![]() Maybe your 5th grade art teacher played it, or your 8th grade algebra teacher, or your junior year homeroom. Maybe it was the listening stations at Walmart, or the kitsch kiosks at the mall, or the tanning bed. Įnable 3rd party cookies or use another browserĮach of these TikToks unlocked, in the parlance of our times, the core memories of a generation - memories that, apparently, heavily featured Enigma’s “Return to Innocence.” If it wasn’t the late-night Nickelodeon ads, perhaps it was the wedding scene from the Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Chevy Chase vehicle Man of the House. ![]() (If you haven’t read Mina Tavakoli’s retrospective on the comp in Pitchfork, please do that because it rules.) Video after trend-hopping video found people twirling around with coffee, blissing out by a wind machine, or interpretive dancemoshing. Pure moods, even, like the ones on the New Age compilation Pure Moods, which blew up on TikTok a year or two ago. ![]() Generally, these listeners only cared about the one song - with the exception, surprisingly, of the JoJos - and certainly weren’t, in the parlance of our time, Enigma stans.īut beneath the surface of the zeitgeist were some shifting vibes, some latent burbling moods. Younger listeners did exist, but they usually came from niche communities for nerdy reasons: the dubiously titled “Modern Crusaders” being used in an ending sequence from the anime JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure “Gravity of Love” being used in approximately 500 AMVs, most prominently a Warrior Cats tribute by one AlliKatNya “The Eyes of Truth” being the background music to the PS3 hacking tool Multiman. Most of the comments came from Gen X, because Enigma is a Gen X yuppie/hippie band. The ‘00s comments often have a guileless charm, artifacts from the YouTube era of camcorder recordings, AMVs, and the sort of fanvids that the major labels would eventually rebrand and monetize as “lyric videos.” The ‘90s comments absorbed the earnest techno-optimism that brought about late-1990s internet forums. ![]() There’s plenty of material to draw from: YouTube, of course, but also MySpace, last.fm, Usenet threads, GeoCities guestbooks, as far back as allows. That sort of comment-low-irony, gushing freely-was what I expected the bot to post. I was 16, high on teenage Dunning-Krugerism and other millennial dumbshit, and so I decided that this, of all things, was what I could do better at. A tiny, petty part of me got into music writing because I had read one too many florid, truly weird reviews of various Enigma tracks by Gen X Internet Tickletexts, feeling Emotions all over the screen in near-masturbatory gushes. And I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that part of the motivation for this silly, silly bot was some deeply-buried salt. Part of the motivation was the utter lack of irony in online comments about Enigma amid today’s irony-poisoned Internet, these sectors of the web have become oases. Most of my motivation for making this profoundly silly bot was coding-related: learning how to roll a Twitter bot more from scratch than I’d done before, getting more experience with Python, getting any experience with the Twitter API. (Twitter, of course, is now itself considered deeply uncool, so I’ve ported the bot to Cohost. The bot, as bots do, exists for one purpose: to tweet comments posted online about the music of the new-age band Enigma, long considered deeply uncool. For about two years I’ve run a Twitter bot inspired by the accounts DiscoComments and.
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