The Transcendent Ecstasy of Cringe

Let's begin with Bladee. I found Bladee on Soundcloud when I was a teenager in 2015, and I felt completely mortified for him. Not really for him, but for myself. The reason why Bladee mortified me, and continues to mortify many of my friends who I force to listen to his early recordings while they're driving, is because his music exists in an unsettling tension between irony and sincerity. He never resolves this tension by revealing his work to be completely genuine or completely a joke. His lyrics are an autotuned stream of unabashed self-pity, braggadocio, brand names, and vague religious imagery, sometimes haphazard, often eloquent, and always melodramatic. For the pathologically self-conscious and cringe-prone, this is agonizing. It feels like facing your own annhiliation.

I was also self-pitying, online, and highly concerned with my personal style, so seeing this reflected so shamelessly felt intolerably cringe-inducing. I was punk, not emo, and I channeled all of my feelings of despair and desire and shame and vulnerability into a quiet, cynical, defensive anger that felt more socially acceptable. I lived in fear that people would discover my drawings of catgirls, winged tigers, cool swords impaling wolves with sidebangs, etc. that I had posted on the internet in elementary school. This perfectly replaced the terror I felt in Catholic confession as a child, ashamed and exposed to God: awkward, oblivious, perverted, uncool, selfish, gross, and irredeemably weird.

As I got older and learned to be more forgiving and honest with myself, I realized that the feeling of cringe can be an opportunity for transcendence. Sometimes, when I see someone do something completely inappropriate and outside of social norms, I feel genuinely ecstatic, high, and alive. Friends occasionally mistake my love of cringe comedy for mean-spirited laughter at the cringee's expense, but it's a feeling of communion and complete acceptance. When you release the burden of secondhand embarrassment, allow ambiguity to wash over you, and finally face the annhiliating force of Cringe without recoiling, you don't need any external validation. You are completely free to love what you love, and for a moment, you are no longer afraid to die.

Written August 2026.