24 - The New Seesaws of the Digital Visual Essay: Genre Provocations, Definitions and Tensions Beyond the Age of Print

Summary

The essay’s title, like the genre it tries to define, shifts constantly at the top of the page: in bold, all-caps white text, it at first reads, ‘Blink-182 Is Punk’, but then ‘Blink-182’ is rapidly replaced by a seemingly endless list of musicians: ‘Green Day Is Punk’; ‘Sum 41 Is Punk’. The Police, Gorillaz, a-ha, Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber – however implausibly, the title declares them all punk. The ever-shifting title reflects, Matt Daniels explains, the difficulty of defining the punk genre:

Punk has never had a clear definition. It’s a moving target, rooted in principles rather than sound. And in 2015, an emerging generation can move that target to whatever they want it to be, even a band who might look/sound different than anything that preceded it.

This genre anxiety will sound familiar to essay scholars; essays are so hard to define that nearly all essay scholarship opens by defining the genre. Essays, too, are bound as much by authorial approach and attitude as by formal features, and similarly have been remade by new generations.

That remaking of the essay genre is deeply evident in this text. Daniels opens in classic essayistic style, relating a conflict between the inner and outer worlds. He fell in love with punk music via Blink-182, ‘[e]xcept anyone born pre-1980 said it was blasphemy to call Blink-182 “punk” music’. But then the essay quickly proves itself unusual: on scroll, Daniels’s essayistic reflections and methodological narration become accompanied by a series of interactive graphs. He examined 3,000 Spotify and YouTube playlists with the word ‘punk’ in the title and ranked which bands appeared most often. One graph represents each playlist as a dot – red if it includes Blink-182, and white otherwise; hovering over each dot reveals the playlist’s title. Another graph ranks bands according to how often they appear; readers can click to select different genres or to hear short samples of many of the bands. A third graph populates a time-line of genres, a scroll advancing the years from 1977 to 2015 and pulling dots representing ‘new wave’, ‘psychobilly’, ‘grindcore’ and so on into their respective timeline slots.