A few months ago, a post went viral on X (formerly Twitter) that referred to “Home” (2009) by Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros as the “Worst song ever made.” The post included a video of the band performing the song live. The video is loaded with emotion; the musicians are visibly moved by the performance, the sentiment, the lyrics, and presumably, their own sincerity and the earnest emotions of the song. In the debate sparked by the post, the term “cringe” comes up repeatedly to describe the song, the band, and their performance. The viral response to the post has largely been in agreement with the poster. I haven’t performed a semantic or sentiment analysis on the responses, but, as a brute approach to the data, the post’s current like count (54,194) far outweighs its reply count (3,565), suggesting overwhelming agreement. Still, some came to the song’s defence, especially in the replies.
“Home” is a deeply moving song. It came out at a time when I was just beginning to navigate early adulthood, and it is deeply tied to that formative experience for me. It comes from a genre of indie music, sometimes called Stomp Clap Hey, that celebrates earnest, raw, happy, almost saccharine emotions. You might not resonate with its deeply emotional tone, but I do, or I did, and I think we are deeply deprived when our cultural ethos limits our ability to express emotions as heartfelt and timeless as those of “Home.”
The issue I want to address here is not to defend “Home.” Although I would vehemently defend it. It is absolutely and objectively not the worst song ever made. What I want to address is, instead, the cultural notion of “cringe.” Cringe is usually accepted to be an experience so embarrassing or awkward that it causes a kind of physical, visceral reaction. In its modern usage on social media, it also has an extended meaning related to witnessing something so embarrassing or awkward that it causes secondhand embarrassment. So, one might feel cringe for oneself or for another. Given this definition, it might seem that cringe is rooted in empathy, but I don’t think that’s accurate. It’s one thing to be embarrassed for someone, especially someone we care about. It’s quite another thing to be embarrassed for someone we don’t know. And what does it mean to be embarrassed for someone else? Is it to put ourselves in their shoes and worry about how embarrassed they must be? I suspect this isn’t the case for two reasons. First of all, that seems to be the kind of secondhand embarrassment we usually feel for people we care deeply about, and second, this cringe is something we actually seek out, which doesn’t make a lot of sense if the emotion is so deeply upsetting in an empathetic sense. But I don’t think it builds empathy. If anything, it decreases empathy and increases our tendency to want to impose social limits, whether to protect ourselves or others.
The kind of cringe humour that we actually seek out these days is rooted in digital tribalism and identity politics. You only need to search “cringe” on TikTok or Instagram to quickly realize that most of the videos are either taken from their original creators and curated to emphasize how “cringe” they are, or they are original videos by creators acting or performing as a particular type of identity in order to explore how cringe that identity is. So, in the first case, we have these videos sincerely posted (presumably, who knows these days) and then co-opted to celebrate how cringe they are. In the second case, we have videos making fun of horse girls, pick me girls, performative men, toxic men, “nice” guys, furries, wolf packs, whatever. If the behaviour is really cringe, then why is it cringe? Because it’s different? Or maybe because it doesn’t fit into our version of acceptable behaviour anymore? If the issue is that the behaviour is actually socially problematic, then making fun of it through the language of identity politics or digital tribalism is going to do very little to correct the behaviour. Instead, it weaponizes humour as a tool of social control that desocializes but does very little to socialize. If it does socialize, then it does so only in a highly restricted and superficial way that rewards performative behaviour, but not genuine change. This is why I worry about the tendency of cringe, as a type of widely consumed humour, to reduce empathy and impose social limits. Or, put another way, I worry about a cultural ethos that so readily consumes cringe humour.
I believe that cringe humour reduces empathy and imposes social limits by not only demonstrating, but also inundating us with demonstrations of, all the ways we can embarrass ourselves in society. Yet the interesting thing about being cringe is that it is almost always accompanied by being sincere. So, the best way to avoid being cringe is to never be sincere. This is the problem with performative identity. What does it do to us if we are unable to be authentically ourselves, instead adopting glib, ambiguous, sarcastic personas? What does it do to us when we are constantly aware that when we are authentic, we must do so very carefully to avoid misstepping? What does it do to use when we are rewarded for performative behaviours, but not for authentic ones? And what does it do to us when we are not compassionate with others or ourselves? Invariably, we will identify authenticity in ourselves and others as cringe and reject it instead of considering it with compassion. Yet compassion is foundational to communication and community building, through activities such as active listening. A lack of compassion and a wealth of judgment are not conducive to healthy dialogue in a society.
I have already explored some of the ways that cringe humour might serve as a stumbling block to fundamental social skills, but I also believe that it is especially damaging to the practice of art, which requires compassion, risk, and abandon. Great artists and art do not exist in a vacuum; they are part of social and communal processes of production. Great art requires great art communities. As a natural process of the creation and selection of art, some of it isn’t going to be good. Some of it is going to be terrible. But that’s necessary. That’s the risk of creation. That’s the risk of experimentation. If the greatness of art is measured by what has already been done, then art is inherently conservative and will always tend to repeat itself. But if art is capable of being new, innovative, meaningful, liberal, and mutable, then art must take risks. Artists must take risks. And some of those risks will result in missteps.
When we, as a society, become more concerned about cringe as a form of social control, as a risk-aversion, instead of as a respectful execution of norms, then I think we have stepped too far in a direction that begins to restrict meaningful possibilities. What I mean is that cringe is at root about embarrassment, which is an important aspect of creating social norms. Social norms play critical roles in our society in maintaining and expressing certain practices that benefit individuals and groups. Social norms help to detect and eliminate social cheaters, one of the most important social evolutionary problems. But there is a spectrum here between absolutely permissive sets of norms and highly restrictive sets of norms, both in the nature of the restrictions and the extent of the restrictions. Of course, highly permissive norms are not going to be very effective, and highly restrictive norms are unlikely to account for human variety and differences. But more than this, restrictive norms are conservative to the point that they limit the possibility of meaningful change. Permissive norms, on the other hand, allow only change, and they preserve little; this is counterproductive to any social practice that admits of progress, such as technology, science, and, arguably, art. However, highly restrictive norms conserve but limit change and progress. Ultimately, either one of these approaches limits our ability to achieve progress, either because too much or too little is conserved. When we place the fear of being cringe, the fear of being embarrassed, above the desire for innovation, for experimentation, for novelty, then we handicap our ability to create art.
Art is a perfect example of a social activity that requires a balanced approach to norm enforcement. Art depends on norms, not because they serve as unchanging rules, but because the norms of art serve as both a shared language, under constant gradual change, as well as a set of guidelines for what tends to work. Art exists within this framework of loose “rules” or “norms.” Most artwork produced is not especially new. It is new in the sense that any given individual artwork did not exist before, but it is not usually new in the sense that it creates a new norm or rule for art, that it forces the set (see Alain Badiou’s Being and Event, 1988). Most art serves to recapitulate the world to us in a language that has largely been accepted and is, in one way or another, currently in vogue. Some work goes back to a largely abandoned technique, style, language, etc., to create work there, in that style, but usually this work looks less like art to us and more like kitsch or pastiche. Some creative works are essentially derivative of existing, established work and styles. These are usually technically celebrated, but they will rarely rise to the ranks of great art, especially over time. However, occasionally, an artist will create work that is so decidedly new that it breaks some, or many, of the “rules” and serves to redefine what art is. This type of work is exceedingly rare, and it requires constant experimentation. These experiments will regularly fail (and often we will call the results cringe). However, some work will also arise from these experiments that pushes the envelope only in subtle ways. The changes introduced by these works are not so radical that they redefine the field of art, but they do often create new subgenres. When an artist is creating in this way, they have no guides. No amount of looking at the rules and norms will allow you to create what has not already been created. The only thing that will let you create something new is ignoring some or all of the norms and rules. What then is the function of the norms and rules? They serve as guides, often as formulas. They say, this will work, because it has worked. But the “work” in that phrase depends on a lack of saturation in that subgenre for a given population and time. For instance, relatively little has changed with the Marvel superhero formula and yet people seem fairly tired of it. The formula no longer works because what was once relatively novel is now the norm. This saturation theory explains why certain trends tend to shift back and forth like a pendulum. Look at the history of Hollywood filmmaking. It often tends to shift from pessimistic to optimistic over periods of several years. One of the reasons may be the fatigue audiences feel from continuously consuming pessimistic or optimistic content for years on end. So, if an artist must reject some or all norms to create anything meaningfully new, what guide can they use? The norms and rules can no longer serve as guides for obvious reasons. Their pure negation or polar opposite is also unlikely to serve as a good guide since the rule still has some value insofar as it expresses a tendency for audiences to like or dislike certain things. What then serves as the guide for an artist? Intuition, judgment, and emotional gut reactions are the guides for artists who have become unmoored from the strictures of rules and norms. The obvious consequence of this is that sometimes those new emotional guides will be too personal. They won’t resonate. And the artist and artwork will be isolated by them. Of course, this can happen occasionally, maybe even often. But the alternative is that we abandon emotional sincerity for formulaic veneer and we all pump out the most nauseously polished, AI-inspired bullshit. Or we can boldly accept some missteps as meaningful costs of doing business with emotionally charged art.
Aside from this larger argument about the necessity of risk in making art, there is also a much simpler argument that I hinted at above. Art is a type of communication that cannot be readily replicated by anything else (though play and ritual come close). It embraces ambiguity and aporia. It embraces these deeply confusing qualities so that it can resonate with many people. Art is not here to lecture us. There are so many better ways to lecture. Art is here to change our lives in small but meaningful ways. Art can get into the crevices that reason simply cannot. And the way it does this is almost always attached at least partly to emotion. We can have debates over whether conceptual art is emotional (I happen to think it is), but nearly every one of us, if asked to mention the most powerful piece of art we have ever experienced, will undoubtedly mention at least one emotion attached to the aesthetic experience. Art requires emotion. Artists require emotion. And when we stifle emotion to avoid embarrassment or cringe, we are handicapping one of the most powerful and important human creations that has united us for tens of thousands of years.
