The ongoing trajectory of Haliey Welch’s fame seems to offer, in its very triviality, the prospect of a deep insight into our present culture. You may (or may not) know Welch by the title conferred upon her by viral fame: as “the Hawk Tuah girl”.
Last June, Welch was on a night out in Nashville, Tennessee, when she and a friend came across a YouTuber interviewing people on the street. They asked to be interviewed. To one of the YouTuber’s mildly spicy questions – “What’s one move in bed that makes a man go crazy every time?” – Welch gave the response that ensured her ascent to the viral pantheon. “Aw you gotta give him that hawk tuah! and spit on that thang, you get me?”
Her deep Tennessee twang, and her air of lascivious glee, invested the moment with a charming authenticity, even joyfulness, that makes it, even now, fun to watch. Welch was clearly several drinks deep into the evening and enjoying the reaction of her listeners, who were equally celebratory and scandalised; as a spectacle, it was remarkably free of calculation and cynicism, animated by nothing more than Welch’s irrepressible energy, and her own simple joy in getting a reaction.
The clip went viral for the reason such things so often do: because it was funny, and because it felt real enough to pierce, in a fleeting and incidental fashion, the endless banality of online content. It also made Welch very famous. (I am anticipating, at this point, a certain amount of objection to this latter claim, but I would hope that we can all by now acknowledge that you or I having no idea who a person is does not preclude that person being extremely famous. The distinction between “mainstream celebrity” and “internet celebrity” is now as conceptually void as that between the internet and what used to be called “real life”.)
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In the months that followed, Welch succeeded in parlaying her memefication, in ways that felt both familiar and jarringly contemporary. She started an Instagram account, quickly gathering millions of followers; shortly thereafter, she started a podcast, called Talk Tuah – still, at time of writing, a going concern – in which she hosts a roster of guests, most of whose names you’d probably struggle to put faces to, but who are, nonetheless, also very famous. (The podcast is part of the Betr Media network, presided over by Jake Paul, the PT Barnum of the influencer era.)
Her most recent attempt to (quite literally) capitalise on her sudden fame, however, has proven problematic. Last week Welch launched a cryptocurrency called $HAWK, no doubt on the advice of the growing agglomeration of hangers-on and suckers-up surrounding her. $HAWK was the latest in a line of so-called “meme coins”: crypto-tokens representing viral moments, a market which has expanded since Donald Trump’s election win gave rise to anticipation of a more crypto-friendly regulatory environment in the US.
Even among some of the more bullish devotees of cryptocurrency, meme coins are seen as basically worthless monetary tchotchkes – “little more than frothy assets representing the market’s over-exuberance”, as a recent Financial Times report put it.
Within minutes of its launch, $HAWK’s market cap reached just under half a billion dollars, before almost immediately plummeting by more than 90 per cent of its total value. This led to allegations of the whole thing being a pump-and-dump scheme; in such scams, an unscrupulous actor artificially hypes up a worthless stock to create a buying frenzy, selling their own position at a large profit and tanking the asset in the process: see, for instance, the Enron scandal of 2001, or more recently, much of entire history of cryptocurrencies.
Our society is so heavily marketised and commodified, our culture so radically atomised, that it feels deliriously appropriate that everyone should now have the ability to issue their own personal currency
The YouTuber Steven Findeisen, aka Coffeezilla, who specialises in investigating crypto scams, claimed that the launch was aimed at giving insiders an advantage. “Unfortunately with situations like this,” he said, “they’re not targeting crypto bros, they’re mostly targeting actual fans who have never been involved in the crypto space before.” One such fan claimed to have put $35,000 – their entire life savings – into Welch’s meme coin, before seeing it shrivel, within minutes, to $2,000.
Welch has denied allegations that her team sold any of the tokens they owned.
One reading of this would position Welch as a classic villain: an opportunist who saw a chance to get rich off her fans by scamming them, and grabbed it with both hands. I’m inclined to see it in less morally stark terms. This is a woman who, last June, was working in a factory that produced mattress springs and who, suddenly and absurdly, stumbled into a very modern and very intense variety of fame. You could hardly blame her for trying to make some quick money, and maybe even some kind of lasting career, out of her ridiculous situation.
[ Crypto entrepreneur eats banana art he bought for $6.2mOpens in new window ]
Careers in entertainment have been built on less, and sustained on less charisma. Become a social media influencer? Why not. Start a podcast? Sure, whatever works. Get that bag, as we now say. And if getting that bag involves minting a pseudo-currency tethered to the dubious value of her own virality, then so be it. You can see how, having been presented with the idea by whatever avaricious crypto-booster had her ear, she might have been inclined to sign off on it. Don’t hate the player, as we also now say, hate the game.
But let’s not pretend that the game is not deserving of contempt. If the ride-or-die crypto-libertarians get the kind of unregulated market they want, this is, at scale, what it will look like: an unmediated capitalist fever-dream in a collapsing labyrinth of scams and swindles.
There is, in this sense, something strangely illuminating about the brief arc of Haliey Welch’s career and its culmination in the launch of a worthless crypto-token based on her own fame. Our society is so heavily marketised and commodified, our culture so radically atomised, that it feels deliriously appropriate that everyone should now have the ability to issue their own personal currency.
This, perhaps, is where unregulated capitalism and radical individualism were always going to wind up. Endless meaningless currencies, briefly hyped and quickly dumped, imprinted with the dubious sovereignty of the self.