The dream came in the night and changed my summer unexpectedly. We were snuggled up looking out at the stars in a guest cabin attached to my friend Steve’s place, right by the Djerassi artists residency and Neil Young’s former digs, on a ridge overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I was in town for a tragicomedic pile-up: a friend’s funeral followed by my mother’s 80th birthday. Something about the setting and the occasion put unconscious wheels in motion. Or maybe it was the isolation: intermittent wi-fi, no cell service, only a one lane service road that took us deep into a chilly California redwood forest. That night I had a vivid dream, full of 90 degree narrative turns, that prompted me to wake up early and, yes, tweet the funniest part: “Had a dream I was at a rave talking to a girl and she told me about a genre called “hit em” that is in 5/4 time at 212 bpm with super crunched out sounds thank you dream girl.”

That was it. I went back to sleep, then woke up and moved on with my life, ironing my shirt for the funeral. Things turned strange as the tweet took off. A few favourites became a hundred favourites, and then thousands. The impressions started climbing as more people retweeted it (it’s now north of seven million). More surprisingly still, programmers turned my dream tweet into a production challenge, setting their sequencers to 5/4 time and their tempo clocks to 212. Alex Reed offered “Thank You DreamGirl” that day, and soon there were crunchy jams from janeplane and Jetski, and an offer from Machinedrum to make some tracks together. Over the next few days, more and more producers around the world, from Chile to Berlin to New Zealand, started joining in, crafting increasingly elaborate post-dubstep bangers and gnarly gabber tantrums in 5/4 time. My dream had crossed over from the innermost perverse folds of my unconscious onto the glowing screens of countless strangers, now sharing video of their DAWs ablaze with preposterous sounding, monstrously distorted sketches and, in some cases, surprisingly catchy jams. Hit em had hit.

By the time journalists from The New Yorker, The Guardian and NPR all talked to me on the same day, my mother was officially proud of me and my husband somewhat annoyed that I was constantly on the phone. I felt very odd at suddenly occupying the role of spokesperson for a viral trend, asked to adjudicate online border disputes regarding whether a given interpretation was “too soft” or “not really 5/4 enough”, and puzzling over what it would mean to say that a genre is or is not “real”. One wag asked: couldn’t we do “hug em” instead of “hit em”? Genres are not natural kinds; they are spaces in which to hang out. Some are more capacious than others. The ludicrous over-specificity of hit em sounds like a parody of the micro-generic: a tiny space in which to move, indeed. But: you know when you’re at a house party and for some reasons everyone is packed into the too small kitchen and it’s hot and loud and tight and fun because it’s a bit absurd to overstuff a small space? That’s what hit em felt like for the first week when it popped off.

Soon enough, Machinedrum (real name: Travis) and I were sharing files and working on our hit em tracks, and Travis proposed that we pool forces with his friend’s record company: Tabula Rasa, a New Zealand/California label of weirdo electronic music. Why not solicit submissions for a hit em compilation online where the whole thing began? We thought there would be interest but did not predict the resulting stampede: over 200 submissions. Listening to all of those from start to finish was alternately exhilarating and, if I can be honest, fairly ear-shredding. Aspirin was called for.

Throughout the process of selection, I kept wondering what I was listening for: the creative choices of individuals as they swerved deliriously off the rails, or the precision with which they hit an imaginary target? The hit em submissions seemed to bifurcate along similar lines: some compositions were laser focused on demonstrating that the formal contraints were in effect, but seemed to lose sight of the rough around the edges mandate of “super crunched out sounds”.

Other submissions were undeniably crunchy, but trudged at a latent 106 bpm and didn’t have the feeling of onrushing forward motion required. I needed to hear all three qualities, or, failing that, a truly enchanting willingness to excel at two out of three, in order for a submission to make my shortlist. All four of us tabulated our votes and the winners circle of 27 songs has been released as a digital compilation benefiting the Musicians Foundation, a grant-giving organisation that helps struggling musicians meet everyday expenses, healthcare costs and life’s challenges.

It is bittersweet to mark the changes that have taken place in online spaces between when hit em started and our release date. To say the least, Twitter (I refuse to call it X) this summer and Twitter post-Trump’s victory are not the same place. In hindsight, I feel a bit mushy and sentimental about hit em as a moment in which my belief in the creative possibilities of hanging out online with strangers reached a delirious peak; drowning in MAGA exultation and disinformation as Elon’s victory lap ushers in a pack of fascist ghouls, I’m now trying to wean myself from Twitter for the sake of my own sanity. I deleted it off my phone but still peer at it on my laptop. Platforms live and die in time; crowds and scenes form and then there is churn, exodus, migration. Hit em happened, and on the hard drives of hundreds of strangers across the world, hit em now exists as another formal possibility, another emergent shape that things might take.

Numerous Max/MSP nerds and generative music coders have shown me their hit em patches that can now generate endess algorithmic jams ad infinitum, indicating a post-human future in which machines can precision-tool my dreams into yet unheard variants. Trying and failing to gatekeep hit em reinforced the suspicions I have always had about genre, the fact that we need these forms precisely so that we can test their affordances, push them to failure, and keep creating. Come what may, I am grateful to my dream girl for telling me what was on her mind.

Thank You, Dream Girl is released by Tabula Rasa

This essay appears in The Wire 491/492 along with many more critical reflections on 2024. To read them, pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop. Wire subscribers can also read the issue in our online magazine library.