What This YouTube Saxophone Player Taught Me About Nihilism

Three notes. Undulating, swirling, flirting like a haphazardly orchestrated fleet of birds flying through a storm; three notes played by an overweight man with a saxophone over top of "Stairway to Heaven," "Here I Go Again," and hundreds of other instantly recognizable songs, making them alien and at once uniform in their atonal chaos. Three notes that never change.

The man in question, who goes by the Youtube handle "ikema781," has uploaded roughly 400 videos over the past 5 years exactly like this, save for the odd video featuring an old outboard motor. His motives are a mystery. Is it art? Is it a joke? Is it a pure expression of unrefined passion? Whatever it is, it's remarkably consistent.

These are the questions I asked myself as I spiralled down ikema781's brassy vortex of pure aural madness at 3 AM on a Wednesday night.

Of course, ikema781's videos are funny on one level. The initial shock of hearing the same ludicrously tone-deaf performance over numerous perennial dad-approved classics is humorous. At least, for a while. At a certain point, and I don't remember exactly when, perhaps after I watched him pay his bitter tribute to John Coltrane, I stopped laughing and turned inward. I became somber, morose even, as I analyzed my own thoughts and motivations; mine own self.

I began to wonder if this was nihilism. Putting aside ikema781's own intentions, the onslaught of those same three damn notes—horrible, angry, and lively—flattened into a plane of disinterested anguish; so much of the same as to be nothing at all. I listened intently to his mocking delivery of Pharell's "Happy" and stared blankly, letting it all wash over me. It was horrible; I knew this intellectually. But affectively, it was not merely benign—it was nothing.

I could feel myself slipping into a kind of contemplative funk, soundtracked by the three notes of the apocalypse itself; the nonsensical, tessellating, recombinatory madness of a Hieronymus Bosch painting relayed on a sax by an old white man on YouTube. "Did I ever really love that ex?" I thought to myself, succumbing to the tempting siren call of utter self-destruction. "Should I start going to the gym?" And still, those three notes, droning on in the background.

I was being pounded into a fine mental dust by the sounds of pop music being destroyed by one man, a saxophone, and three notes. All the emotion that went into these songs' original compositions and recording—or lack thereof, in the case of some of ikema781's more Top 40-oriented choices—was being effaced with sheer brutality. Everything I thought I'd felt before, however deeply, seemed false now.

Nothing mattered. I wanted it to stop, and yet I continued to click through to the next video. And the next, and the next, and the next.

What was happening? I could feel some small tug at the back of my mind pulling me towards a slightly brighter mental state. Or, at least, something more conscious; something that was more than nothing. I slowly became aware of what I was doing to myself.

I was giving in to pure nihilism, to affectlessness, and to a steady stream of internet content without semantic meaning but with a certain immediate interest that compelled me to click. It started as fun, mindless entertainment, but it had become something much, much more. Or, rather, much less.

It was then that I stopped, because the seduction had become obvious, and thus cheap and undesirable. I no longer wanted nothing; that sweet comfort of an absolute void. I wanted sleep. I wanted dreams. I wanted to wake up the next morning and live as if something could be done—about what? I could take my pick a few hours from now, after my first cup of coffee.

Coffee. Hot and familiar. I could feel it going down my esophagus already; perhaps I would even take a sip before it was cool enough to bear, just to see what it felt like.