Online Rap Song Previews Are Making My Brain Explode, but I Can't Stop Watching

Holy shit! Drake just shared 20 seconds of a new song! Nicki Minaj just announced her single is coming out Wednesday! Jay Z and Beyoncé made a sweet action movie trailer for their tour! In other words, my brain is about to explode. I'm worried I might need spoiler alerts for rap songs. Sure, the buildup to a rap song or video release has to be one of the most absurd types of anticipation that exists, and the trailer has to be some of the most pointless types of content. There shouldn't be any way six second snippets of audio can legitimately get someone excited for a full song. Except, in my case, they do.

Over the last couple months, I almost ruined a new Young Thug song, “Eww,” for myself, entirely through following every detail of its upcoming release. I'd been subsisting on radio interview snippets (this one in particular should have gone triple platinum), and I greeted the song's actual release with hyperbolic excitement. It was fire. But once I got over the initial thrill of it actually coming out, I couldn't help but wonder if my obsession over its previews had undermined my ultimate enjoyment of the song. How the hell did this happen? How did I become the type of psychopath who does that?

Perhaps this particular experience is only something fellow Internet rap fiends can relate to, but there's an obvious trend across the board: Our collective attention is getting parceled off into six-second intervals. When once the single teased the album (according to various historical sources), today the Instagram clip teases the single. Give us a hot 20 seconds of your song, and we'll all gather around for when all of it, in its monumental two-minute entirety, leaks. Alternatively, just make a Vine of two compelling enough bars and you're a superstar.

This kind of hilarious truncation runs the hype cycle, and it's a very easy thing to hate. It's bad enough if you're just a regular rap fan who thinks your favorite artist has put out a new song only to discover it's a trailer of the behind-the-scenes Instagram series. But it's even worse if you actually buy into it. When a rapper releases a snippet, it can feed our excitement, but it can also ruin the whole song. When you're watching Vines, your attention can get stuck in the hamster's wheel of the video loop, then leave you hours later wondering what the fuck your life has come to. More and more, it's feeding our desire for the condensed. Consider that Pharrell packed 24 hours of content into an interactive music video. That kind of thing is becoming necessary just to keep your eyes and ears satiated for four minutes. It anticipates your desire to "change the channel" on the Internet every six seconds, so it (cleverly) lets you do that internally.

Artists, who want to sell albums, have to walk a narrower line, then, between giving a taste and giving too much away—first on the molecular level of hyping their single, then again on the macro level of the album, from which the singles have to have withheld something substantial. Give away too little and you'll fall behind in the Instagram promotion arms race. Give away too much, and the delicate balance falls apart. Look at the G.O.O.D. Music album Cruel Summer: Despite having a number of the strongest tracks of 2012, was greeted with a resounding "meh" upon its release, mainly because we had heard most of it already.

Some artists, though, do navigate this balance successfully, and—not coincidentally—they also tend to be the most successful. Nicki Minaj's recent run is a good example. Almost every week, she's been finessing the entire rap game with another street collaboration, like a politician touring the nation rapper by rapper (Young Thug, Soulja Boy, YG, Lil Herb) before an election, kissing the babies of her constituents. And only now is she finally alluding to her single ("Dropping my single in two weeks, The Pinkprint album a movie!" she rapped on "Yass Bitch"; last night in LA she shared the news that it's coming Wednesday, generating a bevy of breathless blog posts). With most of these pre-single singles, there's an accompanying Instagram tease, an infectious Vine, or otherwise viral nature attached. It's all part of the plan. Now all she has to do is make sure the real single is on par with the songs leading up to it, and that her album is indeed a "movie."

Similarly, though on a smaller scale, YG's "Who Do You Love" was an instant smash to anyone who first saw this shitty video of Drake playing like five seconds of it. Someone else took that clip and slowed it down, stretching it to about 15 seconds, and it became the hottest track of that day. The embarrassingly high number of times that I watched that clip rivals if not surpasses the number of times I've listened to the actual song. There is something wrong with me. Such addict behavior would have ended in me ruining the song for myself if, fortunately, a terrible, unfinalized version hadn't leaked in the meantime. After resigning myself to the idea that I had enjoyed a fucking five-second phone-recorded video more than a song, the final version came out—and in miraculous fashion, it climbed its way back into my heavy rotation one DJ Mustard piano plink at a time.

We do have agency here. I chose to watch "Eww" radio interviews over and over again, so I had sapped some of what the song could have been to me. You can cultivate your arc of enjoyment based on the level you want to obsess. The medium allows us to tune in as much or as little as we want, but really, it's addictive. It's a positive feedback loop between our desire for content at ultra high frequency and music's ability to push that desire. We want the very next thing, very right now.

Think about the fact that Chief Keef is coming out with a mixtape titled Bang Pt. 4 before Bang Pt. 3, which is his album. Young Thug is (God willing) calling his album Tha Carter VI. Both of these examples make a joke out of the way we obsess over new material. The truth is that at the rate at which we discover and consume new music, it feels necessary for artists to play the game if they want us to care about their new shit.

That still doesn't mean that they should expect us to care, though. The pure, unadulterated flex of Beyoncé's out of nowhere album release is something only she and a few others can do. Kanye can project "New Slaves" on walls to carry his marketing, but no one's going to rush to the scene if CyHi the Prince does the same. And you can tell when a rapper is struggling to manipulate excitement. They might drop a dramatic trailer for a song that will have no buzz regardless or let you know that nine of your favorite other zero-buzz rappers are going to be on the remix. What it comes down to is self-awareness. Artists have to gauge their audience's engagement, then throw their lassos accordingly. Chief Keef and Young Thug (both famous for not giving a fuck) transcend (or at least deflate) this silly game with their respective preemptive titles, as though they each already had a Playstation 7 in the back of their Phantoms while the rest of us were shaking with anticipation for the Playstation 4.

Thankfully, "Eww" has since re-entered my life after giving it a much needed breather. I'm not sure what's next. Should we be doing something about this? Should we be afraid of a brave new world in which music thrives on an ever more granular scale? Wherein the musical equivalent of a tweet can be more influential than the musical equivalent of a book? Will craft suffer? One thing that is clear is that as long as our pathetic husks of bodies are able to care about music news, we'll probably keep feeding this cycle and, in turn, making ourselves ever more neurotic about it. We will spoil songs for ourselves, and we'll be pissed about it. And then, in our self-hatred, we'll continue to perpetuate the cycle, encouraging artists to unleash ever more pointless snippets upon us. Or maybe we'll embrace the snippets, and eventually we won't need full songs anyway. If we're only using music to soundtrack our own Vines anyway, what's the big deal?

Almost inevitably, as this trend progresses, it will become overwhelming. I won't be able to keep up anymore, and I'll have to drop out of the stream and become an old man holding dearly onto his SoundCloud playlists, a Luddite clutching his mp3s. But for now, I'm going to sit and wait for a three-frame GIF of Drake thinking about releasing a 1.4-second preview of himself humming the chorus to his new single.

Alexander Gleckman has Instagram connected to his TV. He's on Twitter - @nonmogul

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