Oliver Tree died yesterday in a helicopter accident. He was 31. I found him through my YouTube algorithm, which at this point knows me better than most people do. Cash Machine came up and I just stopped. Not because of the joke, though the joke was good, but because of how committed he was to it. The bowl cut, the scooter, the whole neon 90s thing, and underneath it this sad song about money and worth and performing for people who will never actually see you anyway.

I grew up having to learn how to be myself, and I mean that literally. First generation kid of a working-class Pakistani-immigrant-widow-single-mom (say that 10 times fast), not the guy anyone expected to be in the room, spending a long time figuring out which version of me was real and which one I'd constructed so I didn't get flattened. You figure out pretty fast that sincerity is a liability. Show too much and people either don't know what to do with it or they file it away for later. So you build a character, get good at the performance, learn to make the joke before anyone else can.

Oliver Tree turned that survival instinct into an entire career, and I don't think people fully understood how serious that was.

He said once he wanted to make something that could be in a museum but could also be a meme. People treated that like clever branding. I think he was describing something closer to desperation, the only way he knew how to get the real thing out without it getting torn apart on contact. Because the real thing was in there. Miss You, Life Goes On, Here It Goes Again, these are genuinely sad songs about longing and isolation, but you reach them through so much absurdist scaffolding that by the time the feeling hits your guard is already gone.

Talking about Cowboy Tears he said he was "crying cowboy tears for real" and that guys especially hide behind tough exteriors and he wanted to make something that lifted that. Then right after: "As ridiculous and weird and eccentric as I might be, I'm not that unique. I'm a human. I shit, I eat, I have sex. I'm just a normal guy who happens to dedicate their life to making art."

The confession inside the joke. The sincerity that only gets through because the absurdity already ran interference.

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He wasn't the first to figure this out. Devo dressed in identical yellow hazmat suits and mocked consumerism so precisely they became part of it. Primus called themselves Primus Sucks before any critic could get there first.

Thundercat wins Grammys for jazz fusion and shows up to perform in anime dragon claws writing songs about his cat and losing his wallet. Salvatore Ganacci does trust falls off DJ booths in front of massive festival crowds who paid to be hyped up and instead stand there genuinely unsure what they're watching. None of these are comedy acts. They're artists who decided the real stuff was too exposed to carry in the open, so they built something strange around it and put it onstage anyway.

Oliver Tree was that instinct fully mutated for the internet age. The machine he was satirizing was the same one distributing his music, and he understood that completely, kept feeding it chaos and memes and a living punchline, and used the whole exchange to move something genuine through the noise. Every time an audience thought they had him figured out he shifted. He said he needed to reinvent to stay inspired, that not everything he made was for everyone but there was something for everyone in there somewhere. I think that's also just what happens when your identity has always been a negotiation. You don't settle on one version of yourself because staying still feels like getting caught.

His live shows were where everything collapsed into one thing. He described them as every discipline he'd ever practiced as a human, the writing, the production, the directing, the costumes, the physical stunts. He said music alone gave him less room for himself, which is a strange and telling thing to admit about the work people loved most. The songs weren't enough container. He needed all of it.

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What I keep coming back to is how strange it is to grieve him. Most people only knew the costume, and the costume was engineered specifically so that's all you'd get. He protected the real thing so completely that now it's gone and we're left holding this absurdist bowl-cut cartoon trying to figure out how to mourn someone we never quite got to meet properly.

As these seasons keep on changing, life goes on and on and on and on.

He wrote that and somehow made it sound like a banger. I don't think it was nihilism. I think it was just the most honest thing he could say about being alive and exhausted and still showing up to do the whole performance again anyway. A lot of people live that way without ever naming it. He named it, wrapped it in the most ridiculous packaging he could find, and put it out into the world. That took something. Rest in peace, dude.