dev lemons, bath water, and metamodernism

Note: This piece was originally pitched to another publication but they passed on it - decided I’d share it with all of you instead.

When cosplayer and media personality Belle Delphine listed her “GamerGirl Bath Water” for sale in 2019, commentators rightfully pointed out that it was as much performance art as it was marketing. The bath water was likely not actually for sale, but the mere act of pretending otherwise was an ingenious troll. You’re supposed to ask “who would pay $30 for bath water,” at which point you would be confronted with the reality that many people pay much more than $30 for soiled products that are considerably more unsanitary. That confrontation was decidedly postmodern — few things can get you to more quickly reject universal objectivity than coming to terms with the fact that there are people out there who would pay $30 for bath water.

One pandemic and two elections later, Delphine’s stunt seems almost quaint. Between the rapid disintegration of institutional trust, the proliferation of much more sinister influencer products, and the AI-accelerated industrialization of grift that exacerbated both, culture has grown justifiably tired of the sort of postmodern trolling that characterized the late 2010s. It simply wouldn’t be interesting to sell bath water as a bit in a world where people very earnestly tried to sell ugly pictures of apes as an investment. To make even a fraction of the same splash, the bath water salespeople of the future would have to do something else — and if songwriter-producer Devon “Dev Lemons” Schmalz is anything, she certainly is something else.

In 2024, Lemons uploaded “Selling My Bath Water on Facebook Marketplace”, a YouTube video that you can probably guess the contents of. The bath water listing in question has several key differences from Delphine’s — the most obvious of which being in its considerably grimier presentation. “Selling my freshest batch of bath water,” the listing reads. “A lot of it. And It Smells Wild.”

While the video and the direct messages contained therein are definitely funny, the fact that Lemons was listing the water on Facebook Marketplace instead of an online store would not be all that noteworthy on its own. But, as the world would find out two months later, the bath water listing was merely Lemons laying out the canvas for her actual project: the lyric video for her single “Why Did I Laugh Anyway.” If you’re in a position to watch it right now I highly recommend you do, but whether you do or not, I can guarantee that it’s dense and outlandish enough that you’ll probably want to talk through it with someone else afterward. Worry not — the paragraphs that follow are here to keep you company.

Just like the previous video, the lyric video for the song opens with Lemons showing the bath water listing on Facebook Marketplace — but in an immediate and striking testament to the phenomenological power of music, the song’s reverberant and melancholic opening guitar riff shifts the mood from “ironic shitposting fun” to “echoes from a hollow soul” just about instantly. The subsequent shots show Lemons going back to respond to more DMs, but this time, she’s responding with the lyrics of the song as she sings them.

The first DM she opens reads “are you ok?” and Lemons responds with “jokes disguised with lies soak up the shame.” Another calls her a “disgusting bitch,” and she responds with “tell me what you really wanna say.” Yet another simply asks, “is it drinkable,” and she ominously responds with “every mess I make I can’t take back.” The DMs Lemons chooses to respond to — and the lyrics that she chooses to respond with — feel deeply intentional, particularly in light of her ostentatious and free-spirited public persona. The lyric video’s emotional rawness is a sharp departure from her other projects, which include bombastic hyperpop inflected singles like “CEO OF MY ASS” and off-beat collaborations like “QUEEF JERKY.”

On one hand, “Why Did I Laugh Anyway” is explicitly about a character who uses ironic distance to shield herself from sincerity, and who has — as metamodern theorist Greg Dember would put it — come to find her incapacity for sincerity “intolerable.” The video’s structure implies she has found it so intolerable that she’s resorted to selling bath water on Facebook just to generate opportunities to authentically express herself to other human beings. The premise is just extreme enough to read as dark comedy, but it can’t help but feel like an uncomfortably plausible window into the hyper-atomized dystopian future that platforms like Facebook have had a large hand in driving us towards.

On the other hand, in our present, Lemons actually made a Facebook Marketplace post advertising bath water (and a wet sock, and nail clippings — though these are not as prominently featured in the lyric video) on an account attached to her real name, and, unlike Delphine, broadcasted it specifically to people who live in her vicinity. Her personal proximity to and involvement in the execution of the “bit” necessarily makes the character in the song feel semi-autobiographical, and serves to blur the line between “irony” and “sincerity” in a way that feels exemplary of our new metamodern era. Where Delphine’s bath water bit was a rejection of objectivity, Lemons’s music video is an exploration of what that rejection says about the person doing the rejecting, and the ways in which ironic distance can make desperation look like defiance.

The last DM shown in the video is from someone who had replied to one of the song lyrics. His message reads “I think I have lost interest.“ Such is the danger of postmodern irony poisoning - and we should be grateful to Lemons for baring her soul to Facebook Marketplace to show it to us.