Hit Em
A dream becomes a tweet becomes a genre
Drew Daniel
The night I had the dream was dark. We were staying in the guest cabin at our friend Steve’s house, which overlooks a meadow at the edge of a redwood forest. The house is only reachable down a one-lane mountain road with a steep drop. Water comes from the well onsite. When the power cuts out, they make do with generators. You can’t get cell service but sometimes Wi-Fi works. Our bed was directly beneath a plate glass window facing the trees. Above them, above us, a field of bright, piercing white stars lit up the dark night.
In the dream, I am at a rave. Loud music is playing, strobes flashing. I meet an excited girl who tells me about a new genre called “hit em.” She says that it is in 5/4 time at 212 beats per minute, with super crunched out, distorted sounds. My friend Max appears. I try to talk to him, but he is too busy trying to fix some piece of broken music hardware. The music is too loud, anyways. It embarrasses me that he doesn’t want to talk, or that I am being clingy. A puddle of glistening liquid slime is on the ground. I hear my own voice: “I live there. That’s my grave.” A handsome stranger with red hair and freckled forearms appears. The dream becomes charged with sexual excitement. We are alone, suddenly, and he is naked. He turns and offers himself to me. I reach toward him. I wake up.
Barely awake, I grabbed my phone and tweeted:
“Had a dream I was at a rave talking to a girl and she told me about a genre called “hit em” that is in 5/4 time at 212 bpm with super crunched out sounds thank you dream girl.”
I went back to sleep. Rising later, I went about my day, trying to get some overdue writing and editing work done on an anthology. Flickering at the edge of my attention, the tweet caught fire: 100 likes, then 500, then a thousand. Then more. The “impressions” shot upwards. Uncannily, the dream girl’s description of the genre of “hit em” had prompted musicians to fire up their laptops, set the tempo and time signature to the requisite settings, and let their crunchiest sounds rip. Hit em started hitting.
At first, friends and “mutuals” made 30-second sketches. But soon, total strangers, from Chicago to Chile to Berlin, shared their attempts at “hit em”—produced in their bedroom studios, sharing murky videos and screengrabs of their software. Listening on my cellphone in the cabin, the songs sounded radically odd and frankly ridiculous: noisy, chaotic, far too fast. In other words, they were exactly to the dream girl’s strict specifications. The experiments multiplied, some songs sounding surprisingly slick—demented in their energy and form, but increasingly tight in their execution. Accompanied by animated videos, comment sections were soon encrusted with parodic memes about hit em. Musicologist and writer Alex Reed was the first person to complete a hit em track and put it on Bandcamp. The tweet reached 500,000 impressions, then a million. Within a day or two, the producers working on “hit em” included people with substantial followings in the EDM world. Some of the “hit em” songs had tens of thousands of likes. Some of them sounded like fully formed, even danceable, realizations of the core idea.
Journalists started to notice. An article on the Music Radar site was the first web article, aggregating some of the most viral hit em tracks. Novelist Peter C. Baker asked me to write about hit em for their Substack. Between promising to do that and completing the article, a journalist from The Guardian approached me about an interview, and even, incredibly, something that started in my unconscious was now on NPR’s “Weekend Edition.” An astrologer had calculated the planetary forces from when I had the dream, offering a star chart and elaborate exegesis. Within a few days, I was getting requests for festival appearances in European capitals. By the time my husband and I had touched down in Australia to play some concerts a few days later, a worldwide crew of programmers had already generated and released an entire compilation on Bandcamp, titled “Disposable Heroes of Hit Em.” Struggling through the jetlag, I sat in my Sydney hotel room listening to fully fledged hit em tracks: Louis Hubris Nooz’s “Dunrobin Stobie” and Pony Boys’s “It Came To Me In A Dream.” I can no longer keep track of how many people have made “hit em” tracks. For a compilation I am assembling with some friends, The Dropbox submissions exceed 200 in number, and my tweet now has 7.4 million impressions.
“The tweet is a surprising example of ‘dreamwork’ in action: a labor of recovery that is also a sleight of hand between self-exposure and self-concealment.”
A dream about genre became a tweet, and a tweet became a meme that birthed a genre: a collective form opened up to anyone who wanted to participate. Somehow, the internet took something from my unconscious, translating it into something that now lives online—the decaying half-life of a random moment in my psyche, now exteriorized as an elaborate subcultural prank decidedly out of my control.
*
Before I assess that outcome, in the spirit of “auto-analysis,” I want to return to the moment in the cabin when the dream became something to share. A mildly embarrassing symptom of chronic attachment to social media, the tweet is a surprising example of “dreamwork” in action: a labor of recovery that is also a sleight of hand between self-exposure and self-concealment. The passage—from the meandering chaos of the dream to the minimalism of the tweet—reads like a textbook example of secondary revision.
Highly selective, the tweet crops out what is compromising, awkward, and, well, queer about the dream, in order to render it sleek and shareable. I was a bit ashamed at my own self-censorship in crafting the original tweet. Perhaps this prompted me to follow up an hour later to tweet another controlled blast of self-revelation: “did I mention that in this dream apparently I lived in a grave covered in slime? because yeah” This, too, counts as secondary revision: sharing a further detail, while massaging that detail into sense, steering the dream toward readers, affecting a bemused and self-distancing tone.
I kept out of the tweet and offline my clingy need to talk to Max, the broken hardware, the red-haired freckled man, and our willing bodies. This was pure cowardice, aka “professionalism,” but let’s keep it real: some of the undergraduates I teach follow me on Twitter. I did not want to share intimate sexual details of my dreamlife online, because that would be both compromising and “cringe.” Such material is perfectly appropriate for discussion behind closed doors, or in therapy, but it would cross over into “horny on main” territory if rendered public. Even now, sharing these details in an essay, I am a bit worried about repelling my reader with erotic confession. In the illusory hindsight of the tweet’s virality—a matter of sheer and unpredictable contingency—I’m glad I shared what I did and stopped where I did. Sticking to the odd specificity of the dream girl’s description of “hit em” made the tweet short, sharp, and strange.
The materials condensed in the dream can be contextualized, if not entirely explained. On the mingled occasions of my mother’s 80th birthday and the funeral of a family friend, I took a trip to California. My friend’s ashes had been scattered into the Pacific Ocean the day before the “hit em” dream. The “grave” in the dream might well be related to the memorial service, though my sense is that it was my own grave—neither threatening, nor repellent, but simply my home. This seems consistent, on its face, with Freud’s observation that death is not subject to direct representation within the unconscious, but further mysteries lie behind these speculations. Where did the dream girl come from? Who was she? If I wake up and claim that “a girl speaks from inside me” is there a trans dimension to this dream? Is this inner girl’s eruption from my unconscious the cracking of an egg? Consciously, I don’t think so, but that might well be my own repression and cisnormativity talking.
As in all dreamwork, I am in the realm of best guesses. Some possible sources of the dream girl figure come to mind. In the days preceding the dream, I had seen several social media posts about an underground party happening in Los Angeles called FULL FX. The lineup included DJs like Baseck and Kavari, and the grindcore band Sulfuric Cautery. People had shared video clips of Kavari’s DJ sets, often heavily distorted and very fast. Maybe these snippets of footage became components of the imaginary music in my dream. I’m not sure whether the phrase “hit em” was a garbled memory of “FULL FX” or not. I cannot really explain the significance of 5/4 or 212 bpm. The sonic similarity of “rave” and “grave” seems hardly accidental. I ended the tweet with the phrase “thank you dream girl,” a public address to her that sealed the dream off yet sustained some relation to the figure at its center. Here, I feel as if readers are eavesdropping on me talking to someone on the other side of the threshold that separates dreams from waking life.
“Yet, I learned a lesson watching hit em spread across the internet: my dream was mine, but it wasn’t personal.”
I wonder if I sound defensive about my own secondary revisions—an occupational hazard of self-analysis. Am I trying to sound likeable about the person who dreamed? Do I need to justify the desiring, needy, horny self that dreamed? Do I need to justify the canny, self-promoting avatar who tweeted? Am I here to protect or institutionally reinforce “hit em” as part of a personal brand by attaching the imprimatur of Parapraxis? Isn’t all this an open and shut case of oversharing? Yet, I learned a lesson watching hit em spread across the internet: my dream was mine, but it wasn’t personal. From its source in social media to its redirection back onto social media, this causal arc demonstrates something that readers of Parapraxis surely know: the psyche is always already social.
Unavoidably, somehow, I had the hit em dream, but this did not really matter to what hit em became. By the time the dream message had ricocheted across the planet, hit em was not about my own unconscious anymore. Hit em became the formal template of genre, entering social circulation and meeting the moment. This has led to memes, backlash, mockery, imitation, and speculation. Some people have wondered if I really had the dream, or if it is part of some kind of marketing scam. Many have groused that hit em just sounds like breakcore, or old Venetian Snares tracks. Its novelty has been litigated, and some wags have called for “post-hit em,” while DJ Physical Therapy named into being an uncanny clapback genre called “hug em,” trading assault for caress. When I am presented with new examples of hit em—asked to assess how well or poorly each new effort lives up to the terms of the prompt—I try to back away from taking too much ownership over the genre that generated inside my dream but then spilled ever outward. Instead, I invoke the trinitarian hit em catechism of time signature, tempo, and texture: 5/4 Father, 212 BPM Son, and Crunched Out Holy Ghost. Since genres are not natural, it is nonsensical to ask if hit em is a “real” genre or not.
Genre offers people a stable yet historically evolving framework of rules, formulas, and expectations. These tend to sound silly when spelled out: romcoms have meet-cutes, black metal has blast beats. Dubstep is 140 bpm. Westerns have cowboys. Tragedies end in death. The pleasure and skill of recreating a genre is a matter of agile maneuvering wherein formal expectations are teased, withheld, satisfied. Still, genre is not only a matter of form: it is a matter of flowing community with its social uptake, adaptation, and mutation. The hit em tweet has become a place to hang out online—a social milieu of exchange and competition and one-upmanship, a place to flex. To have a form, there needs to be something that sounds like hit em, but there is no limit to the number of hit em tracks that can be built. There is no way to control in advance where hit em goes.
As I happened to have been personal and confessional in this essay, let me go ahead and reveal something even more embarrassing than my desire to talk to Max or my lust for the redheaded stranger: judging from my aborted sketches and floundering attempts essayed in Ableton so far, I am not particularly skilled at actually making hit em. The hummingbird tempo of 212 is not natural to me. The mandates that a track be both incredibly fast and “crunched out” smears individual notes and percussive strikes into a blur. Wrestling with the wonky awkwardness of working in 5/4, with an ear habitually accustomed to 4/4 forms, I struggle to create a natural groove in hit em. It turns out that other people may be better at realizing my dream than I am.
Only time will tell if hit em survives; often what flourishes online for a day or a week becomes intensely repellent a little while later. By the time a hilarious meme from your co-worker becomes a printed book called “I Can Has Cheeseburger,” a certain stomachache of commercialized overfamiliarity sets in along the path from online thrill to the landfill of discarded cultural commodities. Hit em may live and die online. Whatever its fate, I remain grateful for the confounding experience of how the unpredictable process of dreamwork has been socially and collectively reproduced. Hit em has lit up the unpredictable paths that lead from the world to our dreams and back again. Repeat after me: Thank you dream girl.
“It turns out that other people may be better at realizing my dream than I am.”
Postscript: In the time since writing this essay, I have collaborated with electronic music producer Travis “Machinedrum” Stewart, and Ramon Pang and Jozef White of Tabula Rasa Records, to assemble a global compilation of artists making hit em tracks. Thank You, Dream Girl dropped on November 15 on Tabula Rasa Records.