“Nobody takes anything f*cking seriously anymore,” starts a now-deleted rant from ambitious alternative musician Ethel Cain.

“It makes me feel so crazy and annoyed because I am constantly bombarded by jokes constantly.

“There is such a loss of sincerity and everything has to be a joke at all times,” she continued, before summarising the issue as an ongoing ‘irony epidemic’.

It’s bold for an artist to reject the way fans engage with their work. She says all this in fear of backlash, after all, yet she’s right to feel this way. There is indeed a loss of sincerity in our general approach to art, and the need to place an irony-poisoned filter on our feelings towards it is utterly suffocating.

ethel cain speaks on the ongoing irony epidemic and how it frustrates her as an artist pic.twitter.com/Cka4n6GQzW

This feedback is quite devaluing for an artist like Cain, who is attempting to express herself honestly and genuinely. “The number of times I have to read the same stupid shit like ‘yes you ate that like Isaiah ate Ethel’ over and over, it makes me SO mad,” she wrote, referring to her conceptual debut album Preacher’s Daughter, where Cain tells the fictional story of being sold into prostitution then murdered by a lover named Isaiah.

As you can imagine, constant jokes about serious themes that parallel the real and........

© Herald Scotland