2020s Subculture: Xpiritualism

Popularity: 2021-2022

Popular artists: Yabujin, Death Soulja, HEXXO, Yohei, alfie, Rory in Early 20s, Curseweb, AkuraVortex

This was a niche but slightly popular subculture primarily on tiktok post Covid. Visually, people would edit their pictures to parallel the early internet as well as foreign whatsapp type memes and advertisements. It’s similar to weirdcore in that it aims to feel very dreamy but it primarily uses internet/technology motifs as well as late 2000s creepypasta and anime. It died when it started going “mainstream” and people started making fun of the fact that they use foreign languages like Arabic to try and be scary as well as the way they edited their faces. People started calling the overall aesthetic “yabujin core” satirically

  The music side was really interesting. It’s associated with dances like jumpstyle a lot as well as music like cloud rap and hardstyle/techno. Most of the music these people made were purposefully low quality with many 2000s internet or phone samples like ringtones. The biggest artist of this subculture was yabujin who actually has over 10 million streams on his songs. Many other artists in this style took inspiration from him. Unfortunately he retired right when he started getting popular. Much of the music in this subculture either has no lyrics or rap lyrics that are heavily layered and hard to make out.  Id recommended listening to yabujin’s “302? ionwan2go” to understand the vibe of the music.