Spose: "I'm Awesome"

The conceit here is pretty simple: uncomplicated vignettes of suburban squalor followed by a proud, defiant negation: “I’m awesome.” It’s like the opposite of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog’s “...for me to poop on,” both of them monuments to undeniable illogic. The Arcade Fire may have spent three years modulating suburban ambivalence into an endless, wispy groove, but here Spose bullshits out a thematic twin that feels more of itself—not the populist musings of Exeter grads but authenticity which stumbles into profundity.

It succeeds both because and despite of its genre, being: white boy joke rap, destined to sit forever under the noxious armpit of “I Love College.” And yet, compared to Asher Roth’s lowest common denominator pandering, here we have an artist whose sense of location—Maine, hometown disaffection—throws even the Arcade Fire’s watercolor universal-isms into sharp relief. I can’t deny the widescreen appeal of trying to reach everybody at the same time, but whatever happened to detail? For all of The Suburbs‘ (2010) merits, there aren’t any window-to-window tunnels or police disco lights, images whose surreality was a perfect match for their otherwise blurry nostalgia. “I’m Awesome” may have its fair share of instantly dated generalities—“I met all my friends online,” for one—but they don’t feel calculated, more like guileless would-be jokes from somebody who will actually “talk to myself on my Facebook wall.”

So yes, the song might not be a “Neighborhood #5,” but its invocations of lobster rolls and cat piss are certainly more evocative than “took a drive into the sprawl,” and the confessional aura boosts its artlessness towards truth. If The Suburbs is an Animals (1977), an undeniable work of discontent from a protected behemoth, “I’m Awesome” is perhaps, in a world we’re unaware of, a first salvo from a post-ironic Never Mind the Bollocks (1977), a work of boredom and desperation from the disenfranchised and disrespected. Now that so-called independent heroes like the National and LCD Soundsystem can debut in the Top 10 and command the respect of the most atrophied mainstream critics, have the Juggalos become today’s dumb, disaffected mods or teddy boys? What is the neon human refuse that clogs today’s Warped Tours? Is anyone over the age of sixteen even keeping track of that shit? Spose may not have anything to do with those subcultures in particular, but he is an oddly clear beam of light in the Top 40, and perhaps an instructive one.