I attended a Yung Lean concert in November. This was about four years after Ginseng Strip got big again on Tiktok, and about six years after Drain Gang/sadboys music arguably peaked. This was the London stop of the Forever Yung tour, and he stops during his set to tell us how he’s almost 30, and of course that we made this happen, and that he loves us. I really like the show and I almost buy a hoodie for 80 pounds.

“It’s for you in the fur and the emoji cap writing #slavic under your Instagram post of a perfectly low resolution macbook selfie”

What keeps attracting the ironic-doomer-leftist triad to this music? Perhaps how sexily permissively able cloud rap makes it for you to look at once scathingly ironic and desperately sincere and jadedly disillusioned and most importantly very online, very internet literate, thus very smart, all without losing the facade of realism which separates “femcel” (sociable, self-aware) from degenerate. It’s for you in the fur and the emoji cap writing #slavic under your Instagram post of a perfectly low resolution macbook selfie next to an early internet render of a majestic white stallion. Whatever. In the fallout of whatever “indie sleaze” used to mean, a Yung Lean song still manages, perhaps a little more so now after the peak of drain gang-era irony, to be the appropriate soundtrack to the Chinese copypasta superimposed over your lighter in the rain. And it’s very cool/self-destructive/haunting/ephemeral that you smoke.

The important thing, as ever, is that it’s about You. Yung Lean lyrics are, on the whole, rather self- explanatory (“When I’m afraid, I lose my mind/It’s fine, it happens all the time”) and occasionally vividly impassioned (“I’m the ash in your lungs/So let’s burn down the sun”). More often than not they’re just the right level of brazen/strange that it can be reframed as self-aware/strangely profound/absurdly funny (“Got my balls licked/By a Zooey Deschanel look-alike cocaine addict”). They are, for lack of a better term, easily co-opted, resaid. And the production is always satisfying, anyway – anything less good, overly inexplicable, goes away with the soundcloud irony and the earnest Scandinvanian-ness, which is the safe kind of foreign because it’s white and European, so you’re allowed to be tongue-in-cheek about it.

“Edging slowly out of stiff Hailey Bieber cleanliness”

Personality is also, of course, a factor. Jonatan is a very enigmatic figure and continues to be a good curator on his Instagram. He’s still young, with the times, verges on insensitive at times (good now, subversive and unique, shows critical edge) and he has, again, the Scandinavian detachment to cover him if need be. There’s a reverence, particularly as of late, for the international cultural ‘revival’ of the mysteriously Utopian austere nordics, with their untouchable vintage jeans and bronze cheeks and small plates. Jonatan is from Sodermalm, the hip artsy part of Stockholm. His favorite restaurant is Pelikan, the area’s prime testament to its pre-70s working-class population. This is the turn that we want after years of bawdy hypebeast culture, edging slowly out of stiff Hailey Bieber cleanliness, and now a little turned off by the vulturish commodification of brat. Artists with these kinds of no-holds-barred, grounded but ambitious personas (Timothee Chalamet comes to mind) savvily evolved out of the grating me-me-me of 2010s stardom to be soft-spoken, culturally literate, known-loved-and invited to niche spots. This kind of individualism is still aspirational for us.

“Academia is the one [place] where you most need to show you’re not completely serious”

And at the end of the day, however reductive, it’s a meme. Everything is a meme, you’re a meme, it’s ironic and also not that I’m here and you’re here and we love Yung Lean, and we “love” Yung Lean and we “love Yung Lean”, and are we really important in this room or what? Jonatan has this beautiful cinematic visual preceding his walk out and I am really quite in awe of it. When we walk to the station I keep telling my friend that he’s really so cool, he’s so real. Thanks perhaps to how stripped back the stage is, even when the spotlight is on him he does just seem like a genuine person. He doesn’t even sound too different live. He wears a uniform, marches in place, swings a spiked bat. The girls in front of us with the green highlights love this, the guys in the Geese shirts too. Maybe we all just want to believe we can stay dedicated to creative expression in the way he clearly is, with that same quiet stoicism that shields the charge of “cringe” or whatever else stops us from making things. He’s great at the visual language of it, always has been. His Letterboxd top four are great.

When we’re at Liverpool Street most of us on the platform to Cambridge have merch on. Perhaps of all places, academia is the one where you most need to show you’re not completely serious, or maybe you are, but really you’re not, because in that tension you can dissolve whatever worry you have about your hard-earned degree being piss in the wind. Jonatan is exciting to follow because it’s hard to imagine his success detached, his persona existing at any other point in time – he needs this audience, just like we need him to reflect the nowness, the actual in-spite-of-it-all lived vibrancy of the bleak cultural landscape, back at us. When I/you look up and say, emphatically, really quite meaning it, that Yung Lean is “real”, I/you are asking your friend to turn back to you and say yeah, you are too.