“Riffing” gets thrown around constantly now: podcasters riff between ad reads, comedians riff off a bad heckle, and half of “prompting” a chatbot is really just riffing on whatever it hands back. The word is more common today than it was in 2013, and it’s still routinely used to mean the opposite of what it actually means. Nobody needs to have read a thirteen-year-old VICE essay to get that wrong. But that essay happens to be the cleanest, most confident example of the mistake ever put into print. That’s what got us thinking about it in the first place.
In October of 2013, Kate Carraway had a supposed epiphany. Standing in an office, midway through a conversation about 13 Chambers (the Wu-Tang and Fugazi mashup album), she looked at her friend Chris, felt a sudden wave of existential dread, turned around, and walked away.
She then wrote roughly 1,000 words for VICE, titled (fittingly) “Riffing.”, explaining that walking away mid-sentence was actually a revolutionary rejection of the very thing the title is named after.
There’s just one small problem: She has no idea what riffing actually is.
The Conflation: Infodumping vs. Riffing
Carraway’s essay treats “riffing” as a sinister social currency: a competitive, gatekeeping performance where people toss out niche references and hot takes as a shield against real intimacy.
She describes it as a “casual and ongoing assertion of opinion” and calls out “this refusal of vulnerability that makes riffing such a sinister friend-force.” She frames two friends chatting about a mashup album as an exercise in mutual intellectual posturing.
Except, that’s not riffing. That’s just infodumping.
What Carraway is describing is the familiar experience of someone cornering you to explain the deep lore of Star Wars, list off rare Pokémon cards, or flex their knowledge of 2010s indie mixtapes. It’s monologuing. It’s cultural name-dropping. It’s being a bit of a snob.
But by calling it “riffing,” Carraway reveals she fundamentally misunderstands how conversations actually work.
What Riffing Actually Is
The term “riff” comes from jazz and comedy. It’s inherently collaborative, generative, and improvisational.
| What Carraway Describes (Infodumping) | What Riffing Actually Is |
|---|---|
| “Let me show you how much I know” | “Yes, and…” |
| Monologue & Status-Seeking | Toss-and-Catch Collaboration |
| Static / Knowledge-Based | Dynamic / Idea-Based |
To riff on something isn’t to quiz someone on trivia or assert a static opinion; it’s to take an idea, spin it into a new shape, toss it to your friend, and see what absurd or funny direction they take it in next.
- Infodumping: “Did you know Wugazi sampled ‘Waiting Room’ on track 3, which was produced by Doomtree?”
- Riffing: “What if Wu-Tang remixed other 90s post-hardcore bands? Imagine Ol’ Dirty Bastard over a Jawbox baseline, but the album cover is just a picture of Dave Grohl at a bodega.”
Riffing requires listening, adaptability, and a total lack of preciousness. It’s a game of mental catch. Carraway wasn’t trapped in a riff; she was trapped in a monologue. Instead of just changing the subject, she invented a whole social diagnosis to justify walking out on her friend.
Riding the Vibe Off a Cliff
The irony of the piece is astounding. To prove how tired she is of “performative cultural currency,” Carraway’s essay relentlessly flexes its own credentials:
- Dropping references to Swedish band jj, Wugazi, and a tweet from Emily Gould.
- Name-dropping Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
- Peppered with a posteriori, Fremdschämen, and film-set terminology like “martini shot.”
It is the ultimate 2010s “hot take”: a piece riding 100% on mood, posture, and flashy vocabulary, built entirely on top of a dictionary-level misunderstanding of the core premise.
Carraway didn’t strike a blow for emotional vulnerability when she walked away from Chris in 2013. She just misdefined a basic English word, wrote a high-minded critique about a phantom social disease, and left her friend hanging in an office over a mashup album.
Sources
- Carraway, Kate. Riffing. VICE, October 24, 2013.