The Music Was Never the Point

Nobody needed to debate whether Bibi’s debut single was bad. It was bad the way a dental emergency is bad—you don’t need a second opinion, you already know. How It Is (wap bap…) arrived in 2017 as if to test the structural limits of the music industry’s tolerance for content-creator cash grabs, and it found those limits almost immediately. An offense against ears, and it didn’t matter at all.

Which is the interesting thing about Bibi—BibiBeautyPalace, millions of subscribers, makeup tutorials, product lines, the whole operation. The song was always beside the point. She sells things: moisturizers, eyeshadow palettes, shower gel, whatever would otherwise be moving from the clearance shelf at the drugstore. She smiles, she holds it up, people buy it. That’s a genuine skill, and it doesn’t require being able to sing. It requires being a certain kind of attractive and a certain kind of relatable, and she has both in abundance. The boys who follow her aren’t thinking about her skincare routine.

When someone uploaded the music video to YouPorn under the title "German Girl Fucks German Music Industry," it was a cheap joke that landed cleanly. The category fit. The video had already done something obscene to the charts, so it made structural sense that it should end up next to other things that are obscene in a more literal way. Whoever did it understood the assignment.

The music industry, for its part, was fucked regardless. Bibi’s label got their streams, got their headlines, got to tell a story about a YouTuber crossing over. The fact that the crossing-over sounded like a ringtone designed by committee wasn’t really the point. It never is. The money was never in the music.