Warning: Some of the music videos I have linked in this article contain offensive language and adult scenes so please don’t feel compelled to watch them if you don’t want to. The article will make sense without them.

Some Saturday mornings I get up early enough to watch Rage on ABC. I wake up expecting to see audio-visual experiments from VCA over a dolewave drone but instead, I get Miley Cyrus humping the ground in ‘Flowers’. This is what I get for waking up to watch Rage rather than staying up to watch it.

Rage was an institution when there was no Spotify, when there was no YouTube, and when there was no TikTok. Rage has no algorithm commercialising ‘the personal experience’. It’s just a bunch of producers that need to fill six hours of music video programming every weekend from midnight to 6AM.The viewing experience is marked by randomness, and audiences often stick around for one more song in search of new music they may enjoy.

An episode of John Safran’s Music Jamboree (a 2002 SBS music documentary series), showed how easy it was to get a video into the playlist. Safran strapped a camcorder to his dog and turned it into a video over a joke dance track (which is actually quite good upon relistening). It made it onto Rage.

But I want to take you back to the winter of 2003. It was 1AM and I had fallen asleep in front of the loungeroom heater in my childhood home (brown Vulcan wall gas heater. IYKYK). I woke up to Aphex Twin’s ‘Windowlicker’ (1999) playing on Rage. It was ten minutes and 42 seconds of disturbing weirdness that truly haunted me but interested me. I became obsessed with the UK acid dance scene and would read old issues of The Face at the library and borrowed CDs from the genre. I never lived it, but I longed for those days to come back. I wanted rave culture while Mum had put a ban on Roll-Ups in the house.

Pull forward to today and there is a lot of chatter about Gen Z’s love for nostalgia. I wrote about this topic last year, noting that nostalgia has evolved from a personal experience to a shared one, thanks to social media. As a result, what may be fleeting for an individual becomes permanent for their audience.

Fragmented everywhere, their nostalgia lives in a feed photo, a short video, a tweet, or a screenshotted message. It’s ready to be revisited when the present and future constantly seems heavy.

What we are nostalgic for, after all, is part of our identity. 

But now, enter Fred Again… The London DJ who is immensely popular with Gen Z and recently sold out a secret Melbourne show in 3.4 seconds. His 'Actual Life' album trilogy chronicles his personal experiences over the past three years, reflecting distinct phases of disconnection, limited connection, and reconnection through intimate voice recordings of his friends, Instagram clips, his favourite songs, and crisp club hits.

Many of us experience life in a similar way to Fred Again... by listening to music and using audio to enhance our daily commutes. Although hundreds of people walk from Flinders Street station to Southbank each day, each journey is unique due to the music we listen to, the messages we read, the videos we watch, and the memories we attach to them. In fact, 33% of Australians stream music through their headphones daily, indicating that while these experiences occur in isolation, the behavior is widespread (Gilliver, Nguyen, Beach, Barr, 2017).

This happened to me at Miami International Airport, back in 2011. My flight to New York was canceled so I lay on the ground at my gate and waited for the next one. I listened to an album to pass the time (cliché to say that it was Bon Iver’s self-titled album). Watching people eat their Dunkin’ Donuts while listening to ‘Holocene’ reminded me of how beautifully basic this life can be.

But it wouldn’t be 2023 if this didn’t happen on TikTok. And it wouldn’t be TikTok if this phenomenon didn’t have its own aesthetic. Never fear, it’s edgy af; it’s #corecore.

With over 1.3b views on the hashtag, #corecore is a video editing style that brings together movie clips, images, and phone-filmed moments to conjure a mood. Its M.O. is to make an audience that is so numb from scrolling, feel something. Gen Z reportedly spends 95 minutes a day on TikTok (WARC, 2022), and with each video lasting 47 seconds on average -  they’re watching around 121 different videos a day, on that app alone. #corecore’s noble mission to cut through has dignity.

And of course, Aphex Twin’s ‘QKThr’ is the main track used for #corecore. Everything starts and ends with Aphex Twin.

Australian #corecore expresses our dystopian dream by lamenting the Aussie battler. Behind every rental or interest rate increase, and behind every $7.20 bag of Red Rock Deli chips is a bloke just trying to work and knock off with his mates.

While our social feeds are curated for attention, #corecore is curated for perspective. It critiques the systems that have made us this way while at the same time feeding into them. And for Australian #corecore, we have to make the loss of our middle-class a joke. Because if you aren’t laughing, you’re crying.

The fragmented content in the videos mimics how anyone that grew up using social media views the lives of others. It’s also how Fred Again… creates his music and his videos.No feeling is complete. Moments exist in isolation amongst a constant stream of other moments. What is important to us, exists among what others think is important. A baby’s first birthday streams next to Aperol Spritz’ being clinked. Everything is nothing.

The more we lean into this, the lonelier we feel, and the more isolated we become. In order to feel connected, people are compelled to produce content. It creates a sense of security; if we’re all creating the same thing then at least we are feeling alone, together. 

It begs the question - Are we living the best years of our lives, or are we just trying to capture them?

As I round off this article I acknowledge that #corecore is nothing new. This feeling of everything and nothing has been around since anyone, ever, hit adolescence. We love to want things, “we just want to want things” (Klein, 2023).

Cast your mind back to that broody teenage guy in American Beauty that filmed a plastic bag floating around. “Video is a poor excuse I know. But it helps me remember. I need to remember.”

Waking up to Rage at 1AM hits different to scrolling in bed at 1AM.Rage ends at 6. The internet does not.I wonder how Gen Alpha will display their melancholy and nostalgia in Roblox.

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