An inevitable part of getting old is no longer recognizing the names of celebrities and musicians. Slowly and steadily, the more famous young and younger people get, the more their names will seem like incoherent phrases muttered by someone losing their mind, a vegetable side dish, or some kind of cruel trick. At some point, for a certain swath of millennials, Kourtney Kardashian will seem like old Hollywood compared to the likes of Terror Jr (who Pop Crave assures me is a person).
Sometimes the only way to combat this and ensure you are not being defrauded by life itself is to accept your own mortality and find a smart, kind, young person and beg them for the truth. It’s not unlike asking a youth to hold on to your arm while crossing a busy street. This is why I chatted with Jason P. Frank, a writer at Vulture and sterling member of Gen Z, to explain Sombr — allegedly a person, musician, and currently center of a seemingly impenetrable internet drama — to me (a grumpy millennial).
Jason, my first question to you, a youth, is to please explain to me, in millennial terms: Who is Sombr?
Sombr is a Timothée Chalamet lookalike rock singer, who sounds a little like The 1975 got put through the washing machine and all its big, even sometimes annoying, ideas got shrunken down into a TikTok-sized package.
Are you sure Sombr is one man or is he simply three skinny children in a coat?
He’s skinny as one man in a coat!
Like Chalamet, he started his career at LaGuardia, a performing arts [high] school in New York. He’s the kind of act that you might remember from the days when groups like Neon Trees, Foster the People, or Fun. would break through and manage to get one pop radio hit. Except now there’s no pop radio to hit, so there’s no way to get just one good song out of him and send him home.
Fill in the millennial blank: “If I like ______, I will like Sombr.”
“If I like the song, ‘I’m Not Going to Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance With You‘ by Black Kids, I will like Sombr.”
Why does he spell his name like a millennial app? Is he trying to trick us?
His name comes from his real-world initials, SMB, and the fact that he was sad when he released his original song. I don’t know why it’s spelled like Grindr, but the fact that he didn’t see the connection is a great indication that he’s straight.
Since it obviously is not me, who is Sombr’s main audience?
His main audience is the same group that loved Panic! at the Disco, Fun., and The Neighborhood: There is always a group of teens looking for a cute, self-serious rocker to swoon over and feel emo with.
And what are adults but simply teens that have become older? Now, from what I’ve heard through various group chats and TikToks that seemed entirely too long to listen to all the way through, Sombr is at the center of a controversy. Are the teens turning on this skinny man?
You can call [the controversy] a millennial-Gen Z divide if you want, but I think the real divide here is between young and old Gen Z.
This is an important delineation, 18- to 24-year-olds are wildly different beings from 25- to 29-year-olds.
It’s a whole different world — the generation was set in stone well before Covid hit, and when you entered lockdown makes such a big developmental difference.
The drama that started happened because a 25-year-old posted an eight-minute-long TikTok in which she criticized his performance at the Anthem in DC. She noted that she listens to Sombr and that a lot of people her age listen to Sombr, but the truth is that they’re on the older age of his listeners.
I just clicked on Sombr on Spotify and an ambulance pulled up to my apartment to take me to an assisted living facility.
Happy birthday by the way, Alex.
I’m kind of like, If you’re out of college, you can graduate to actual rock music, but whatever. Either way, she was old enough to delineate a bad concert from a good concert, and said in the Tok that you shouldn’t buy a ticket if you’re “over 16.”
I like the idea of punishing children with a bad concert.
Sombr then responded to the viral TikTok, all pissed off, and his young fans attacked the girl and called her old. She’s 25! Not old! (The 26-year-old says, feeling extremely old.) So Sombr’s fans and opps are both Gen Z, but the intra-generational lines have been drawn.
So the fight about Sombr is, at least, a little bit about being young and, perhaps, weaponizing a child army to wipe out your enemy. I don’t think one has to enjoy Sombr to understand that.
Final question: Do you think Sombr’s fame will outlive his controversy? Or is this the sombr end?
I mean yeah, I do think he’ll weather this particular controversy. It feels like the kind of thing that will only galvanize his hardcore fan base, who can’t pay for concert tickets anyway. Maybe it’ll even force his label to pay for him to get the training needed to be good onstage. Then, when he gets inevitably nominated for Best New Artist at the Grammy Awards and performs better than expected, it’ll be a great narrative. Congrats to Sombr in advance for that.
