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Something old and something new came to Instagram last week. It’s also definitely something borrowed, and if you’re a fan of the courtroom-metaphor-hammering thigh-slapper ‘All Rise’ it could easily be something by Blue. The Meta-owned social media giant is slowly rolling out a new feature which allows users to pick a song to add to their profile.
The update was first reported in October last year but over the last few days more and more people have had the sense that they’ve wandered into a timeslip. Picking a song to sum up your whole ethos and personality is to head through a wormhole into the MySpace era. Soon we’d be swapping Arctic Monkeys demos while excitedly plotting out England’s journey to winning Euro 2008 as the glorious reign of Steve McLaren kicked off.
I had a look at what I might choose to soundtrack my Insta life and a very familiar feeling washed over me: pure terror. Now not only do we have to curate a feed which makes us look stylish and socially rich but also a bit arch about the whole thing, we have another dimension through which to possibly embarrass ourselves.
It’s already bad enough when you go back through your story and realise that that video you took in the beer garden is both out of focus and mostly features your mate loudly asking if he can have a go on someone’s Lost Mary. Now you’re going to see that someone you previously trusted has summed up their existence with ‘Green Green Grass’ by George Ezra, and you’ll realise you never knew them at all.
So do you play the web 3.0 irony angle – something you’d never actually like and which your friends know you’d never like – or pick something which demonstrates the outer edges of your tastes? Do you do something deliberately obtuse or do you go for something you sincerely like, and immediately launch yourself into a vortex of cringe?
It’s as existential a choice now as it was when I was 14. At that point I wanted people I fancied to think I was both serious and fun, and my MySpace profile song picks ended up slaloming all over the map. There was the Pet Shop Boys era, a run of Arctic Monkeys demos from Beneath the Boardwalk, the weekend where I hoped someone at another sixth form college might fancy me if I added some Ella Fitzgerald. (Did not work.)
I sat down and fiddled about for a while. ‘Where Is Love?’ from the soundtrack Oliver! was a maybe, but felt a bit wacky. Maybe some Jon Hopkins? Much, much too far the other way. It needs to be unpretentious but not really obvious. Folklore Taylor, not 1989 Taylor. Remi Wolf? Something off Renaissance? Closer. Definitely getting closer.
I ummed and I aahed and I weighed up exactly whose colours were safe to nail to my mast when you consider how likely they are to do something stupid in the next six months. And eventually I found my tune. I’ve gone for ‘Vindaloo’ by Fat Les. It’s dumb, and it’s loud, and it means almost nothing. Na na naa.
