🟧 Put your (wired) headphones on
An ode to tangled EarPods and Addison Rae by Chris Erik Thomas.
Addison Rae’s pop hit “Headphones On” inspires us to reclaim our vintage technology and hook directly into the digital mainframe. Wires are cool again.
Chris Erik Thomas: 2003 marked a significant milestone in culture. It was the year Beyoncé launched her solo career with “Crazy in Love.” It was the year we invaded Iraq under the guise of “weapons of mass destruction,” which, you know, didn’t exist. And it was the year that Apple released its “Silhouettes” ad campaign, an instantly iconic series of posters and commercials featuring blacked-out bodies dancing to music as their white wired headphones swung free.
I bring up these three moments because lately, it feels like time has flattened. In the past month, Jay-Z performed “Crazy in Love” with Beyoncé during her Cowboy Carter tour stop in Paris, the United States bombed Iran under the guise of nuclear weapons that don’t yet exist, and yet another pop girlie by the name of Lorde was spotted wearing Apple’s white AirPods in a music video. Wired headphones have been clawing their way back to cultural relevance for years (I’ll get to that), but this moment feels different, thanks in part to the 2003 resurgence, and also thanks to TikToker-turned-singer Addison Rae.
A lab leak of 2000s pop
A feeling of religious fervor washes over me whenever I listen to Rae’s breakout single “Headphones On” with my headphones on while walking through the streets. For those who’ve been in a cultural coma and haven’t yet been acquainted with this absolute banger, imagine the vocal quality and camp of “Stars Are Blind” by Paris Hilton but slow-boiled in a vat of nostalgia. This all sounds like an unnecessarily descriptive drag, but trust me when I say this song works; “Headphones On” makes me want to peel off my shirt, run through a sprinkler, smoke a cigarette, and brood (sexily, of course).
Future historians, should they not die in the Water Wars, may very well look back at “Headphones On” as one of this era’s most prescient cultural artifacts. The track is both perfectly unnatural and perfectly of the moment. It’s unnatural because 1) Rae is a pop star whose claim to fame is being a social media celebrity turned actress turned musician, and 2) every last ounce of the song and its accompanying album are utterly derivative. It’s a lab leak of an experiment in recreating the 2000s-era pop landscape. Musically, Addison Rae is the Paris Hilton of the attention-deficit generation, down to the mononymic debut album title: Paris by Paris Hilton walked so Addison by Addison Rae could strut.
It’s this obvious mirroring that, ironically, makes the track feel so current. It is also what ties it into the tangled wires of the headphone discourse. The “Headphones On” music video is indie sleaze as imagined by ChatGPT. There’s a Manic Panic pink wig, outfits pulled from an American Apparel moodboard, a smudge of heavy eyeliner, and, of course, wired headphones dangling from her ears. There’s only one lo-fi accessory suitable for the level of cultural retroflection we’re in, and sorry to Motorola, but it’s not the Razr (although it, too, has been having a moment).
Techno-regression
The wired headphones resurgence is effective because they are the easiest way to signal resistance to the Big Tech agenda. Last year, a millennial New York City muscle gay named Ryan proclaimed that “me still using wired headphones is actually camp and a play on the socioeconomic structure of technological consumption.” He’s right. Mostly. Besides a subset of people who willingly strap VR headsets to their faces so they can watch porn and air-grab phantom titties, the general consensus seems to be that we’re technologically too far gone. We’re in a digital depressive downward spiral and yearning for simpler, sexier times. This extends all the way through to the headphones we use to listen to music.
Ever since I stopped resisting and fully ensconced myself in Apple’s walled ecosystem, I've accumulated their headphones. I regularly use the wired EarPods, AirPod Pro, and AirPod Max models, and have a dusty pair of years-old AirPods somewhere in a drawer. I have weathered the storm of “AirPod flexing” memes that made landfall online in the aftermath of Apple’s launch of its debut $159 wireless headphones. And I bought the bulky Max over-ear headphones after seeing one too many Instagram influencers wear them in airplane bathroom selfies, presumably on their way to some Mediterranean locale. They do not make me feel like I’m off to a Mediterranean locale. They just make me worry that I’m going to have a permanently indented skull if I wear them too long.
Addison Rae is right. We do need to put our (clunky, wired) headphones on, because when addictive algorithms dominate our music and social networks, plugging in a physical cable to listen to music feels like a small reclamation of something special that’s been lost in the brainrot era. I can’t deny that reading articles about Gen Z associating wireless headphones with looking like a finance bro can feel frivolous, and seeing wired headphones appear in Skims campaign ads featuring pop princess Sabrina Carpenter can seem like a cynical, trend-hopping cash grab (it is). But I’m hopeful about this technoregressive moment we’re in.
As the wave of trend pieces over the past four years proclaimed: wired headphones are “a styling essential” and “fashion” and “the next it accessory” worn by “cool kids” because “everything Millennial is cool again.” This may feel like throwing the first tangle of EarPods at Stonewall, but resistance has to start somewhere. As Rae so eloquently sings: “You can't fix what has already been broken. You just have to surrender to the moment.”
Chris Erik Thomas is a Berlin-based reporter covering art, fashion, and culture. His irregularly published newsletter, Public Service, is a catalogue of fixations and essays much like this one you’ve just read, so he would encourage you to subscribe.
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Interesting read. The main reason I use wired Earpods, and I suspect I'm not alone in this, is that the world already seems to have an endless supply of them in new-old-stock condition. We don't need more stuff.
After my last (nice) wired in-ear headphones bit the dust a few years back I grabbed some Earpods out of a bin of 100 more, paid the $7 or whatever and was on my way. They get the job done!