(or: The Chainsmokers Problem, Fourth Variant)

To truly understand the Chainsmokers, you can’t think about music — you have to think about Twitter.

If you spend any time at all on Twitter, you’ve no doubt encountered a certain type of popular tweet: tweets made not by people who are otherwise famous, or by people who are known for making successful tweets. These are tweets by everyday, regular folk that are well-written, clever, or relatable enough to rack up re-tweets into the tens of thousands and likes into the half-millions. A witty, well-timed comment that momentarily launches an unknown account into the spotlight.

If you recognize this type of tweet, you are no doubt familiar with the type of tweet that usually follows it: the pivot. The moment when the originator of the popular tweet discovers that the countless eyes of the internet have fallen upon them. The way Twitter is designed, clicking on a tweet automatically displays the replies to that tweet, with replies by the writer of the original tweet sorted to the top. Because of this system, the author is left with an opportunity to amplify their voice, an opportunity that many find too tempting to resist.

Sometimes the pivot is as an innocent as a request for the reader to follow the author’s twitter account, maybe with the added benefit of a “follow-for-follow” arrangement. A slightly more cynical and/or financially-conscious tweeter might offer to retweet products or personal advertisements on their page in exchange for monetary compensation. The most popular response, so blatant and so uniquely contemporary that it spawned a minor meme, is the posting of the author’s SoundCloud page as a means to further promote his or her music — said music usually consisting of ambient chill-wave synthesizer loops or hip-hop beats crassly named after more popular artists (“Future type-beat,” “Drake-type beat,” “Fetty Wap type-beat”).

No matter how it’s used, the pivot has become a common element of the online experience, and a particularly immediate example of how social media has altered our construction of “fame.” Because of the way that content spreads, something that would have been totally ignored in previous eras — say, a cheap novelty dance song about a minor pop-culture phenomenon — can be passed around by like-minded people to the point that it becomes legitimately successful, regardless of whether or not it was any good to begin with. More often than not, that’s exactly the point: someone who posts a popular tweet doesn’t really care about the artistic merits of what they’re doing — they just want attention, and a chance to heave themselves into the spotlight.

It seems crass, and it usually is, but really: can you blame them? Do you really know what you would do if you got famous overnight (even if it was “only” internet famous)? What if the reason that you’re famous isn’t so great? What if it’s actually shameful?

Of the three songs that the Chainsmokers have released in 2018, “Everybody Hates Me” does the best job of articulating band’s current modus operandi: examining the perils of social media culture and modern-day celebrity, told by two people who are especially qualified to do it. Whereas “Sick Boy” was a bit gloomy and self-centered and “You Owe Me” was too glib to sell its darker subject matter, “Everybody Hates Me” splits it right down the middle. The verses offer a shockingly reflective and measured list of complaints about the life of someone who has become suddenly famous in the age of quote-unquote viral content, while the chorus repurposes an old meme based on the opening lines of Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop”, a novelty crossover hit that, in its own way, is just as obnoxious as “#SELFIE”. That the Chainsmokers (and co-writer Emily Warren) would utilize a played-out Vine joke in order to express their own inner turmoil is such an obviously pandering gesture to surface-level internet culture that it speeds right past ‘cliché’ and loops back around to ‘brilliant.’

While some of the lyrics are directly tied to the struggles of the wildly famous and super-successful (“poor me, I made it”), many of the sentiments expressed by the singer could belong to anyone who is even a little uncomfortable with the prominence of social media — which would be, at a low estimation, only almost everyone. “I’m a product of the internet” is true for all of us, but is doubly true for Andrew Taggart, the person singing it: his existence as a musician, as a product, is only possible due to the internet. But while most of us didn’t get famous off of a meme disguised as a song, nearly all of us have left a less-than-respectable paper-trail. Whether it’s an old LiveJournal, an offensive joke told at a press junket, a screen-cap of a misbegotten tweet, or a particularly unfortunate interview with Billboard Magazine, everyone’s got something floating around out there that they’re not ready to account for. Anyone who’s taken a public stance on anything knows the feeling behind the lyric “Why do I still have to mean everything I ever said?” It doesn’t matter if you change your mind, walk it back or  delete every trace of what you said from existence; the Wayback Machine is always gonna be there, and your greatest mistakes will always be single click away.

“I post a picture of myself ‘cause I’m lonely/Everyone knows what I look like/not even one of them knows me” — sung by anyone else, this line would seem so obvious, so preachy, that it would land with all the impact of an after-school special. But it’s fascinating when it’s sung by the man who wrote “#SELFIE”, who apparently needed a full four years and the help of a co-writer to condense the sentiment “it’s not healthy to be obsessed your own profile picture” from a three-minute sad-trombone-noise of a joke into a punchy three lines. Also: even though that line might scan as cheesy, it is no doubt a sentiment that many people will find relatable, particularly young people, people who entered middle school with an Instagram account and were already bored with SnapChat before you even knew it existed.

By drawing this line from the uber-relatable everyday pitfalls of a casually publicized existence to the crushing pressures of a life spent stumbling through scandals and dodging paparazzi, Taggart and Warren force us to consider how similar those two modes of existence have become. The Chainsmokers are two rich white men who spend their lives flying around the world with their gang of young and attractive friends. But if you imagine their entire career happening in the string of replies below a popular tweet, it doesn’t seem all that far off. It seems almost relatable.

“Everybody Hates Me” is a song that couldn’t be made by someone without a moderate streak of self-loathing. The Chainsmokers are living the dream, but they’re still at least a little ashamed of themselves. But should they be? They caught a lucky break and decided to ride it out for as long as they could. They’ve gotten further off of their moment in the spotlight than most people do: even if someone catches a few new followers off a funny tweet, the rest of the world moves on in the amount of time it takes to press ‘like,’ leaving the author with one minor achievement and string of embarrassing follow-ups.

But if the same thing happened to you, if you had a chance to make your voice heard, can you really say you wouldn’t use it? Maybe you’d try to further your own career and achieve your dreams of artistic legitimacy, or maybe you’d just try to make some money by selling retweets. You might think you wouldn’t act so shamelessly, but that’s only because you’ve never been in that situation. If you woke up internet famous, can you really say what your next move would be?

The problem with the Chainsmokers is that you can’t ever really know yourself.