment of 
SoundCloud rap (often derogatorily 
referred to as mumble rap) is a task 
ranging from arduous to impossible.

During the last decade, the 

audience for the music streaming 
service SoundCloud exploded into the 
hundreds of millions. With a utopian 
vision of accessible music creation 
for the people, SoundCloud became 
a champion for any up-and-coming 
artist. New musicians, without ever 
having to leave their bedroom, gained 
stratospheric stardom, circumventing 
the conventional methods of going to 
professional studios and working with 
record labels. SoundCloud’s design 
is more aligned with social media 
websites than streaming services, 
which lowers the barrier between 
artist and audience. This gave a 
massive advantage to musicians who 
interacted with their fans online. 
Behind the scenes, SoundCloud’s 
unprecedented success shook the 
music industry to its core.

What we think of as SoundCloud 

rap is emblematic of the platform 

it spawned from. With harsh, raw 
instrumentals, 
SoundCloud 
rap 

embodies the DIY nature of its 
platform. Songs like XXXTentacion’s 
“Look at Me” (which currently has 
over 189 million plays on SoundCloud) 
contain blown-out vocals and very 
minimal mixing. Lil Pump’s “Gucci 
Gang” (which peaked at number 
three on Billboard’s Hot 100) trades 
songwriting for the repetition of the 
phrase “Gucci gang” 53 times. For 
outsiders of the genre, this style of 
production may make SoundCloud 
rappers seem lazy and their music 
seem inaccessible, but for fans, this 
amateur aesthetic only heightens the 
listening experience.

These 
rappers, 
boasting 

ostentatious 
personalities, 
mind-

numbing music and underground 
origins may elicit strong parallels to 
the punk movement of the late ’70s 
and early ’80s. Rather ironically, most 
SoundCloud rappers have ditched the 
platform of their namesake and got 
snatched up by large record labels, 
leaving SoundCloud rap to embody the 
spirit of the early punk scene. Where 
punk was a stripped-down, aggressive 
and often nihilistic response to the 
maximalism of mainstream rock, 
SoundCloud rap responded similarly to 
the excess of mainstream hip-hop with 
hostile, anti-authoritarian attitudes. 

SoundCloud rappers are much 

more likely to write songs about 
taking drugs than dealing them, 
and the content of their songs is 
centered around depression and self-
destruction, unlike mainstream rap’s 
obsession with ego inflation.

Similar to punk, SoundCloud 

rappers are overwhelmingly young. 
Many SoundCloud rappers, such as 
Tekashi69, Lil Peep and Ski Mask the 
Slump God, all gained tremendous 
fame before their 18th birthdays. 

I have this one memory that I’m 

not sure is even real. I can vividly see 
my infant self gazing up at our green 
marble countertop, struggling and 
struggling to reach some Flintstones 
vitamins my mom left out. My 
chubby little hands barely reach the 
wood beneath the stone, and then 
suddenly I morph into a bigger (but 
still quite little) four-year-old. Taller 
and smarter, I rise up on my tippy-
toes, swipe up Fred and Barney and 
chomp. 

As ridiculous as it sounds, I feel 

like that actually happened, and 
this has often led me to question the 
true nature of our relationship with 
memory. How much of what we go 
through is real, especially as children? 
What if what we think we remember 
is simply an illusion, a mirage, a false 
memory planted by our malleable 
young minds? For something to truly 
stick, you’d think it would have to be 
important or jarring or memorable. 
That said, Dontnod Entertainment’s 

2020 narrative adventure game “Tell 
Me Why” argues that our pasts are 
much less certain than we have been 
led to believe.

“Tell Me Why” follows Alyson 

and Tyler Ronan as they attempt to 
sell their childhood house 10 years 
after their mother attempted to kill 
them there. By confronting their 
past, they learn everything is not as 
they remember and must dig into 
the mystery behind why Mary-Ann 
Ronan wanted to kill her kids. 

The Ronan siblings possess a 

telekinetic bond that allows them to 
wordlessly communicate with one 
another and replay ancient memories 
in an effort to learn more about 
their tragedy. Over the course of the 
game’s three chapters, the siblings 
will remember an event in two 
very different ways, forcing players 
to decide which events actually 
occurred. Maybe you will trust 
Tyler, a transgender youth sent off 
to Fireweed Residential Center after 
stabbing his “deranged” mother out 
of self-defense. Or maybe you will 
pick Alyson, who grew up under the 
protective eye of the town sheriff and 

was branded “murder house girl” for 
her entire childhood. 

Since Tyler is a member of the 

LGBTQ+ community, the question of 
memory becomes doubly important. 
Can he trace back the memories to 
when he first began to feel dysphoric? 
What about the memories of when 
he realized he was gay? Which 
came first: the gender or the sexual 
orientation? 

In my personal experience, the 

arduous process of self-identification 
began without any build-up, yet 
after accepting my truth, I found 
hints scattered throughout my 
childhood. Old memories that once 
passed by without a second glance 
transformed into small windows 
gazing directly at something within 
me that I had no words to express. 
Where once stood an arid desert 
of 
disconnected 
repression, 
a 

newfound flowing river of memory 
ran freely. 

When examined, these hints make 

it intensely clear how inevitable and 
natural my current identity is — I was 
just remembering things wrong. I 
was always meant to find myself and 

live this truth; it simply took 20 years 
of experience for me to realize it. 

For 
those 
in 
the 
LGBTQ+ 

community, the issue becomes not 
only trusting but identifying with the 
past versions of ourselves — someone 
who feels miles away from who we 
are now, but we know at one point 
we stood there, in their shoes, living 
their “normal” experience. Tyler 
faces this dilemma constantly: He is 
not the same person he was 10 years 
ago, yet he must unearth the causes 
of what happened in order to finally 
let go.

In the end, it doesn’t matter which 

memories you choose in a particular 
playthrough of “Tell Me Why.” Sure 
it will impact Alyson and Tyler, but 
each playthrough acts as our own 
memory of the game; each person’s 
journey will be different and personal 
with distinctly hard to recall details. 
What “Tell Me Why” wants players to 
understand is that the past is the past, 
and that “the second you walk away 
from something, that’s it.” The past is 
what we want it to be right now.

Where once stood Ollie Ronan 

— an earlier assumed name, the 

game thankfully never deadnames 
Tyler — the sister who felt more like 
a brother, now stands Tyler Ronan, 
all bearded out and confident in 
his masculinity. We cannot change 
what happened in the past, just 
as we cannot stop ourselves from 
remembering a certain way. So, 
unless your version of events will 
harm someone, it’s okay to pick 
something as truth.

Even if it didn’t happen, I choose 

to believe that I had a sudden growth 
spurt and aged a few years, and 
that’s my first memory. It’s weird 

and stupid and makes zero sense, 
so it’s absolutely perfect for me to 
identify with. I’m sure that years 
from now, I’ll look back at my time 
here at the University of Michigan 
and my writing for The Daily and see 
things that are different from how I 
remember them. And that’s okay.

The important things right now 

may fade into the background to 
make room for something smaller 
and more personal, something that 
means more to me in the future. I 
look forward to understanding what 
that is.

Directed by Paulette Phillips 

(“The 
Directed 
Lie”), 
“The 

Quoddy Fold” first feels like an 
adaptation of a Mary Oliver poem. 
The film, showcased in this year’s 
Ann Arbor Film Festival, takes a 
“Koyaanisqatsi”-esque 
approach 

to documentary filmmaking; the 
director films herself over the 
course of the year as she tears down 
a 19th-century home — that she 
bought for this specific purpose — 
in rural Nova Scotia, Canada. The 
only dialogue heard is from quiet 

eavesdropping of the director’s 
phone conversations or a moment 
when she reads the title of a book 
to herself, there is no musical score 
or soundtrack at all. Early on in the 
film, it felt like a thoughtful ode to 
the nature of decay. 

“The Quoddy Fold” also features 

some 
beautiful 
cinematography 

juxtaposing the rotten wood of the 
house with the lush fields of cattails 
and wildflowers. The director 
seems to want the viewer to pay 
attention: to watch closely and let us 
make the story for ourselves rather 
than have it explained to us.

In 
the 
post-screening 
Q&A 

moderated by Amanda Krugliak, 

assistant director of the University 
of Michigan’s Institute for the 
Humanities, Phillips explained that 
she actively exercised restraint in 
introducing any sentimentality — or 
any narrative at all — into the home. 

At times, the film feels incredibly 

meditative. Watching these shots 
of birds, snails, dogs and insects, I 
got the feeling that animals seem 
to understand life in a way we 
don’t: live, work, eat, multiply, die. 
Anything else is simply excess. 
Don’t get caught up in the small 
stuff.

When Phillips and her two dogs 

walk through a field, she layers the 
two frames of them walking toward 
the house and away from the house 
on top of one another, giving the 
figures 
this 
translucent 
ghost 

effect of walking past one another. 
Krugliak observed that it seems 
to symbolize a sense of the “past 
blurring into the present.” Phillips 
agreed that our experience of time 
and “what it means to dwell” were 
major components of the “story” 
during production. 

Unfortunately, 
creative 

intentions and thoughtful sound 
bites can’t save a film. I felt myself 
getting increasingly bored — not 
just because there wasn’t any 
dialogue, but because the film didn’t 
seem to know what it wanted to say. 

It would’ve been fantastic as a short 
film, or maybe even a traditional 
documentary that included more 
exploration of the families behind 
the home.

Phillips adamantly rejected this 

“typical anthropomorphizing” of 
the home, declaring, “I did not want 
to make a movie about that family,” 
but she doesn’t really explain 
why. I understand her inclination 
to explore what she calls the 
“kinesthetic experience” we have 
with material objects — meaning 
the way that our sense of touch 
influences our attachment to our 
possessions — but as a Black woman 
watching a white woman tear down 
this house with so much history, I 
couldn’t help but feel frustrated.

There’s a moment about two-

thirds of the way through the film 
when Phillips finds a copy of the 
book “The Great War on White 
Slavery.” She reads the title aloud 
to herself in a whisper before 
throwing it into the furnace to 
burn. Of course, I understand the 
rejection of something hateful, 
but from white hands, it felt like 
erasure. It was clearly a very old 
copy of the book, with authentic 
photographs 
that 
would 
have 

been useful in a museum rather 
than destroyed. Trying to erase 
records of colonization and white 

supremacy feels cowardly. People 
don’t study “Birth of a Nation” 
because we think it’s a great or 
morally sound film, because it’s 
clearly neither; we study it because 
it’s a part of history, and the racism 
that lived in history lives on today.

I felt the same way about the 

house. There were clearly rotted 
and moldy portions of the home, but 
there also appeared to be healthy 
portions of the foundation that 
she just tore down. Phillips herself 
said that there were times that she 
thought, “Maybe I can save (the 
house),” admitting that “it would’ve 
stayed standing for an awful long 
time,” if she had not intervened.

Her intentions then feel rotten. 

She clearly shows knowledge of 
the land there, explaining the 
indigenous meaning of the word 
“quoddy” (an excess of fish) and 
the image of folding in on the 
landscape. She explained this “post-
colonial notion … that the settler 
house is the house of the past, we’re 
actually on a positive way towards 
a new horizon,” and to a better 
relationship with the land. 

I think Phillips felt that tearing 

down a building where some white 
supremacist had lived would be a 
way of honoring Indigenous people 
who had been displaced from that 
land, but I couldn’t help but think: 

“Someone else could have lived 
in that house.” It could’ve been 
repurposed or given to Indigenous 
people in need, not just torn down 
for an art project.

Phillips said she found over 

38 diaries in the home when she 
acquired it in 2015. The photographs 
shown near the climax of the film 
as the house is pulled to the ground 
are the most intriguing section of 
the film. Delving into the lives of 
all of the people in the photographs 
from the turn of the century might 
have seemed cliché to Phillips, but 
it would’ve made for a better film. 
It seemed as if Phillips was looking 
for a creative challenge in removing 
the sentimental aspect of the home, 
rather than respecting what it 
meant to people. Getting rid of that 
narrative felt like erasure. 

It seemed that Phillips didn’t 

want the film to over-explain 
itself. 
There’s 
a 
saying 
that 

explaining a joke, story or symbol 
is like dissecting a frog: It helps you 
understand it better, but you kill it in 
the process.

In “The Quoddy Fold,” she 

smashes the frog with a hammer, 
turns to the camera, then says, 
“What do you think?” Ultimately, 
the film looks beautiful, but it’s 
shallow. Honestly, she should have 
just let the frog live.

‘Tell Me Why’ understands the fickle nature of memory

Ann Arbor Film Festival 2021: ‘The Quoddy Fold’ makes art of erasure

‘Look at me’: The rise and 

fall of SoundCloud rap

Read more at 
MichiganDaily.com

M. DEITZ

Digital Culture Beat Editor

MARY ELIZABETH JOHNSON

Daily Arts Writer

KAI BARTOL
Daily Arts Writer

This image is from the official website for “Tell Me Why” by Dontnod Entertainment.

Still from “The Quoddy Fold,” Paulette Phillips.

YOUR WEEKLY

ARIES

We start this week in quite a 
feel-good, cooperative mood, with a 
helpful Venus-Mars sextile on Tuesday 
which encourages good personal 
interactions and a friendly, sociable 

vibe across society.

AQUARIUS

GEMINI

The problem with goals this week is 
that they keep shifting, Gemini. Your 
priorities are changing, and your 
objectives are changing too, so it’s 
very tricky for you to know whether 
you’re on the right track or not.

SAGITTARIUS

CAPRICORN

SCORPIO

CANCER

Your dreams have a lot to teach you 
this week, Cancer. It’s an excellent 
time to start a dream journal or to 
look into dream imagery. What is 
your subconscious trying to tell you? 

Synchronicity may play a large part 

in your week too, so look 
out for odd coincidences.

TAURUS

Friendships could be difficult this 
week, Taurus, particularly if there is a 
large gap in money or social status 
between you. Someone may feel left 
out, or as if you are not bothering with 

them, despite your best 
intentions.

VIRGO

PISCES

LIBRA
LEO

In love, you may be lulled into a false 
sense of security early in the week. 
Any issues of jealousy or infidelity 
have not gone away, despite the 
smiles.

Read your weekly horoscopes from astrology.tv

There’s conflict and tension this week 
between your working life and
your home life, and in particular your 
love life. You may feel upset or taken 
for granted if your partner complains 

about your work ethic – but 

are you really doing all 
that you can to create a 
better work-life balance?

You’re more prone than most to falling 
into this week’s lazy, somewhat
stubborn vibe, Libra, so it may be hard 
for you to get up to speed. Friday’s 
Mars-Neptune square highlights how 

your idealistic goals suffer 

when you can’t get the day 
to day details right. 

Are you sure that you’re telling the 
truth, the whole truth and nothing but 
the truth? There’s a deceptive vibe 
going on this week, particularly 
around your closest relationship.

The focus is definitely on your home 
and family life this week, although 
what starts as a gentle enough vibe 
could very well prove more stressful 
as the week progresses.

At work, there’s an elusive, vague vibe 
that hinders you from getting much 
done. Despite your best efforts, 
details go astray, deadlines are 
missed, and people just don’t seem to 

be pulling their weight.

Your stubborn nature is highlighted 
this week and it seems that you are
determined to do things your way or 
not at all. The influence of Friday’s 
Mars-Neptune square pervades the 
week, and for you, this is all about 

risk-taking versus security, 
especially with money and 
material matters. 

This is not an easy week for getting 
much done, which is frustrating – you 
had plans, and you have deadlines, 
and your self-confidence is riding on 
creating a success this week. Hang on 
in there. Just do what you can, step 

by step.

WHISPER

“Happy April!” 

“There are too many bagels in 
my kitchen.”

“I am allergic to cats. I want 
one more than anything.”

