Songs for Dopamine

dopamine dispatch #4: metamodernism and the return to feeling

Welcome back to the dopamine dispatch, a learning-in-public practice exploring the dopamine mythos. I’m not an expert, just a writer that gets obsessed with ideas, and here you get to watch them unfold, spin-off, and connect in real time. To read the deeper dive at the end of this post and interact with this project as it develops, become a patron of my slug arts:

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raft of the madelline

A good sign that a concept has fully permeated a culture is when it starts appearing in pop songs, and lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of odes to our new favorite neurotransmitter.

dopamine by Madelline, a sexy-sad jam that addresses the algorithm like a toxic lover, has been stuck in my head for weeks. In a TikTok she made to promote the song, Madelline lays in bed scrolling on TikTok, singing a song about the pain inflicted by TikTok, while we, the viewers, are also scrolling on TikTok. It’s a great example of what the critic Greg Dember calls “hyper-self-reflexivity” or “Life-as-Movie”, one of eleven art methods he identifies as metamodern.

@madellines.musicinspiration behind “dopamine” #corecore #originalsong #lyrics

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Metamodernism is a synthesis of modern and post-modern sensibilities — they’re not art movements, but “structures of feeling,” to quote the critic Raymond Williams. They are patterns that emerge throughout history, and they’re not necessarily conscious choices. We only identify these patterns by looking back at them, which means metamodernism isn’t fully defined yet, because it’s happening right now.

Very broadly speaking, modernism was about the grand narrative, objective truth, and sincerity. Postmodernism responded to the ideals of modernism with irony, nihilism, and a deconstruction of the idea that objective truth even exists. Metamodernism finds us somewhere in the middle of the two, smashing the sincerity of modernism and the irony of post-modernism together. See the film Everything Everywhere All At Once, a story about the meaning of life told with sausage fingers, cosmic bagels and talking rocks that still, somehow, manages to make you cry.

Postmodernism broke it all down, and now metamodernism attempts to build something with the rubble. For Dember, the defining feature of metamodernism is the return to valuing “felt experience” over modernist rationality or postmodern ironic detachment. Dember writes:

Metamodernism inherits self-reflexivity from postmodernism, but repurposes it in a manner that, generally speaking, serves to affirm felt experience. If the “self” being reflected upon in a metamodern work is the work’s author, the result is a highlighting of the author’s own lived, inner experience. In this case the author’s own self-reflection provides a model for the reader’s self-reflection, and by extension, the reader’s own felt experience. [emphasis mine]

Madelline nails this hyper-self-reflexivity in her TikTok, aptly hashtagging #corecore, an anti-aesthetic core of cores that inspired a flurry of discourse this year. Corecore edits chop up bits of media — clips from movies and podcasts — and put them together in a way that evokes a feeling, often commenting on consumerism and capitalism.

@sebastianvalencia.mp4Wake up. #corecore #nichetok

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ArtNet called it “meaning-making via doom-scrolling.” Hyperallergic says it’s “a form of metacommentary” on TikTok-induced overstimulation, likening it to Dada, the surrealist movement that used collage to reject rationality in response to the first World War. In an essay called Is corecore radical art or gibberish shitposts?, Kieran Press-Reynolds writes that it uses “the native language” of TikTok to capture “an inexplicable vibe”:

The comments are rife with people anonymously relating: talking about how the video soothed them or made them cry, bonding with other viewers, trauma-dumping their personal woes. Like therapy, these videos release something in certain viewers; they puncture an emotional blockage and let the spigot of regrets and irritations run loose. They meet viewers where they are—browsing TikTok for memes, probably—and hit them with a mosaic of sorrow and roaming unease.

Corecore, like the dopamine mythos, expresses the dysphoria of algorithmic consumerism, but does it in a way that only art can. We all understand the existential conundrum that Madelline is singing about:

You’ve heard all of the secrets I’ll never tell / By now, you know me better than I know myself / and it’s nice but I wonder / what would life be like had I never known ya?

On a podcast that puts scientists in conversation with musicians, our dopamine prophet Dr. Anna Lembke talks to 28-year-old pop artist Alec Benjamin, who wrote a song about his struggles with social media called Dopamine Addict. At first, Lembke begins to muse about the reward pathway, and Benjamin cuts her off, getting straight to the point: “What should we do? How should we try to regulate our relationship with social media?”

Lembke recommends a dopamine fast, but toward the end of the episode she elaborates on the concepts in her book, Dopamine Nation: we must engage in “self-binding” and utilize “pro-social shame” like “stricter churches” do. We have to feel pain on purpose, because then our brains will reward us with pleasure.

The Myth-Making of Dopamine Nation

But Benjamin says that he doesn’t feel like moderation is possible for him — he’s an artist, and suffering is why he makes art. Lembke tells him that’s “a romanticized and dangerous trope” and insists artists can find peace and still “make amazing art.” Benjamin is skeptical. “Who is a good example of that?”

The host offers Radiohead, a band that makes music so sad, a data scientist once tried to map the depths of its despair on a chart. “You don’t think Thom Yorke is tortured?” Benjamin pushes back, and I roll my eyes with him. Yes, it’s a trope, but art is made of tropes, and they exist for a reason. In a 2003 interview, Yorke said that he suffers from depression, and finds “a lot of creative power” comes from it. He’s also said he was “a complete fucking mess” after finishing OK Computer, and described himself as “completely unhinged.”

Suffering is not the only motivation for art-making, and I don’t think it necessarily makes art better, but when artists talk about the relationship of pain to creativity, we’re just being honest with you. Even in our happiest creative periods, the challenge of expressing the inexpressible is still a futile struggle — it’s going to hurt. But as Rollo May said, it’s what gives the artists’ life meaning.

Of course in conversation, romanticizing means “idealizing,” but my art history brain jumps sideways to the Romantics, who are sometimes misunderstood as mere lovers of love. But Romanticism was dark — have you seen The Raft of the Medusa? Gericault was painting severed heads and shipwrecks! The Romantics were concerned with the terror of the sublime and the limits of the rational Enlightenment ideals that preceded them. Like metamodernism, it was a return to the primacy of feeling.

Maybe through the lens of addiction medicine, Lembke is misunderstanding what Benjamin means when he says moderation isn’t possible for him. In response to his question, she talks about teaching her patients they can make better art when they get sober and give up their “extreme life”. But what I hear Benjamin saying is not that he needs to do extreme things to make art, but that he makes art because he feels in extremes.

This is the function of the artist — to express what we all feel but “would rather not know”, as James Baldwin wrote in his essay The Creative Process. For Baldwin, the artist is “that incorrigible disturber of the peace” who doesn’t turn away from suffering, but mirrors our “uncharted chaos” back to us. Art does this well precisely because it is “unreasoned,” as writer and systems theorist Nora Bateson writes:

“With our logical, rational frames of reference we can only see small pieces of the larger patterns of our world; but art is impatient, skips over decades of theory, and is either baffling, or stretches perception into new territories of knowing. There are levels of communication that only art can reach. For me, this is where hope waits.

Unlike either religion or science, art does not offer explanation. Through subjectivity, art brews the healing salve of multiplicity.”

Where do we turn after the rational control of modernism and the cynical critique of postmodernism both fail us? To art, where we can play and feel again. As Micha Frazer-Carroll writes:

“Art’s emotional potential – its unashamed embrace of the messiness of feeling – undoubtedly represents a radical political challenge to scientific authority. It asks us to take seriously our messiest experiences, beyond the individualistic, clinical and controlled language of the lab. It defies measurement, categori- sation and replication, the most revered pillars of science.”

Art vs The DSM with Micha Frazer-Carroll

The addiction doctor attempts to map this chaos with a mechanical explanation, to provide a protocol for controlling emotion. Lembke even tells Benjamin that the “come down” he feels after career success is a “dopamine free-fall” that evolved for survival reasons, and that it needs no further explanation. But what about the psychological effects of living in an achievement culture? What about his fears, his hopes, and his motivations?

Like pointing to a diagnosis in the DSM, these just-so scientific answers serve as question-killers. But metamodernists are New Romantics; we name and describe, yes, but we also know that data has limits. There are some things only a mournful violin can express. When the beat to dopamine drops out and Madelline’s voice echoes like seraphim in a cathedral, I catch a shiver of the sublime. You could say it gives me dopamine, or that it’s stimulating my auditory cortex, or that it’s some kind of evolutionary response, but catharsis doesn’t come from explanation. It’s a feeling.

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This Week’s Tangent:

Further readings on metamodernism — where did it come from? Can it be explained in memes? (yes) How did researching it somehow also lead me right back to eugenics, dear god why???