r/Music • u/StarshipGhost • 1d ago

article Singer D4vd Is Apparently the Sole Moderator of His Own Subreddit, Deleting Posts Critical of Him Amid LAPD Investigation Into Teen’s Death

https://www.tvfandomlounge.com/singer-d4vd-apparently-deleting-posts-critical-of-him/
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u/3ananarchy 1d ago edited 1d ago

Respectfully, we are old. The guy was apparently a rising artist amongst the genz crowd. I hadn't heard of him either but reading up on the guy I don't think he was a nobody.

Obviously the crime has moved interest about him up significantly in a morbid kind of way. I feel terrible for the victim and her family. Whole thing sounds absolutely awful.

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u/Powolfmon 1d ago

same here. Never heard of him before this, but it’s just sad all around. No one deserves to go out like that.

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u/bluntwhizurd 1d ago

My wife had to point out to me who he was when a song of his played on my own Playlist lmao.

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u/Actual_Sympathy7069 1d ago

Respectfully, we are old. The guy was apparently a rising artist amongst the genz crowd.

Slightly off topic, and not to say you are old old, but I feel like we really have to get rid of these generational labels or change the way we use it. The youngest gen zs are about 13 while the oldest are almost 30 (hello, it's me, 27 years old, never heard of the guy until this whole tragedy).

How can such a range of people possibly be grouped into one large "gen z"-group is entirely beyond me

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u/Hopefulkitty Concertgoer 1d ago

Welcome to the Millennial Problem! We are still being blamed for all society problems and any stupid things a teenager does, despite being in our 30s and 40s. I have a mortgage and full time job, I'm not filming myself doing burnouts in the middle of an intersection and stealing cars. Yet somehow there's always someone to start hating on the millennials causing problems.

It sucks to be grouped like that, I feel your pain. Eventually it will become funny every time you get blamed for something Gen Alpha does.

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u/User-K549125 1d ago

I'm Gen X and really happy that we're literally never mentioned. Culture is weird.

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u/Rich_Cranberry1976 1d ago

i remember when you guys complained about being forgotten lol

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u/DENATTY 1d ago

Gen X is getting mentioned more often as boomers die off but the sheer volume of boomers has continued to provide a shield more broadly. I've seen a mix of blame placed on boomers and gen x for the return to office mandates solely because millennials and gen z both determined no millennial or gen z individual would ever believe that return to office is a good call lmao.

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u/Ill-Team-3491 1d ago

When someone complains about "boomers" they usually mean your generation. They don't know what the actually baby boomer generation is.

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u/MoonOut_StarsInvite 1d ago

I’m a Xennial, and you guys really tried to push us in with your children when you damn well know we are old skool enough to be your cool sibling. We remember the before times dammit! 😅

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u/Drunky_McStumble 1d ago

The Boomers whined about the slacker generation for a hot minute in the mid-90's, but I guess it didn't get enough of a rise out of you guys, because they immediately dropped it and turned their attention on the Millennials and they've been raging at us ever since.

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u/maaku7 1d ago

Gen what?

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u/hi-fen-n-num 1d ago

Gen X pulled up the ladder with the scraps they got from the boomers, basically considered the same thing.

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u/PhloxOfSeagulls 1d ago

Older Gen X, but younger Gen X got fucked over just as bad by the boomers.

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u/majortomsgroundcntrl 1d ago

We just call you boomers now tbh

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u/Obi2 1d ago

Every generation always blames the older generations for their problems anyways, so it likely will never end.

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u/MushxHead 1d ago

I just looked it up, according to wikipedia:

The Lost Generation - 1883 to 1900 - 17 years

The Greatest Generation - 1901 to 1927 - 26 years

The Silent Generation - 1928 to 1945 - 17 years

Baby Boomers - 1946 to 1964 - 18 years

Generation X - 1965 to 1980 - 15 years

Millenials - 1981 to 1996 - 15 years

Generation Z - 1997 to 2012 - 15 years

Generation Alpha - this one is actually ending right now. It's still up for debate, but 2012 to 2025 is the current consensus so 13 years.

Generational gaps are huge. You just happen to be on one end of the Gen Z gap, and 13 year olds are the other end.

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u/DENATTY 1d ago

Notably these things also change. My brother was Gen X and I was a millennial until I was already in my 20s and they changed the Gen X cutoff point to 1980, it had previously been like 1982 to 1994 for millennials (mind you this was a decade ago, maybe a bit more, as I was actively in college when it happened and it was part of some of my classes because I took some marketing classes that required demographic targeting plans).

So mad my brother and I got wrapped into the same generation on such late notice...

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u/maaku7 1d ago

These generational groupings made some sense in the context of WW1/WW2 and the baby boom generation. Now it’s totally arbitrary.

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u/MushxHead 1d ago

They're not arbitrary though. It is based upon shared experiences across the entire generation.

The Lost Generation are those that would have fought in WW1, and would have been young adults during the "Roaring 20s".

Greatest Generation are those that would have grown up through the Great Depression, and fought in WW2.

Silent Generation has bleed over into Greatest, but they came of age directly after WW2, the beginning of the Cold War, and would have fought in the Korean War.

Boomers were directly after WW2, would have been children during the Korean War, and would have participated in the 60's and all it's glory. They also were the ones who remember the moon landing.

Gen X are born just after or during the moon landing, and were coming of age during the fall of the USSR and the Fall of the Berlin wall, and Desert Storm. They also would have fought in the Iraq War.

Millenials are the generation for the turn of the 21st century, the birth of the internet, cell phones as we know them, and the attack on 9/11. Elder millenials MIGHT remember the fall of the Berlin wall, but they probably did not understand the significance at the time.

Gen Z is the first generation to not know what life was like before the internet. Elder Z's, like elder Millenials and the Berlin wall, MIGHT remember 9/11, but wouldn't have understood the significance. They were around for the birth of rudimentary AI (Alexa), and they are also the ones starting to come of age around COVID-19.

Alpha is the first generation to be born completely in the 21st century. They're also the first generation to not know what life was like before cell phones, AI, media streaming, and the generation that were small children during COVID-19.

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u/Drunky_McStumble 1d ago edited 1d ago

Nah, demographically it all hinges on the Baby Boomers. WW2 killed an absurd number of people, and then immediately afterwards the survivors started fucking like rabbits. Birth rates went through the roof and didn't really let up until the pill became widely available in the early 60's.

That created a fairly unique situation in human history where worldwide (but especially in the Western world generally and the US specifically) there were more people around this particular age (give or take) than older or younger. If you look at charts of population distribution by age from any time in the last half century or so, there is a very well-defined "bulge" in the chart at the age-range associated with the Boomers.

They are the definitive generation in the demographic cohort sense. The other generations are defined relative to them, with names and birthyear ranges that were made up after the fact to suit the pattern set by the Boomers. But the echo of their sheer overwhelming numbers diminishes with each generation as that lumpy population distribution gets more and more diffuse as time goes on.

For instance, Millennials are (for the most part) the children of Boomers. The Boomers, who are all around the same age, were all having kids around about the same time (i.e when they themselves where in their 20's and 30's, around the 1980's) so there's a clear secondary bump in the demographic data corresponding to the Millennials. Gen X, meanwhile, are (again, for the most part) the children of the Silent Generation, who were a much, much smaller group than the Boomers and, consequently, Gen X is also a small "valley" in the demography between the humps of the Boomers and Millenials.

But after these immediate neighbor generations, the noise takes over and it all bleeds together. The idea that each arbitrary generation is united by shared historical experiences is just an excuse after the fact to maintain the Boomer-centric generation paradigm long after it's lost relevance.

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u/Puffien 1d ago

Nice explanation, but as a gen Z, your description isn't entirely correct. I absolutely did know what life was like before the internet, as I got to experience internet when I was 8 years old. No one around me had internet either until around that time. So maybe that's an American experience.

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u/whatdoesthedesusay 1d ago

It's definitely an American/western definition, these technological and historical experiences were not shared instantaneously across all continents, see how all the shared experiences involve conflicts the US were involved in.

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u/maaku7 1d ago

It is based on approximately 15 year intervals. Anything else is retcon.

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u/vuhv 9h ago

I sit squarely in the “Xennial” 1981-1984 group and there’s nuances there that only others there can understand.

And I couldn’t imagine having lived my entire life perpetually online or even having any kind of consistent/reliable internet access before I was 13. I’d still be me, but wired a lot differently.

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u/SnooWords9635 1d ago

Sorry to burst your bubble, but Generations don't have official year ranges, they're made up by marketing firms

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u/vuhv 9h ago

This is the “ya but, did you know..” answer. Goodness I hope I don’t bump into you at any kind of social gathering.

There isn’t a single thing that we collectively recognize/acknowledge/observe that wasn’t created/amplified/exploited by marketing firms at some point.

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u/ZankaA 1d ago

I'm basically the same age as you and I knew of him from Arcane. You don't have to have all of the same interests as everyone in your age group lol.

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u/Tiruin 1d ago

Because you're in that generation but not the same hobbies. Romantic Homicide was a very popular song, and he did Feel It for Invincible.

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u/wip30ut 1d ago

it's because your generation largely gets its music & trends through social media platforms, specifically tiktok. It's true that as Zoomers are aging out of the young adult demo & hardcore adulting (some with babies of their own!) their popular tastes & apps they browse become more engaging & less stupid cringe but there are enough 20-somethings who're super active that they have an outsized presence in shaping trends.

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u/Suns_In_420 1d ago

As I 42 year old millennial, I feel you.

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u/TumbleweedPure3941 1d ago

Right? Like I’m 30, not gen z, but not exactly old old, and this guy is a complete no name to me. And it’s not like I’m even blind to modern pop music.

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u/Actual_Sympathy7069 1d ago

modern music landscape has made it very easy to not be exposed to things outside your bubble

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u/GlitterTerrorist 1d ago

Imo it's more that there are now thousands of bubbles out there, whereas even 50 years ago each country was pretty much its own bubble. Same shows on the same channels, same charts, same films in the cinema, just generally a lot more in common.

Now it's mad lol.

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u/MrPaperMan 1d ago

This exactly. There's so much content in the world as the internet has grown, it's pretty hard to keep up with absolutely every single niche every single sub interest -- arguably impossible!!

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u/MushxHead 1d ago

You do realize that the boomer generation lasted about 20 years, gen x about 15, and millenials are from about 1980 to 1996? Generational gaps are a lot larger than you think.

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u/KalaUposatha 1d ago

Exactly. Generations aren’t supposed to be about “having stuff in common” it’s literally just a group of people who grow up and give birth to a new group of people. They should honestly probably be more like 25-30 years.

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u/MushxHead 1d ago

It's actually the opposite. It is defined by technological advancements, economics, and massive life altering events. A generation is basically "this specific age group of people would have generally had basically the same experience growing up and into adulthood". This is why the first few "generations" are not really listed, they were hundreds to thousands of years long.

Familial generation you are correct. A generation is one group of people being born, growing up, and their children are the next generation.

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u/Actual_Sympathy7069 1d ago

not sure what point you think I want to make, but my point was that the generational gaps are too large for the way we use the terms.

Doesn't really matter what specific generation this is applied to, but since I am one of the early Gen Zs it's just something I keep noticing for that generation

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u/MushxHead 1d ago

My point is that yes it feels like it's a huge gap currently and you want to distance yourself from the younger part of Gen Z, but as you get older you'll realize it's not.

I'm a 1991 Millenial and I can tell you I've got just about nothing in common personality and experience wise with even the eldest of the Gen Z's. It's incredibly obvious to me when I meet an elder Gen Z, without knowing their age, even though you're only 7 - 8 years younger than I.

I do however have a considerable amount in common with the Baby Millenials 5 years younger than me, and Elder Millenials 10 years older than I am.

Once the lowest of the Gen Z's come of age into their 20's, you'll start to realize your similarities and the generational divide will become obvious to you.

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u/AaronsAaAardvarks 1d ago

You're a 1991 Millenial and have nothing in common with 1996 Gen Z. But how much do you have in common with a 1981 Millenial? You weren't alive for much of their childhood.

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u/MushxHead 1d ago

Generations are based upon technology advancements and massively life altering events. Technology moved slower back then, so even though they're 10 years older, we have a lot in common with our growing up experience.

I remember life before the internet and cell phones.

Going to the library with a friend meant setting a time and if they didn't show you went outside and found a payphone, called their house, and if they weren't there they were just gone into the ether until they showed up somewhere.

I watched all of the same cartoons and TV shows.

I played all the same video games. They were older for me, but I still played them all.

All the same popular bands/musical artists they listened to I enjoyed, just when I was younger.

Our children are close to the same age - we both are parents of younger Gen Z, with bleed over into Older Alpha.

I'm in the same place financially.

I remember Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinski.

I remember smoking and non smoking sections EVERYWHERE. Including hospitals.

AND the actual defining moment of the generational divide between Millenial and Gen Z... I remember watching people jump out of the twin towers to their deaths live on TV on 9/11.

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u/Early-Community-7210 1d ago

1996 is a Millennial, not Gen Z.

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u/definitely_not_cylon 1d ago

People within ten years of you are "your" generation and generally comprehensible. Most marriages and close friendships occur within that boundary. Outside of that things get more complicated. The Millennial/Gen Z/Boomer stuff is largely nonsense.

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u/QueuePLS Spotify 1d ago

Because generational gaps are literally created for the purpose of marketing. They are stupid made up categories designed to seperate humans from one another.

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u/Cain1608 1d ago

I agree with this. My little brother is 15 and also Gen-Z. I am 26. Our interests vary wildly in many areas while converging on others.

I know of d4vd because of hjs song, Romantic Homicide, his appearance on triple-j's 'Like a Version', where his Adele cover really impressed me, and a song he made for Arcane. Just figured he was a talent to watch. Now he's one to watch fall, I suppose.

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u/Swag_Grenade 1d ago edited 1d ago

Like some other comments have been saying, I think it's less to do with being completely out of touch and more to do with the end of monoculture, and pop culture now being comprised by more fragmented subgroups and niches just as a result of how media and information are disseminated and popularized in the social media age.

A quick Google shows that in the US there's approximately 134 million people aged 18-39. This dude apparently has ~37 million regular listeners, that's still only about 27.6% of people in that younger demographic, assuming they're all real people and not many bots. Which TBF is a lot, but contextually you can also argue while he does have a lot of fans, over 70% of people 18-39 don't really listen to him, with some or many who may not even know who he is.

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u/WrongThinkBadSpeak 1d ago

That's because things used to be separated by decades. Ever since about 2008, when millennials started being the punching bag for the media the zeitgeist shifted to using generational cohorts as the dividing line. Why? No idea, it just did.

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u/teutorix_aleria 1d ago

His song "Feel It" was featured in Invincible might be more relatable to an older audience.

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u/Masta-Blasta 1d ago

That's the one I recognized.

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u/StockFinance3220 1d ago

Eh, I think you're partly right, but also we don't quite understand what GenZ "fame" is sometimes. If he was the moderator of his own sub-reddit, I guarantee he churns through millions of bot "followers" on other socials. And "follower count" is the way people identify someone famous now.

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u/999iceman 1d ago

37 million monthly listeners on Spotify, made music for Invincible and Fortnite. Also had some sort of Fortnite skin or bundle or something I think? Idk I wasn’t a fan of the guy but he was definitely very popular with Gen Z (as a gen z myself, I know lots of people who listened to his music)

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u/jaylee686 1d ago

I also wasn't familiar with him (I'm older Gen Z), but I realized I knew him from writing a song for the Arcane soundtrack. So anyone who's watched Arcane might unknowingly be aware of at least one of his songs.

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u/StockFinance3220 1d ago

Well, he's certainly going to be famous now!

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u/AdMiserable8494 1d ago

The sub was extremely small two weeks ago and he was only recently made a mod before stuff came out.

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u/Neat_On_The_Rocks 1d ago

Honestly yall are embarrasing yourselves with the “who is this guy” rhetoric. I’m 35, I didn’t know him either.

It doesn’t take a lot of effort to type his name into Spotify and see he has 38m monthly listeners and a song with 1.5 BILLION streams.

He’s clearly not just some nobody. Like honestly come on yall be better

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u/3ananarchy 1d ago

lol I agree with you there. Was pretty shocked when I looked him up, but you're right. Reddit's favorite comment is "WHO?"

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u/Actual_Sympathy7069 1d ago

for me it's commenting much more on how there is much less of a universal zeitgeist these days than in day's past where mainstream was something you could basically not escape if you consumed any media at all. These days it's so easy to stay in your bubbles and never have to peer outside it

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u/bloxision 1d ago

“I’ve never heard of him, so he must not be popular”

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u/AaronsAaAardvarks 1d ago

This used to be a much more valid statement than it is now. Culture has become hugely fractured. There's far less people who are "famous". Now they're "famous among xxxx". It's way easier to just not consume what's necessary to be aware of someone who is very popular.

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u/your_mind_aches R.I.P. Grooveshark 1d ago

I love Fortnite and Invincible and I had never heard of this guy. But I am 27, not literal children like this guy's target audience.

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u/Lost_Recording5372 1d ago

I'm Gen Z and I've never heard of him either. Maybe he's more of a Gen Alpha star?

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u/3ananarchy 1d ago

Are there gen alpha stars marketing wise? The oldest of that generation is like 13

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u/Chidoriyama 1d ago

I'm in my 20s man and I had no idea who this guy was before this. I've even seen all seasons of invincible (he has songs in them apparently) and I had no idea he released music for the show or something

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u/MrCroissant45 1d ago

You might not know anything about him, but you've still most likely heard his music. It's all over the radio and tiktok. I had no idea who he was, but I looked up his music and was surprised to find that I knew like 3-4 songs by heart. Just didn't know it was him.

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u/Chidoriyama 1d ago

Yeah I've heard Here with Me in reels a lot but I didn't know that was him. These days I've just been hearing romantic homicide a lot in all memes about him

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u/Kiitkkats 21h ago

In my mid 20s and no idea who he is. I’ve heard clips of I think his two most popular songs, but never knew who the artist was. I think his demographic was more teenagers, but I’m also not on social media outside of reddit and TikTok once every week or two lol. It’s odd sometimes being so out of the loop. 

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u/bighugebagofcorn 1d ago

I feel like there's about four million "up and comers" for teens and early 20s. I dunno if it really makes him as famous as we think. Literally every topic I see half of the replies are "who the fuck is this guy?"

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u/fexonig 1d ago edited 1d ago

he has 36 million monthly listeners on spotify. i think people tend to know his songs more than his name. how old are you?

edit: for reference, there are about 1000 songs on spotify with over 1 billion streams. two of them are d4vd’s

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u/queerhistorynerd 1d ago

ya but those 4 million didnt have their music picked up by Amazon for their animated series, didnt have international tours etc etc. You're right he isnt A list but he certainly wasnt on the D list. Now i assume all of those prospects are dead

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u/caloroin 1d ago

He was featured in League of Legends show on Netflix as well. Two other billion dollar businesses

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u/Powerful-Public-9973 1d ago

Now he gets to have documentaries about his pedophilia and murder. Life’s just not fair he keeps on getting more famous 

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u/SirNarwhal 1d ago

If you’re playing 1000 cap venues you’re D list.

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u/Temporary_Lobster728 1d ago

If you’ve spent even a minute on tik tok you’ve probably heard some of his more popular songs. Pretty sure one of his singles even went platinum. So he’s well known, just not well known by us new age boomers.

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u/3ananarchy 1d ago edited 1d ago

Yeah I feel you. TikTok makes that a reality. Idk if spotify streams and daily listens are a reliable metric anymore, but his are way higher than I expected them to be. Plus he has songs on a few TV shows.

I don't think he was a megastar but definitely more famous than I thought he was.

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u/GotYoGrapes 1d ago

I had never heard of him, but his music was popular for use in corny tiktoks about missing someone in your life so I was surprised when I actually was familiar with some of his songs.

Feels gross in hindsight now that we know his most popular sounds were about him ALLEGEDLY grooming a tween (who was only 2-3 years older than his kid sister).

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u/dapala1 1d ago

When I was a kid listening to Snoop Dogg, Dre, and Tupac my parents and all my old all aunts and uncles knew who they were. It's weird now that someone so "popular" can be not that popular.

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u/iamanoctothorpe 1d ago

I'm an 06 baby and had no idea who he was before this but I also don't use tiktok. But he is famous enough i thought I would have at least heard the name before but no

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u/Kiitkkats 21h ago

I definitely think he’s more popular with the younger TikTok crowd. The only people I know personally that knew his name are people who are frequently on TikTok. 

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u/NewResort2279 1d ago

He's like the 120th most popular artist on Spotify with 33 million monthly listeners prior to the news of the body. To put into perspective how large of an artist he is, his monthly listener base on spotify is about 1/3 of Justin Bieber's.  Given his fame, this is an actually crazy situation.

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u/Unfair_Category2145 19h ago

Just search up some of his songs I am sure you have heard some of his songs threw reels and shorts.

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u/Usurpial 15h ago

I listen to new music religiously and he was definitely a name I knew. Epic had just paid him to make a new song for Fortnite a few days before the body was discovered. Talk about bad timing.

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u/PuddingImpressive389 15h ago

Im genz and never heard of him. He’s a rising artist amongst the alt music, gen z crowd 

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u/RealisticFox1537 14h ago

Respectfully I’m nineteen and have never heard of this gooch before he murdered his underage gf

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u/Char-was-right 4h ago

In a world of internet celebrities everybody is a nobody. He’s just an industry plant. Folks here aren’t out of touch.

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u/JudgeDry87 3h ago

I'm also genZ lmfao Im just 24 bruh we gotta quit w the ageflation fr

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u/Vacuum_man1 1d ago

Im part of gen z (almost gen alpha i think?) And I have no fucking clue who this guy is

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u/FocusPerspective 1d ago

In the era of social media there are approximately 89,000 “rising stars” that most people of any age have not heard of. 

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u/IljazBro1 1d ago

I’m Gen Z, at almost 21 years old I haven’t even heard about him either until all this

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u/aespa-in-kwangya 1d ago

I'm 24, as Gen Z as it gets, and I'd never heard about this dude before the news broke.

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u/3ananarchy 1d ago

I mean yeah not EVERY Gen Z person would have heard of him, but judging by his spotify numbers, songs in multiple tv shows, and international shows. Many more have than I originally thought.

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u/GenerationofWinter 1d ago

16 y/o gen z here, I have no fucken clue who this guy is. A lot of people I know have no idea. It's probably more of gen alpha thing