He called it “the first-ever Twitch album,” and maybe it is. Last week after playing the role-playing game Persona 5 and giggling with his followers for a while, Brown stepped away from his webcam and played what amounted to an album’s worth of new music. Brown is a late adopter to Twitch, but he clearly recognizes its importance. The night before the mass shooting, the Detroit rapper Danny Brown used Twitch for something very, very different. It’s just going to be a part of our world now. And if you’re paying attention to the world around you, you will find it necessary to engage in that whole scene from time to time. In the worst possible way, this online video-game ecosystem has found its way into the consciousness of those of us whose game systems are now utterly outdated and rotting in garages. The tournament was being broadcast live online, so the clip of the shooting and its immediate aftermath - all audio, since the controller was disconnected - was immediately all over social media, providing one more terrifying document of what it’s like to be in one of these mass shootings. At a Madden tournament in Jacksonville on Sunday, a 24-year-old gamer opened fire on his peers, killing two people and injuring 11 before turning his gun on himself. There will be a lot more stuff like this.Īnd there will also be more things like the horrific events that went down in Florida this weekend.
This past weekend, for instance, the Mexican lucha libre promotion AAA streamed TripleMania, the biggest Mexican wrestling show of the year, worldwide for free on Twitch, flying in an English-language commentary team and everything. They’re developing a whole cultural ecosystem, and that ecosystem is starting to bubble over into the rest of the world.Ĭompanies are realizing that Twitch can be a way to reach people, to find audiences. They’re becoming extremely famous within gamer circles. People are making livings livestreaming themselves playing video games. As a middle-aged man who spent way too much of his youth sitting around, bored, watching his friends play video games, I cannot even begin to fathom the appeal. We should talk, now, about Twitch, the gamer-kids social network that is now reaching some strange cultural tipping point. And talking to TMZ earlier this week, Nahmir said that there are a lot more kids like him out there: “It’s a whole ‘nother thing coming.” He’s a fascinating example of the kind of cultural wire-crossing that can emerge organically out of something like Twitch. Nahmir met the other members of his YBN crew online, which is also where he learned about the Bay Area rap that obviously informs his style. Instead, Nahmir says he started off in the video-gaming world, freestyling while playing Grand Theft Auto on livestreaming networks like Twitch.
But he doesn’t credit that song with his success. Nahmir’s career started about a year ago when the video for his song “Rubbin Off The Paint” went viral. YBN Nahmir is an 18-year-old rapper who comes from Alabama, lives in Los Angeles, and sounds like he’s from the Bay Area.