There are times when I have a viscerally negative reaction to popular media. It's embarrassing, often shameful. I always worry that it seems performative; I feel intense anxiety about it specifically because it isn't performative, or voluntary, or something that I can control. If I'm not careful, it can trigger outright panic attacks—and that, in and of itself, can be intensely humiliating.

While I can't quite put my finger on what, exactly, my trigger is, I've often felt like it has something to do with a perceived depthlessness. There's a gaping lack somewhere—to the experience itself, but also to the experience of being surrounded by people who don't seem to perceive what I'm perceiving. It's a sense of people flattening, the world shedding an entire dimension, and feeling a hideous sense of wrongness, as if my own dimensionality somehow doesn't fit into this world. I feel wrong. It's as if my very existence, on some level, is a horrible crime, and my only two choices are to hide myself and my suffering away or to express my pain and be judged and rejected for it, as if my very existence is an attack on other people for reasons I can't wholly understand.

I felt unbelievably seen, then, when Laura Les of 100 gecs mentioned offhandedly that she cries to Neil Cicierega's mashup albums. Because I cry to his music too—always have, always will—and I feel just as wrong admitting that as I feel when I feel the need to storm out of a room because a certain song is playing. Mashups, by and large, are not thought of as particularly emotional. More than that: mashups are generally not thought of as deep. More than one person has responded to my putting on a Neil Cicierega album as if I'm attempting to deliberately antagonize them, which I only sometimes am. When I try to talk about his work as if there's meaning to it—when I very seriously call him one of my favorite artists—people look at me as if I'm trying to play a prank on them.

And sometimes mashups aren't very serious. Sometimes, they're nothing more than a good jam: Girl Talk, for instance. Sometimes they're little more than shitposts, like the gloriously awful DK Rhapsody. But in the hands of the right kind of musician, mashups are a form of cultural commentary, even counterculture. They're a comment on, and a critique of, the world that shaped a given artist or a given song. More than that: they're a reclamation of that culture, a reappropriation of it, taking a world that was forced involuntarily upon us and transforming it into something that belongs to us, by right of the fact that we were forced to participate in it to begin with.

When Neil Cicierega releases an album of songs whose vocal tracks have all been replaced with Smash Mouth's "All Star," substituting their original message for perhaps the single most generic set of lyrics the 90s gave us, it suggests an interchangeability to music that often bills itself as singularly meaningful. Does John Lennon's "Imagine" really change that much when it's Smash Mouth singing over that piano line? And if "Imagine All Star People" manages to elicit an emotional reaction when you listen to it—one besides your initial horror, that is—then what does it say about the things you were reacting to in the first place?

Similarly, Smooth Flow has always felt like a commentary on gender, to me. Take one of the most stereotypically masculine songs in pop culture—Carlos Santa and Rob Thomas's "Smooth"—and pair it with Enya, whose music is almost prototypically feminine in nature. Let Rob grunt out his sexual aggression in that manliness-as-constipation voice of his, and undercut it with the gentle currents of Enya's choral multiplicity; let's see what happens when these two pop-music extremes meet, and resolve. And then, sure, throw some more Smash Mouth in there too.

It's never surprised me that so many transgender and genderqueer people are so into mashups. To some extent, it feels logical in the sense that mashups are Extremely Online, and trans culture often seems Extremely Online too. But the connection runs deeper than that. Even if I hadn't heard Les, herself a trans woman, gush about Cicierega's music, I would have assumed that 100 gecs and Neil Cicierega shared some DNA—so much of 100 gecs, too, feels like a reclamation of music from my childhood, from nu-metal to eurodance to ska. They share a similar attitude towards their source material, too: equal parts critique and appreciation, revulsion and love. This is a world they can't exist in but can't escape from. The only way to embrace it is to change it altogether.

Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble, describes drag as a way of resolving what they believe to be the central contradiction of gender itself: namely, that while it doesn't "really" exist, it can't be rejected or escaped. It's too deeply encoded into our culture for us to flee it; even if we try, we find ourselves returning to gendered concepts, gendered attitudes, gendered interpretations of the world around us. And if gender can't be done away with altogether, then the only way to fight it is to lean into it, to accept our entanglement within it, and to turn it into a performance that calls attention to its own performative nature. Turn gender into a game, a joke; lampoon it, satirize it, critique it. Reappropriate gender, until it's impossible to remember what the "real" version of it was to begin with. Rather, play with it to make it clear that that "real" version was never real at all, and that the people who bought into its "reality" because it happened to suit their own feelings were simply unaware of the deep, deep ravages it wrought on everyone who couldn't simply "fit in" as neatly or conveniently.

While I am more-or-less cisgender myself, I've turned to gender theory for a decade and a half to make sense of my own relationship with "manliness" and masculinity. Writers like Butler and Jack Halberstam say more about the struggle I have with my own gender than anything I've heard a cis man say. Because my relationship with my gender is a performance, a kind of play—and what tormented me so much about being a young boy was the feeling that my gender had been imposed upon me, with a series of rules and expectations and evaluations that I didn't know the first goddamn thing about. How was I supposed to be me, when so many other sources were telling me that just being myself meant following a bunch of instructions that nobody had bothered to teach me? How on earth could I be comfortable in my own skin when the overwhelming message I received was that I did not fit in? My own life, my own mind, my convoluted feelings and experiences, did not belong in this world. Simply by existing, I was fucking something up.

And while my own personal coin flip landed more along the lines of the status quo—turns out, I like being masculine, and I feel more like myself the more I lean into that fact—I only learned to be a man by treating manliness like a game that I was playing, and by making up all the new rules myself. I revel in all the different flavors of manhood that I get to take part in: if I want to be a full-on bro, I'll bro out, and if I want to dude it up, I'll let myself be a dude, and if putting on a sharp suit feels on some level like being in drag as myself, then that's something to delight in.

All of which is to say that I have a similar relationship with my gender as I do with my culture. My maleness is a remix—a mashup, if you will. I'm playing all the hits, but I'm playing them my way, and I'm fucking with them however feels appropriate.

Nevertheless, as a cis man, I have certain blind spots. Which is why it took me between five and seven listens of Psynwav's masterpiece Musical Transients before I figured out that it was, conspicuously and loudly, a narrative about Psynwav coming out as transgender.

In my defense, this is partly because the whole album fucks. I was too busy having my mind blown by the sheer musicality of it, by the ingenious metatextuality of its songs, by the virtuosic production work, to notice anything more at first. I was also listening to the album rather than watching along to the video Psynwav put out for it, linked above. (I highly recommend enabling subtitles, too, both for how cleverly they're worked into the production and for how they center the story at the heart of the album.)

Once you know what you're listening to, though, the message couldn't be clearer. Transients is an album about gender, through-and-through. Its genius lies in how much of its narrative hides in plain sight, by presenting itself in the words and through the voices of songs that have run through the background of our lives for decades. So when it opens with

...you don't assume you're hearing a signifier of any substance. You're just hearing Gerard Way sing the most famous opening line of his most famous album-opening song. And when you hear the silliness of the Muppets' voices juxtaposed over the top of "Welcome to the Black Parade," you're not primed to think there's any significance to them singing

...even if it does get immediately followed with Smash Mouth singing 

That last line isn't Smash Mouth, of course. It's Rachel Platten's "Fight Song." Psynwav's wordplay is on point throughout Musical Transients—so much so that, at times, it feels uncanny how perfectly different singers seem to counterpoint each other. Later, mixing Counting Crows with Ed Sheeran, they start to create new meanings out of old songs: "Accidentally in love / with the shape of you," their version goes. A discovery has been made, a journey has begun. Somewhere between two too-familiar shapes, a newer, stranger possibility begins to emerge.

I was never a fan of Nickelback. They struck me as grossly masculine, a kind of gender performance of manliness that ran counter to my own sense of self. By the time they released "Rockstar," I was firmly tuned out. I only ever heard that song because of how frequently my younger sister listened to it, years and years before she came out to me as my younger sister. Perhaps Psynwav heard the same thing that she did, because in this context, lines that I always thought were shallow and derivative suddenly take on a much vaster significance:

(This plays over the Vapors' controversial "Turning Japanese," whose significance here could not be more obvious.)

I Wanna Be a Rock is an astoundingly tight song—as a sheer piece of pop production, it dazzles. Freddie Mercury, ironically, plays the oppressive voice of maleness here, counterpointed with the Ramones' pop-punk chanting:

There's something funny about positing Mercury as the oppressive male voice and Nickelback's Chad Kroeger as the voice of dissatisfaction, given their respective public images. But the real break comes at the song's bridge, where the pop-punk trappings give way to the sadder, slower sounds of t.A.T.u.:

Live Laugh Love opens with a Lizzo fake-out ("Why men great till they gotta be great?") before turning into a mixture of Green Day, Goldfinger, and the Sonic 2 Adventure: Battle soundtrack. It's when Blind Melon gets thrown into the mix that the album's message first starts sounding more clearly:

The chorus, meanwhile, brings out four separate voices from four separate songs, reflecting the narrator's deep indecision and doubt.

A question that has long been debated, in the postmodern era, is: how much do you need to modify somebody else's words before they become your own? Here, Psynwav writes no words of their own—but this placement of four lines of four songs says something that no one of those songwriters said themselves.

Shrimping Pool, the album's halfway point, has a lot of fun juxtaposing pinks and blues: Kero Kero Bonito singing about skin turning pink; Eiffel 65 singing about a man living in a blue world. (It also has a great time making Kendrick Lamar say the word "shrimp" over and over again—I'm not sure mashups as a whole have a single funnier recurring bit than lyric-swapping existing songs. See also: Neil Cicierega's masterpiece Just a Baby, which may have singlehandedly gotten me through the COVID era.) But Psynwav's greatest lyric masterstroke comes in the next track, Facts and Lodging, where they counterpoint the Gorillaz' "Clint Eastwood" with Flobots' "Handlebars," and the songs seem to be directly speaking to one another:

Adding Supertramp to the mix, the juxtaposition grows darker:

Anxieties from two separate generations mix freely... and the anxiety of a third, newer generation is produced.

Then, with Pink Lion Cub—hands-down my favorite song of 2025—Psynwav pulls the trick that hit most closely to my own childhood memories of music.

An entire angsty generation knows Linkin Park's "Numb." But here, Psynwav modulates "Numb" to a major key, and it is a revelation. Somehow, the newfound positivity within the melody changes the catharsis of the song: it feels less like a struggle than a confession, less like torture than like a vulnerable release. Backed, of course, by Chappell Roan's "Pink Pony Club"—what else?—Chester Bennington sounds like he's letting go of a weight that he's been carrying for a long time.

Then comes a revelation of a different sort:

I didn't grow up with The Lion King 2. I have no childhood attachment to it, no fond memories of it worth mentioning. It seemed like a bullshit sequel to me, from afar. And as I've gotten older, and grown more skeptical of Disney as both a corporation and a maker of art, I'll admit that the notion of a vaguely African-inspired spiritual number from a straight-to-VHS animated cartoon sequel about lions fucking strikes me, in the abstract, as... kitschy, if not problematic.

And "They Live in You," from the way it's used here, is kitschy! So is Porter Robinson's "Lionhearted," which Psynwav interweaves: it's from a flavor of 2010s indie pop that sets my teeth on edge at the best of times, and, when I hear it in a bad mood, makes me bleakly wonder whether we deserve the worst as a species. At the same time, though, that's kind of the point: it's mawkish and melodramatic and unabashedly emotional in some dumb, dumb ways, and that's the note that's needed here. Against the complex emotions of "Pink Pony Club"—liberated and sorrowful all at once—and against the unexpectedly complex emotions of major-key Linkin Park, a voice rings out. And however ersatz that voice might be, however bullshit its origins, in this time and place, it feels genuinely spiritual, genuinely religious, the voice of a genuinely higher calling, affirming that which most desperately needs to be affirmed.

That's Bennington coming in at the end there, as Linkin Park resumes its role as the central narrative voice—and I'll confess that, when Chappell Roan's handclaps come in over their words, the contrast between the two triggers something in me, as this man who's angsty about being a man speaks through the decades to a queer woman who's angsty about leaving her hometown, all to tell the story of a trans person making sense of their own identity.

I was thirteen years old when "Numb" came out. Even then, it felt cringe to me. Its angst never felt like my angst; my own teenage rebellion, my own quest for identity and meaning, led me somewhere else, and my sense of alienation from my peers doubled when I realized that all my other alienated peers were turning to songs like this, which I came to vaguely resent for taking up so much unwanted space in my world.

How fascinating, then, that in the context of Psynwav's story, these words feel anything but banal. As the story of a guy in a bad relationship, this means nothing to me; as the story of someone's relationship with themselves, this means everything.

There's a moment in Neil Cicierega's Mouth Dreams that has a similar effect on me, though I find that people's reactions to it are very divided. It's the song Cannibals, which takes one of the bubbliest and lightest pop songs of the 80s—Fine Young Cannibals' "She Drives Me Crazy," obviously—and sets it over the THX Deep Note, mixed with a dozen production bumpers. As with "Pink Pony Cub," a part of it has to do with the modulation: Cicierega constantly bends the pitch of the Deep Note, whose overwhelming omnipresence lends whichever lyric it's underscoring with a powerful and unavoidable inflection. But some of it has to do with the way it so profoundly deconstructs something shallow and trite and banal—however joyously so—and presents it in a context where it can't help but have meaning. The meaning comes from without rather than within, to put it pompously. The empty canvas of the pop music is ripe to be filled with anything and everything else.

Isn't that why we love pop music? Isn't its emptiness, to some extent, part of the point? We wear it like an outfit over every moment of our lives; we repurpose it, refashion it, its words standing in place of our own, its voice filling in for our most voiceless moments.

And isn't identity, too, like this? To some extent, all the words we use to define ourselves are nebulous, malleable, capable of meaning whatever we need them to mean. They're the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves—sometimes as a kind of echolocation, pinging our way through the void in our own minds, towards some kind of self-discovery; other times as a way of pinging out towards others, hoping that we'll help them find us in the dark.

It's why people love star signs and Myers–Briggs tests and D&D alignment charts and personality quizzes. It's all bullshit, sure, but its bullshittiness is what we love about it. That vagueness is why it feels so personal: there's ample empty space for us to fit ourselves inside these stories, to read them the way we need to read them, to find ourselves in the Rorschach blots. The shallowness is a feature, not a bug: these are not depths we're meant to immerse ourselves in, they're utilities whose flatness makes them endlessly reusable.

Personally, I can't stand most of this. I've never been a fan of pop music; I'm always shocked when, once in a blue moon, a pop star like Chappell Roan comes along and writes music that actually seems to say something to me. Most of the time it doesn't, and most of the time I'm very irritated that it doesn't. I got nothing out of Linkin Park, but I found myself in the Smiths and the Decemberists and Joanna Newsom, people who were writing concrete songs about concrete things with ever-increasing precision and nuance. (My most profound gender-and-sexuality anxiety—this is, embarrassingly, true—occurred over Katy Perry, and specifically occurred over just how dissonant my feelings about her music were. Joanna Newsom, on the other hand, felt like she represented everything I'd ever wanted the world to be, at least at the young dumb age of 18.)

But this is exactly why I loved Neil Cicierega, when he started turning every pop song into "All Star." This is why I loved the way he fucked with Rob Thomas and Enya, and with Elton John and System of a Down—or with Katy Perry and Kate Bush, for that matter. He turned generalities into specificities. And as neurotic as I know this sounds, that helped me come to peace with a lot of music from my childhood that I found physically unbearable to listen to: it gave me my own version of songs that I'd never found a version of myself in to begin with.

Towards the end of that particular angsty chapter of my life, I had a crush on a girl who I'd known since high school. And that girl was obsessed—as everyone seemed to be obsessed—with Bastille. I couldn't fucking stand Bastille. The chorus of "Pompeii" would make me flee a party. I couldn't have articulated exactly why I couldn't bear their music—rather, my articulations would have been hilariously, angrily off-base. It was yet another reminder that the world around me was not for me, that it would change and evolve in only unpleasant and uncaring ways, that I would always be trapped in everybody else's world, suffering and resentful and anxious about just how much my misery made me come off as a complete dick to everybody else around me. (I got over this, mostly, at some point between the ages of 22 and 36, thank god.)

And then, at the tail end of "Pink Lion Cub," Chester Bennington's wail reached its apex, and was replaced with a familiar voice...

...and, dumb as it may sound, a tiny part of me was forever healed.

This is our world; this is our culture; these are our bodies. We are born into something: a time, a place, a moment, a genome. So much is beyond our control, oppressively so. But beneath all that, we exist—and if there's no pre-made place where we fit in, we'll just have to make that place for ourselves, out of whatever we find, out of whoever we are, rewriting, repurposing, recontextualizing. It's so hard to believe in that tiny flickering kernel of self that's buried beneath all the other layers of what you're told makes you you. Harder still when nobody else sees it or cares about it; harder still when no words seem to exist that describe that buried thing within you, and you're trying to locate it with words that feel too clumsy, concepts that feel too wrong, culture that seems to describe everything but the one thing you need described. But it's real, and it's you, and there's nothing stopping you from defining yourself and the world around you as you see fit.

It's funny, conceptually, that I've Had it With This Name makes Thom Yorke of Radiohead sing a duet with Coldplay's Chris Martin. In some circles, the two are seen as opposite ends of an artistic spectrum: Radiohead everything that Coldplay isn't, Coldplay nothing that Radiohead is, Yorke's falsetto strange and out-of-place and alien, Martin's falsetto familiar and trite and dull. Here, the two dovetail perfectly, united more by their commonalities than by their differences:

The Killers' fantastic "Somebody Told Me" is turned into a spiraling moment of gender doubt, in the final moment before the transition is affirmed once and for all:

And Michael Stipes comes in for a predictable repurposing himself.

Voices come together, saying things about names that no one singer ever meant to say—the Killers, the Ting Tings, Epic, and Rage Against the Machine, all dancing around one another:

Until the final word comes, as it had to, from Marshall Mathers himself:

All that's left, then, is the grand Finale, which brings back voices from all the other tracks, bringing them together in singular unison:

Taken in isolation, it's possible to overlook the message behind each lyric; strung together, it's impossible not to see.

Andre 3000, the musical trickster, leads us into Psynwav's final sequence, where the joke becomes just how blatantly they're underlying everything...

...with t.A.T.u. sounding off in agreement...

...and Goldfinger urging us, ska-style, to...

...and then Epic asks...

...until, finally Gwen Stefani and Avril say it out loud:

Some things do have to be made obvious. They have to be simple and repetitive and loud and conspicuous. Why do pop lyrics grab people? Because they're simple enough for us to notice them, amidst the chaos and the noise; because their boldness sets them apart; because sometimes we're too distracted and confused and split too many different ways to notice anything but the pop music and the memes.

Even then, it sometimes isn't enough. I was too engrossed with the mechanics of Musical Transients—the brilliant lyric interplay; the subtle melody-bending; the bold key changes; the way Psynwav can layer a dozen songs on top of each other and somehow make them all feel natural—to notice the slightest hint of Gender in the mix. Call it cisgender privilege: by and large, gender fades into the background for me, in exactly the way that pop music doesn't. It's been hard for me to learn how to grapple with my own sense of maleness, my relationship with masculinity, precisely because, for most of my life, gender was never something I had to think about, never something I questioned. My thoughts about music are far more multilayered than my thoughts about gender, probably. And if I relate to Judith Butler talking about gender-as-construct, gender-as-performance, it's because those let me think about gender the same way that I think about music and theatre and art, which are all the things I'd rather be thinking about all the time anyway.

And despite all that—despite my initial well-intentioned obliviousness—once I understood what Musical Transients was, I was left deeply moved. Because while I may not relate to the specifics of what Psynwav is talking about here, the internal struggle they depict (and the way they choose to depict it) speaks profoundly to my own experiences, in the same way that 100 gecs speaks to me, in the same way that plenty of trans writers and filmmakers and musicians say things that I intimately feel connected to.

A friend of mine once said that queer sexuality is richer than straight sexuality, not because straight sexuality can't be rich and vibrant and nuanced, but because straight people have the option not to delve into that richness: we're provided with a script, we get to go through the motions. It's not just that we don't reflect upon certain aspects of who we are: it's that, oftentimes, we don't realize there's anything that can be reflected upon. Our roadmap offers such clear, delineated lines that sometimes we never learn that the map is not the territory, and that who we are is vastly weirder and more treacherous than what we've been taught. Gay and lesbian and bisexual people, my friend said, were never given that option: they were forced to discover and invent and name their sexuality, because every option they were given by the world around them felt intolerably wrong.

That's not my story, with either sexuality or gender. (And in both cases, it made discovering my own rich weirdnesses tricky, in much different kinds of ways.) But it's a story that I'm familiar with regardless. Surely most people must encounter this somewhere, right? We find places where the story doesn't hold, the map doesn't apply, the thing we've been told ought to feel normal just feels off. One way or another, we're forced to write our own story. We're forced to fumble our way through it, using tools that were never made for this particular task.

"I was not genomed to alter reality," says one woman in the Wachowski sisters' adaptation of Cloud Atlas. The man she's talking to replies: "No revolutionary ever was." It's hokey as shit, but it works because it's true. We weren't "made" to define ourselves, or invent ourselves, or evolve the means with which we can finally express who we are. The world certainly does not exist to make this easy. Our societies exist in some muddled state of ignorance, apathy, callousness, and occasional outright cruelty. Only we can do this for ourselves. Only we can find this in and with one another.

I know plenty of people who find mashups inherently irritating. As a genre, the mashup is often seen as a cheap novelty: a joke at best, an act of antagonism at worst. It mirrors a popular reaction to modern and especially postmodern art: people dismiss Richard Prince as an artist and Christian Marclay as a filmmaker; they sneer at hip-hop and electronica for sampling music. We struggle to imagine how repurposing somebody else's work could ever add value to it, or change it, or produce something entirely original. (To be fair, most mashup artists do a very bad job of countering people's preconceptions about their music.)

But this fundamentally misunderstands what art is, or what the creative process entails. To some extent, all art is like this: something like a mashup just lays the process bare. Asked why he found AI attempts to replicate his manner of composition, Philip Glass said simply that a composition, at its essence, is a series of ideas; AI might replicate the basic trappings of his work, but it fundamentally doesn't understand what an "idea" is. Ironically, the fact that mashups are entirely stitched together out of pre-existing songs lays their ideas completely bare: an "idea," in the context of a mashup's composition, is the decision to pair one thing with another, and the reasons why those things work well together, and the methods employed to make those things seem harmonious. In this light, it's true that mashups often consist of exactly one idea, and that that idea is usually banal; however, it helps us see what a thoughtful, artful mashup would have to be, namely a series of ideas that come together to create something wholly new and strange.

Musical Transients demonstrates this better than anything that's come before it, I think. (RateYourMusic currently agrees; when I think of other possible contenders, I think mostly of musicians from another era, like DJ Shadow or the Avalanches or even Daft Punk, whose "mashups" follow entirely different rules and to completely different ends. The only other genuine mashup artist who I think contends, predictably, is Cicierega.) Its technical brilliance is more-or-less unparalleled; its lyrical ingenuity is top-notch. But more than that, Transients is proof that mashups are capable of saying something new, articulating things in ways that other kinds of music. It's a groundbreaking demonstration of what it looks like when a mashup album tells a story—and a demonstration of just how richly that story can be told.

It also makes an argument, I think, for why mashups are so important and so vital in our present cultural moment.

We live in an era of memes: imagery and soundbites and copypasta that offer us templates upon which we construct new variations, new expressions, new jokes, new twists. Most of this, even at its cleverest, is disposable: it might delight, it might be memorable, but it's hard to create genuine depth and substance within a meme or a shitpost.

In some ways, it's the thing that irritated me about pop culture in the 90s and 00s intensified. I know plenty of people who are as allergic to memes and GIFs as I was to pop radio and the shit they played at school dances. And certainly a lot of people despair: at the collapse in our collective literacy, at the degeneration of the mediums we communicate through; at how difficult it is to find focus and substance and meaning amidst the detritus of modern media.

Maybe we're witnessing the extreme peak of a certain kind of media consumption; maybe we'll get sick of all this, and push back, and find our way towards things which are less frenetic and distractible and energetic. And maybe not. Maybe this is is all the start of something new: a new kind of engaging with culture and the world that we'll build upon but never dismantle. If so, I think, it's going to be important for us to learn how to build things of substance and meaning out of things which are insubstantial and meaningless; we need to learn what it means to assemble new languages for ourselves, or how to use the cheap, shallow, limited languages we've been offered to say things they were never meant to say in the first place.

I feel this way about masculinity, sometimes. There's no denying that masculinity is in a dire place, circa 2026: cishet men are confused and upset in all kinds of unproductive, nasty ways. The people who most obsess about defining and "championing" masculinity tend to be the people whose definitions are the grossest and worst; the men who mean well, I suspect, are the ones who find themselves the most confused and the least articulate about what their own identity means to them. It can feel like a rigged game: if the whole vocabulary with which we define what it means to be a man is made up of words that are currently being used to inflict harm on others, it becomes impossible for men to articulate their identity without leaning into concepts and terms that have come to mean terrible things.

How do we get out of that particular trap? Judith Butler says: through drag, through camp, through performances of identity that parody their source material, repurposing it to say something new. In other words: we need mashups too! We need to take the bullshit that we're told defines us, and play with it until it says something that actually does. And what Psynwav demonstrates, among other things, is that mashups can be more than just a silly joke. They can say something powerful, vulnerable, important. They can say something real and meaningful and true.

Can we make it any more obvious?