The following year, in a strangely backwards development, the Chainsmokers’ supremely irritating debut single “ #SELFIE” was the first hit with a hashtag in its title. In 2013, the Lonely Island enlisted Solange for a trend-skewering song called “ Semicolon” (sample lyric: “You know we out of control no brakes/Your birthday party sucked no cakes”). To be sure, hashtag rap was not a positive development for rap music, as moments like Ludacris’ “ I fill her up balloons!” and Childish Gambino’s “ You can fuckin’ kiss my ass Human Centipede” amply demonstrate. Because rap music is the arena where technological and cultural changes register first, the hashtag punchline quickly worked its way into the cadences of verses from Drake, Nicki, Big Sean, and Kanye, who coined “hashtag rap” in an interview that November. “It’s like inventing a toaster oven and then… seeing that your customers have of their own accord figured out a way to turn it into a microwave,” he wrote.īy the end of 2010, the hashtag had undergone mission creep, serving all kinds of innovative linguistic functions, including its most popular manifestation as the equivalent of a punchline after a semicolon. In 2009, technology writer Steven Johnson marveled at the rise of the and especially the hashtag, two features that early adopters built for themselves. What Twitter’s founders couldn’t have predicted were the user-driven innovations that emerged out of the simple use of the platform. Everything is a pronouncement, leaving users reflexively crouched in a defensive position waiting for a retaliatory strike-or eagerly appending a shamelessly promotional SoundCloud link below a newly viral missive. On Twitter, the boundary between epigram and slogan is erased. More than Facebook or Instagram, Twitter eradicates the distinction between personal and global: A stray thought about a surprise-released album or a well-timed joke during the VMAs could go viral, trigger an argument with a fellow traveler convinced of their own correctness, or-like most tweets-languish in relative obscurity, drowned out by the din. The push and pull between these two ideas-Bilton parses the distinction as “what’s happening to me” versus “what’s happening in the world”-defines Twitter in 2019. Williams, who came to Twitter after selling Blogger to Google, saw it as a communications network where global conversations could happen. Dorsey saw it as a status update machine, on the AIM away message model. So yes, while a new breed of yuppies were networking the world anew, they were likely accompanied by the dystopic strains of “ Paranoid Android.”Įarly in its development, Dorsey and co-founder Ev Williams saw two possible futures for Twitter. While Twitter was still tiny, he tweeted through his first experiences with the band’s 2007 album In Rainbows, and even installed a “Radiohead Room” in the company’s office, which piped in Radiohead music all day and all night. Like a lot of tech types, Dorsey is a huge Radiohead fan. As the site grew in popularity, Bilton recounts, pop stars made pilgrimages to the company’s modest San Francisco headquarters, like when a couple of Twitter engineers “found a member of the band blink-182, half-asleep and half-drunk, pouring a small bottle of gin into a bowl of Fruity Pebbles cereal, then chowing down on breakfast.” At that point, when the site had only a handful of users, Glass and Dorsey road-tested Twitter at Coachella and attempted a partnership with the 2007 VMAs. “This is why we built this thing! For concerts and music shows!” Noah Glass told fellow co-founder Jack Dorsey in 2006, according to Nick Bilton’s book, Hatching Twitter. When Twitter was dreamed up, in fact, it was with music in mind.
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