Topic C, Part 1: "Emos, or 'emotional people'"
Just wow. Has the generational divide ever been deeper? A yawning chasm never to close again? Not since Elvis' hips have the squares been so far off the mark (actually, the critics of Elvis were pretty on the mark - bringing a new, frank sexuality to the mainstream? Check). But by failing to recognize that some of what they report is in fact parody of the topic in question, they ruin whatever credibility a backwater local newscast might have enjoyed.
Things aren't much better in Rochester:
Emo is admittedly a strange beast. I don't pretend to fully understand it. I vaguely remember when it referred to Slint and Embrace and Minor Threat. I don't like Fall Out Boy; I do admit to occasionally falling for My Chemical Romance's "six songs in one" approach (in a sing-along-because-it's-on-the-radio sense). So yeah, I'm kind of clueless (not as clueless as Officer Maygra, mind you), but I'm pretty sure that when my daughter is old enough to have such interests, no youth movement to which she may pledge allegiance will be worth my wigging out to quite the same degree as the folks at WDAZ.
Rap music - which I was heavily into as a 15-year-old - genuinely frightened my parents. It was about black politics and empowerment and seemingly had very little to say to a white kid from suburban Ottawa. But I drew Public Enemy logos on my binders, and memorized the lyrics. I enjoyed it for several reasons, not the least of which was the danger it represented. It was exotic, and angry, and charged; it was the antithesis of my daily existence. The language was strong, the images sometimes violent, but my parents had the wisdom to let me draw my own conclusions. And now I am neither a militant nor a thug, but a free-thinking, often curious and (I hope) non-prejudiced lover of all music, someone who still loves hip-hop (but who wonders where the urgency went, the sense that the world could be changed - next topic suggestion: Why Hip-Hop Sucks in '07).
I'm a parent now, so I suppose I understand the confusion and fear involved here. We naturally want what's best for our kids, and the easiest way to imagine what's best is to imagine what we know. So here's a suggestion: know more. Ask questions. And don't assume the folks at WDAZ (or equivalent) know what the fuck they're talking about.
Signed: AGF
Dated: Tuesday, February 27, 2007 0 comments.
File under: "Parents Just Don't Understand", "The Kids Are Alright"
Topic B, Part 5: I Am What I Am Not
The real coup represented by someone like Jeffree Star is the willingness to step into the actual world while maintaining that myspace-crafted persona. We have come to expect a degree of falsification and misrepresentation online, but still hold higher standards for authenticity in the flesh & blood, bricks & mortar world. The fabricated world of online creation should be negated by the actual world of lived experience – you are not your facebook profile; you do not look like your carefully chosen and posted photos - but when a Jeffree Star comes along and denies this rift, it raises alarm. And I think that, as PF suggested, is the point of the whole exercise. New modes of self-invention; newly available methods of self-definition.
Star is but one example of the new breed who, by cunningly utilizing the tools granted them by history’s greatest shared source of information, have become “famous for being famous,” or more accurately, famous simply because they claim to be famous.
***UPDATE*** Emily Nussbaum suggests that maybe it's a generational gap, that nobody over 30 can possibly understand what it means to be young and alive and online today. Most chilling passage? That would have to be this one:
Younger people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.
Signed: AGF
Dated: Tuesday, February 20, 2007 0 comments.
File under: "It's Tricky", "Kids", "Little Lies"
Topic B, Part 4: Amplify the lie.
One could argue that Jeffree Star has every right to manufacture his persona, and that he even has the right to create a biography out of whole cloth, since the business he's in is fuelled by illusion. Why should the development of an alter ego stop at stage names?
An artist's authenticity always amazes (ah! alliteration), but sometimes we need a little fantasy, no? As PF pointed out, the reality might actually disappoint.
Hmm. Maybe I shouldn't be so hard on Laura Albert.
Signed: Nirmala Basnayake
Dated: Tuesday, February 20, 2007 0 comments.
File under: "It's Tricky", "Kids", "Little Lies"
topic b, part 3: the prettiest (proto)star
i'm curious about how real any of it is, though. clearly, mr. star is connected enough to make myspace demos with peaches' drummer (although, i can't honestly say how connected that really makes a person), and he's great at doing the self-promotion qualified by noncommittal disclaimers thing (ie, a makeup line that's "secretly in the works, but you can publish that" and a reality tv show that "is getting finalized today").
i'm impressed by the fake it 'til you make it chutzpah on display here. so impressed, in fact, that i can't tell if i'd really just rather it all remain a cloud of hyperbole awaiting media "condensation" (like a molecular cloud coalescing in the interstellar medium! if i may belabor the metaphor just a tad more - pardon that, but it has the word "medium" built right into it!).
that's the real art happening here, and i'm sure any "realization" of the alleged works in progress henceforth would be a bit of a letdown.
Signed: pf
Dated: Tuesday, February 20, 2007 0 comments.
File under: "It's Tricky", "Kids", "Little Lies"
Topic B, Part 2: Infected
Topic B, Part 1: You got served.
So should staged clips be labelled as such? I'd like to think that I'm savvy enough to distinguish real footage from the scripted variety, or at least take it all with a grain of salt (if that expression applies), but what if the clip involved a crime? (Imagine, /a, if we had posted a clip of one of the fake kidnappings we pulled off in high school? Would the act be dismissed as low-brow entertainment, or would we have police knocking on our doors?)
If I saw footage of a crime on YouTube, my first instinct would be to assume that it was a prank. Who'd post that sort of thing on YouTube, of all places, right? Yet the site has been used to nab murder suspects and is being used to find missing persons. Will the proliferance of Internet hoaxes (and punking in general) diminish the effectiveness of measures like these, because the fakes create a "crying wolf" atmosphere in which the real victims are lost?
Signed: Nirmala Basnayake
Dated: Friday, February 16, 2007 0 comments.
File under: "I Turn My Camera On", "It's Tricky", "Kids", "Little Lies"
topic a, part five: surveillance camera
all i can say is that the idea of every man, woman, and (shudder) child/tween/ager wielding near-microscopic cameras everywhere and then beaming the raw footage directly to every available eyeball and/or brainstem in the world feels like the future to me right now, by which i mean that it both scares and fascinates me.
what i'm really looking forward to is the explosion in editing techniques that can't be far behind. in short order, posting raw footage will have fallen hopefully behind the times, and the original blunder will pale in comparison to the seamlessly manipulated mutation it becomes....
Topic A, Part 4: Teach Your Children Well
a. I love the cranky old woman at the end.
b. A friend of mine tried to find this very commercial in the pre-YouTube era whilst on the job and ended up downloading a ton of spyware onto her company computer. Whoops!
But one thing that has stunned me about YouTube is the proliferation of online blogging. I'm certain there is a fancier name for these things, but you get the ideer. Now whether they are honest-to-God 16 year olds or a bunch of actors who merely look like fragile 16 year olds is really beside the point. I saw the video below and was horrified on several levels. Give it a look, I'll wait.
It also brings up a good point brought up earlier by Miss Imperial. Anonymity sometimes brings out the worst in people, and for evidence you need to look no farther than message boards and the comments on YouTube. This poor kid is just about as awkward as they come, and the comments under this video telling him to kill himself because he's pathetic and hated made me unbelievably sad. Is this where we are, people? Is this the magic of technology that was promised us? Laughing at Britney's bad skin on HDTV and telling the underdog to kill himself?
That's it, my kids are using a Commodore 64 for their homework and playing Pong.
Signed: Betagal
Dated: Thursday, February 15, 2007 0 comments.
File under: "I Turn My Camera On", "Kids"
Topic A, Part 3: Mostly sidebar.
Sigh.
It's true, though, that the world feels a lot smaller than it used to, thanks to the Internet...but, like /a pointed out, the world also feels a lot more congested. How do teenagers stay in the loop? It's not even a loop! It's like a bunch of loops all intertwined, then wrapped tightly around a really huge backpack. No wonder they all need three cellphones each.
(At some point we're going to have to talk about people wearing Bluetooth earpieces ALL THE TIME. I know it's been parodied on many an occasion and is therefore old news, but seriously, it's like those things are grafted to people's temples.)
And /a, you're right, there's a lot of footage on the Internet that some would call, er, "pointless". I feel as if I should applaud the DIY mentality of posting your own work on YouTube -- I suppose it beats waiting in that giant American/Canadian Idol line -- but how does one ensure that the work gets noticed?
(Oh, and I should note that the TBS feed in Toronto comes from somewhere in Georgia, which is the reason why I saw Rap Cat in the first place. Step up, Buffalo!)
Signed: Nirmala Basnayake
Dated: Thursday, February 15, 2007 0 comments.
File under: "I Turn My Camera On", "Kids"
Topic A, Part 2: You Filmed Me Doing What?
Now, with YouTube (or Google Video, or iFilm, or Veoh, or hell, even Zip.tv), the whole damn world is something of a second home – a vast, dizzying, perplexing and altogether overwhelming one, stacked virtual floor to cyber-ceiling with all manner of cultural effluvia (satellite TV contributes to this to, in that I can now watch the evening news from St. John’s or Spokane, if I want to). And like Miss Imperial, I dig the ability to find Rap Cat, or the Geico Caveman commercials, or old music videos whenever I chose to see them. Content delivered on my terms (this is the great advantage the new providers are promising us). The problem then becomes wading your way through all the content that’s available, much of it user-generated. In theory, I’m all for user-generated content (UGC, if we must get all jargon-y). I mean, you know, power to the people and huzzah for the quasi-democratization of the media, but doesn’t the vast majority of it suck?
AFV always struck me as something to chuckle at before changing the channel (with all respect due to PF). Now there’s a gajillion pratfalls, bloopers, hi-jinks, goofs, pranks and stunts vying for your attention, so what’s any of it worth? And who has the time? I think of it all as part and parcel of the cheapening of celebrity, wherein notoriety, infamy, recognition and ridicule are basically and unfortunately synonymous.
And then, as Miss Imperial discussed, there are those unwitting victims of this extreme proliferation of lenses. Combine that with the infinite storage capability we’ve seen develop in our lifetimes, and you arrive at the very sinister notion that once something finds its way on the internet, it can never be erased, suppressed, denied, ignored, deleted or hidden. That’s a good thing in the arena of truth-finding, but not so good if you’re the victim of unwanted photojournalism or overzealous camera phone usage.
Maybe I’m just getting older, but there are days when the whole thing seems tremendously overwhelming, and I’m tempted to forget all about it and sign up for the Luddites’ newsletter (printed on paper, naturally). Of course, then somebody digs up something funny, and I’m back to toasting our cleverness and ingenuity. And being thankful that I’m not this guy:
Topic A, Part 1: Instant infamy.
"MEOW MEOW MEOWMEOW MEOWMEOWMEOW MEOW": RAP CAT
Signed: Nirmala Basnayake
Dated: Thursday, February 15, 2007 0 comments.
File under: "I Turn My Camera On"
It's on.
Sure, there are message boards for this sort of thing, but with this blog we eliminate at least ninety percent of the boards' self-righteousness and tiresome one-upsmanship (if that is even a word. See? If this was a message board, there would already be 87 replies explaining why I am a total idiot and shouldn't be wasting everyone's time. That sort of "advice", my friends, is what the Comments section is for). This blog is more like an IM session with better spelling!
So how do we break the ice? Keep reading.
Signed: Nirmala Basnayake
Dated: Wednesday, February 14, 2007 0 comments.
File under: "Intro" (see Hip-Hop; Jazz)