In an age of manufactured authenticity, where relatability is engineered and “being real” is staged, Oliver Tree showed how embracing weird is a superpower.
Whilst influencer personalities are feeling increasingly artificial, Oliver Tree was an artist who fully embraced the performance. I was in disbelief when I heard about his death, I thought it had to be another one of his publicity stunts, the kind of thing he’d built his entire career around.
He approached everything with an obsessive energy, nothing ever felt half-hearted. Whether it was the intensity of his music, screaming at interviewers, or riding a giant scooter in absurdly oversized jeans, he put everything into his art. Unapologetically himself, never too serious, with just the right amount of darkness and humour.
The bowl cut. The tiny sunglasses. The absurdly oversized jeans. He looked like something generated by the internet itself, equal parts 90s nostalgia and YouTube-era meme culture. Always happy to be the butt of the joke, he claimed to only make music that he loves, even going as far to say the US government would make people listen to it as a torture technique. Though he has millions of fans and inspired countless people.
Despite what many think, he wasn’t an early TikTok star, though he later found success on the platform. What’s more interesting is that he effectively built the blueprint that many TikTok-era artists now follow.
More musicians than ever are fighting for attention, but visibility isn’t about talent. It’s about instant recognisability, and content that can’t be scrolled past.
Oliver Tree demands your attention by being so loud and cartoonish that you couldn’t separate the joke from the artist. That’s what made him impossible to ignore.
Long before every creator was being told to build a personal brand, Tree understood that personality had become part of the product. He played into it. Weirdness becomes a tool for visibility. He exaggerated every part of himself.
What separates him from just pure gimmick is the tension underneath it. Everything is pushed to the point where it almost feels like a joke, but it never fully collapses into that. There’s always something a bit more real sitting underneath it. Loneliness, alienation, even death.
He told us ugly is beautiful, the imperfections are what make you you and being weird is a superpower and life goes oninonionon…
