Illustration by Lewis Mirrett
Word: Trollgaze
Meaning: A “genre” of music defined by its Tumblr success, Twitter divisiveness, and total inability to exist outside of the internet. Coined by Maura Johnson at The Village Voice.
Usage: “A trollgaze track is utterly web-native: It’s not built to exist in a record shop, a TV channel, a collection, or even an mp3 playlist. Its natural habitat is the stream— that ceaseless flow of information we access every time we use social media. Trollgaze is something you see sandwiched between other status updates, tweets, or posts, fighting for attention with every other picture, stray thought, polemic, or advert. Its button-pushing crassness and ambiguous motives make it an evolutionary nightmare: music perfectly adapted for life in the stream.” Tom Ewing on Pitchfork, December 2011
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