The Style of Sound: How Music Shaped the Look of 2010s Tumblr
Back when the internet was mostly good, Marina, Lana Del Rey, and Arctic Monkeys had unprecedented reign over its aesthetics. Thank you, Tumblr.
From the stage to the runway, The Style of Sound is a series that explores the intricate relationships forged between your favorite artists and their iconic fashion statements.
Written by Kateri David
Illustrated by Anisha Kamat
Before the internet was a magnifying glass for the world’s ugliness, there was Tumblr. Specifically, the 2012-2016 Tumblr era. If you were online back then, life might’ve gone something like this: you roll out of bed during summer break and begin hardcoding your personal blog — tinkering with a script that’ll add a glitter effect to its baby pink background. Nailing this look feels super important, for some unknown reason. On your feed, users with names like @sosadtoday and @softcorequeen reblog images that radiate a syrupy loneliness: teens in knee-high socks and pleated skirts smoking cigs, song lyrics laid over an empty '80s mall landscape. Whatever resonates with you and your "aesthetic," you reblog yet again. It’s only 2014, and nothing feels unbearable.
In 2021, this internet moment is having something of a comeback, or maybe we’re regressing, as veterans of the era believe. Either way, after the hyper nightmare of this past year, many are desperate for a simpler time; if the past we’re reliving isn’t too distant, it’s all the more comforting. This might explain why you’ve been getting jumped by that black-and-white photo of a bedroom wall lined with records circa 2013 — Lorde’s Pure Heroine and The 1975’s self-titled album are standouts here — recently on Twitter, or seeing friends post about which indie pop albums they’re revisiting. Music was inseparable from the early Tumblr scene, both shaping and reinforcing its aesthetic. And of the most influential artists at the time, only three had this corner of the web in an undeniable chokehold: Marina, Lana Del Rey, and Arctic Monkeys.
For every era, adolescence has a look; not so much a coded language teens use to vet who’s 'in,' but an expression of an underlying mood. As a predominantly young, femme, and queer space, Tumblr accrued a distinct aesthetic well before the Big Three started circulating the blogs in force. Grainy photos of teens fared well; so did saccharine edits of early internet hallmarks: desktop monitors melting in neon, a pastel Hello Kitty edition of MS Paint. Often, these posts would feature a single typographic message over the image — something bleak and vague like, “I thought we had plans.” For a musician to do well on Tumblr, they would need to embody these sentiments and play off the visuals of the digital age. The blogs need to eat, after all — and before she was concerned with victimizing herself and potentially infecting her fans, Lana Del Rey was ready to serve.
Looking forlorn in a Priscilla Presley updo, Del Rey crashed the blogosphere with the debut of her 2011 single, "Video Games." In retrospect, the music video seemed perfectly crafted for Tumblr consumption: shots of Del Rey mournfully singing flashed between clips from Betty Boop-era cartoons and slice-of-life Super 8 reels of strangers. Like early Tumblr users, Lana had a fixation with imagining the near past as a time of glamour and possibility, one superior to today’s way of living.
The single joined 11 other tracks on 2012’s hugely successful Born to Die, which was panned by critics who accused the singer of glamorizing one-sided relationships and female submission. None of this mattered on Tumblr, though. Gifs of the singer in her rose flower crown — while sitting in a throne near two live tigers — spread to every corner of the site. And her lyrics, especially “We were born to die” and “Sometimes love is not enough,” eclipsed all other 'sadcore' image quotes. Most users were at an age where serious romantic encounters were rare, and the only love they were prepared to give was puppy-like adoration. With charged vintage callbacks and a thinly veiled death wish, Lana crafted a sepia-toned dreamscape where listeners could safely live out their femme-fatale fantasies.
Image courtesy of Vice
Marina (formerly Marina and The Diamonds) followed suit in a similar fashion. Though her later projects lacked staying power, 2012’s Electra Heart was an instant hit: gif-ready in a way few albums have been since. To this day, without really searching for it, one can find reblogged stills and edits across Tumblr from Marina’s “Primadonna'' video, where she spins around in a pink nightgown as static runs across retro TV sets.
Electra Heart is an album about artifice: scattered between its bubblegum choruses and smooth cadences are shallow motives, two-faced lovers, and plastic pop-personas. In an interview with Pop Justice, Marina describes the album’s vapid fame-grab as the “antithesis” of her beliefs, claiming the project was her way of belying the idea of celebrity: “The whole idea, the whole notion of pop culture and especially pop music is all based on an illusion … I’m so against it that I almost have to play the part,” Marina said. It’s unlikely Tumblr fell in love with Electra Heart for its attempted social commentary — most accounts couldn’t get past this look — but users of the platform could sense the empty. The era’s most active bloggers were high schoolers, accustomed to matching their personality with whatever setting; they could find comfort in Marina’s overblown act. An album that revels in its con.
Unlike her contemporary alt-pop girls, Marina was emphatically dramatic, pulpy, and pink, giving Tumblrites the go-ahead to claim these traits as a full online image. “Wish I’d been a prom teen fighting for the title / Instead of being 16 and burning up a bible,” she sings on "Teen Idle." As the track plays, one can’t help picturing the lyrics paired with pastel stills from "The Virgin Suicides" on a post with 12,000 reblogs. In similar dramatic fashion, the Electra Heart promo pics are blown-out to oblivion and slapped with faux '90s television waves, but they’re supposed to. This is Marina’s Y2K fantasy, the same one shared by the thousands of Tumblr blogs devoted to posting Juicy Couture tracksuits and mood boards adorned with "babygirl" in sparkly letters.
Compared to that of Lana and Marina, Arctic Monkeys’ influential trajectory was the least linear. Formed in 2002, the band released four albums between 2006 and 2011 that were met with moderate success across Tumblr, with Humbug and Favourite Worst Nightmare being the crowd favorites. Both albums are buoyed by lead singer Alex Turner’s loveable scumbag persona and personal romantic mishaps mixed with snide critiques of “the scene.” Thematically, these projects catapulted Turner to teen heartthrob status, though Arctic Monkeys didn't have much to offer in the aesthetically pleasing visual consumption department.
The Monkeys’ early visuals were gritty but ultimately vanilla: the cover of Humbug featured Turner and the gang slumped against a random door, while the music video for "Fluorescent Adolescent" features shaky hand-held footage of fighting clowns — nothing that would turn a blogger’s head. But there was something in Turner’s voice, a dusky croon with a blazing Sheffield accent, that bled coolness and drew Tumblr users in.
In the brief span from 2012-2016, Tumblr had an obsession with TV and film characters who were closed-off and hopelessly caustic in relationships, and Turner fit the mold for acceptable love interests perfectly. Users were particularly lenient with the people they stanned: anyone who fell short of being totally genocidal was fair game, especially those who struggled to reciprocate feelings.
Then, in 2013, Arctic Monkeys released AM, securing the band a permanent horde of 20-something listeners who flock to this album daily for a kick of adolescent nostalgia. AM had what its predecessors didn’t: imposing bass lines, stadium-filling hooks, and straightforward talk of desire perfectly digestible for pop rock. It also had a look. The pleading lyrics struck a chord with listeners, but it was AM’s visuals that sent 2010s Tumblr into a frenzy. Featuring only a rounded white soundwave on a black backdrop, AM’s iconic cover and its animated counterpart in the “Do I Wanna Know?” music video changed the course of Tumblr aesthetics, forging a new branch of grayscale minimalism. From this point on, numerous black-and-white grids began to circulate en masse. So did the pleated tennis skirts and the monochrome vinyl photos. More than anything, Arctic Monkeys’ revamped style helped users express themselves through new aesthetics and lean into the contrasting feelings of want and neglect. To this day, when searching for images of Arctic Monkeys lyrics, Tumblr posts continue to dominate the search results with phrases like, “I’ve dreamt about you every night this week” glowing stark against dark backgrounds.
Around 2017, new lyric edits declined sharply, — the web had outgrown this phase — but Alex Turner’s words live on in these early Tumblr posts, as do Marina's and Lana Del Rey’s. Today, clicking on the users from old reblog histories will send you into a sea of 404 errors, but dig through enough sadcore @s, and you might find a goldmine for early Tumblr relics — an archived blog. From the outside, they still look lived-in, more than a well-preserved reminder of when the web felt a little quieter, and looked a little more familiar.