Ethel Cain says we are in an irony epidemic – is she right?

When Charli xcx performed at Glastonbury this year, her fans waved Brat flags high in the sky. A viral image on X captured one group planting their Brat flag beneath a Palestine flag, with comments like, “Girl, standing up for Palestine is not so confusing!” and “Free Bratestine!” Before becoming the Democratic nominee for President of the United States, Kamala Harris was often seen as the quirky aunt who laughed excessively and “just fell out of a coconut tree”. When her presidential run was announced, those memes stuck like glue, and the internet was flooded with fan cams of her laughing and dancing, her catchphrases endlessly remixed to Charli xcx’s “360”. All of this occurred as she, alongside the Biden administration, continued to assert that Israel has the right to defend itself, supplying weapons responsible for killing over 42,000 Palestinians and wounding a further 100,000.

There are countless examples of how we turn everything into a meme or a joke online. Musician Ethel Cain (Hayden Silas Anhedönia) has noticed this too, ranting on Tumblr earlier this week about how “nobody takes anything seriously anymore“. “It makes me feel so crazy and annoyed because I am constantly bombarded by jokes,” she wrote. The now-deleted post was sparked by various things she’d been seeing online, especially how people discuss her work. “The number of times I’ve had to read the same stupid joke like ‘yes, you ate that like Isaiah ate Ethel’… It makes me SO mad,” she continued, referencing her debut album Preacher’s Daughter. The album, a harrowing and beautiful talefollows the fictional Ethel Cain as she’s sexually assaulted by her father, sold into prostitution by her lover Isaiah, and ultimately murdered and cannibalised by him. Anhedönia has said Ethel Cain is a darker reflection of herself, yet people reduce the album’s painful themes to tired memes that never seem to die.

In her post, Anhedönia also expressed anxiety about how people will engage with her upcoming album Perverts and the inevitable jokes its title will inspire. “I’m already stressed out anticipating the stupid shit I’m gonna have to see about Perverts,” she wrote. “It makes me never want to share anything again.”

She’s not wrong. In recent years, I’ve noticed that, as a culture, we struggle to engage sincerely with art – or with life (at least, that’s how it seems online). I first observed this in 2016 when Donald Trump ran for president; his actions and comments were defanged as he was endlessly memed because no one thought he’d actually win. I saw it after George Floyd was murdered by the state in 2020, and people shared Hello Kitty ACAB memes. I’ve noticed it with the memeification of Brata trend Charli xcx and her team leaned into, which to some extent diluted the more serious themes of motherhood, ageing and grief on her album. I’ve seen it in discussions about Palestine as we enter the second year of Israel’s genocide. And most recently, I saw it in the wake of One Direction member Liam Payne’s death last week.

I’m not ashamed to say Payne’s death deeply upset me. While One Direction was a big part of my teenage years, what hit me hardest was the fact that just a week earlier, everyone – including myself – was mocking him: a man clearly suffering, whose life had been consumed and discarded by fame. As James Greig wrote in his piece on our grim obsession with celebrity deaths, “Living in a world where there’s a market for photos of your dead body is not conducive to forming functional relationships or being a well-adjusted person.” I felt sad, not only for Payne but for his ex-fiancée, Maya Henry, who has spoken out about the difficulties of their relationship, and for his parents, his siblings, his friends, and his young son. I mourned the loss of a man who died too young, with no one able to save him. Yet, social media offered no space for nuance. My timeline was quickly flooded with edited photos of his dead body, jokes and memes. “Liam Payne went in One Direction,” one X user quipped. “I hope he died in Payne,” wrote another. And the justification? Because he was an alleged abuser, that made it OK.

I am not denying that Payne was troubled, and I believe Henry. But this past week has shown me that our constant need to joke and meme everything has robbed us of the ability to think critically and feel empathy. Brendon Holder touched on this in his Substack piece on Brat and meme culture from this past summer: “There are obvious downsides to this way of thinking. It’s anti-intellectual, for one. But also, the constant caricaturing and trivialising of major life events numbs us to their significance.”

Now, more than ever, I want to throw my phone into the ocean and never look at X, Instagram or TikTok again. Sometimes, things are serious. Not everything needs to be turned into a joke. As Anhedönia said, we can still make jokes and laugh, but we’ve lost the ability to know when to stop – and it’s time we learned how.