#The culture they came from having a use outside of relatable memes for the audience

[phoenixcatch7]

Sqq gets kidnapped by demons and he's allowed to write one (1) letter to cq, but he's not allowed to even HINT at being stuck or kidnapped. Knowing this, he sprinkles in just enough demonic lingo to render the letter vaguely indecipherable to yqy (and pass muster with the demons as 'not code'), meaning he has to summon sqh to try and figure out what his xiao jiu is saying. Sqh takes one looks at this harmless letter and sees, as a line break, the more code sos.

[wernher-von-brawny]

One man's quest to understand why a “country band” with 10 million TikTok followers has almost zero presence in “country music”.

It reminds me of when Barbara Walters asked Kim Kardashian what she did for a living, while then-Bruce Jenner looked on and nodded.

The olds were still thinking in terms of selling products and services to customers, while Kim made her living by turning media attention into an audience.

But for her, the audience were not her customers, at least not primarily. They were her product, which she then sold to advertisers.

Towards the end of this video, the essayist wonders aloud why TikTok content is so nonsensical and pointless and cringe. The question reminded me about that Barbara Walters interview, but also about when, a couple or more years back, that question was asked about meme culture.

Did we ever come up with a good answer? I think the philosophers may have come up with something, but I don’t know that the general audience cared.

But my intuition is that “TikTok culture” -- setting aside the popular conspiracy theory that for audiences outside of China, TT deliberately promotes content that warps the brains and values of the young so as to undermine the future competitiveness of other nations, which is frankly such an old strategy in the culture wars between nations that it seems performatively naive to doubt it -- is just the next iteration of a cyclical trend in media I call post-literacy.

Post-Literacy

I first grokked onto this idea when I was pondering how Jimmy Fallon could be so successful as host of The Tonight Show.

When he first got the gig, everybody who knew good TV from bad was just embarrassed for the lad. Particularly those old media folks -- Paul Simon (clearly doing Lorne Michaels a favor) comes to mind -- who would radiate anything from pity and incredulity to discomfort, disdain, and contempt from their seat on the couch.

But somehow, Fallon delivered the ratings. He kept his job. He became a hit. Or "a hit".

How? Why?

I decided it was because he clicked with the actual point and purpose of The Tonight Show: It's not meant to be watched, but rather to be "left on".

Johnny Carson learned this when a movie called Middle Age Crazy came out in 1980.

The film opened on a couple in bed having marital relations, while The Tonight Show was playing in the background. Carson described how seeing that made him realize that many of his viewers simply used his show as “a nightlight for sex”.

You didn't need to speak English to enjoy Carson's Tonight Show. His monologue was never more pleasing to the audience than when the jokes died. His comedy skits were so broad that they functioned more as signifiers of comedy, rather than, y'know, actual jokes.

Carson's Tonight Show was a bright light we all gathered around to feel a sense of community. So even if a joke might not actually be funny, it's supposed to be funny, so go along with it. You don't even really have to pay attention to what's going on, just don't sour grapes the party.

I think this is part of the reason that Letterman and Conan weren't really Tonight Show permanent host material: for their comedy to work, you had to pay attention to setups and punchlines. Also, Letterman could be a bit smug and abrasive and Conan a bit effete and elitist.

But a guy like Leno? He waggled his head, did the funny voice, and whether you were paying attention or not, you got the message: the affable host of the party just said a funny, so laugh along.

And Fallon also fills this same Johnny Bravo jacket.

He's SO enthusiastic and happy to be there, and he laughs SO HARD at his own jokes that you don't have to pay attention to the show. He's cute and friendly and almost violently inoffensive, and he'll double over in convulsions to let you know that you’re having a good time.

You don't need to listen close, or follow along, or even understand the language to enjoy the proceedings.

And you'll never feel like you're too dumb to "get" a joke, because the point isn't the joke, but the communal experience of laughing together.

Which, to my mind at least, is a key ingredient of TikTok, and of the massive international popularity of content that is -- outside of China, at least -- unfailingly silly, stupid, or pointless.

The pointlessness is kinda the point.

Call it post-literacy, post-meaning, or post-content. (ba-dum ching!)

You don’t need to think about it or understand it or seek reason or rational sense in it.

It's post- “the gatekeepers of acceptable media”. It's post-reality TV, where anybody, anywhere can be famous if they are outrageous enough.

You’re just meant to enjoy it for seven seconds and move on to the next one. It’s a world party, and we’re just here for a good time. Chug, chug, chug!

If we accept that “the Medium is the Message”, then I'll leave it to you to ponder on what message a medium consisting of millions and millions of seven-second videos -- many or most showcasing “wacky hijinks” -- is sending.

It is here, it is now, and it is the intermediate step between itself and the more extreme next thing which will elevate, accelerate, or exacerbate whatever effect TikTok is having/will have on us.

Like Rat Pack-era Sammy Davis Jr., baby!

But in the here and now, being Wacky™ and attractive and colorful and laughing, laughing, laughing is a business plan. And if it please the court, I present as evidence the subjects -- or are they objects? -- of the above video: the redheaded triplets known as Taylor Red.

They may have named themselves Taylor to capture some of you-know-who's reflected radiance, but these girls are not a band. Not any longer.

Like the Kardashians, they bypassed the intermediate step of achievement/accomplishment and went straight to celebrity -- although they kinda/sorta bypassed the "celebrity" part too, didn't they? -- and became a brand.

They are in the business of turning eyeballs into audience, and then selling that audience to advertisers.

World-Wide

The dude in the video wonders why Indonesia is their biggest audience.

Well, setting aside that there's probably some link farm-esque purchasing of likes and subscribes, one can easily imaging that three redhead triplets wearing tight costumes and jumping on balloons ticks a lot of boxes.

Language barrier, gone. Context, irrelevant. And as everyone from Florenz Ziegfeld to Hugh Hefner knew, figure out a way to commodify cute American girls laughing and having fun, and you're practically printing money -- world-wide.

A researched piece like this video getting 1-2 million views is something like a $1-2k YouTube payout. The dude suggests that the girls are likely pulling in $250k/mo just from TikTok.

From what I’ve heard about how TikTok pays creators, I find this number kinda sus, but hey, it’s not like I actually know enough to refute it.

I suppose it's just a matter of time before Jimmy Fallon invites them to appear of the Tonight Show.

Maybe they'll discuss Post-Literacy, perhaps citing Marshall McLuhan or, IDK, Bertrand Russell.

Or maybe they'll all just jump on balloons, because frankly, that's just better content.

Or should I say, "content".

[pillareternal]

clickbait magical realism

(Originally from my old blog, which i'm not gonna use any time soon. Edited to fit my more recent sensibilities. Told you I'll be blogging for real)

I. Clickbait

The 10's were weird.

Looking back, there's definitely a cultural divide between the current decade--however short it is--and the past. It truly feels like a different world, even though I lived through it. I'm a zoomer, for fuck's sake. I shouldn't feel that old.

Anyway, one of the main things that stuck out to me during that time was our relationship with "clickbait" and obviously fake information. Sometimes it's a joke. Sometimes it's just cynical ploy for traffic. Sometimes people actually believed their own chicanery. Compared to the societal dangers that it poses today, it's more of a curiosity at best. At worst, it's just annoying. Most of these observations are andecdotal.

Enter the scrolling app. Ever-infinite streams of microblogged content offer images and stories that are, at first glance, plausible enough to be true. Life-hacks, weird facts about anything, interesting takes, cool destinations that you'll never see, things that you might never see again as a passive observer until maybe your friend reshares it to you. The ephemeral, slapdash nature of these "informative" posts and memes become folklore, in the oldest and totalizing sense.

The transition period towards the current behavioral trends under Web2 demonstrated how much of our imaginations ran wild. Online platforms hungry for ad revenue just shell out hundreds and thousands of posts on technological optimism (if it wasn't Elon pre-Grimes, it's Yanko Designers back when they were huffing Dahir İnşaat's paint), pictures of places all over the world, and digital folk stories. Perhaps, like a Tlön-esque tulpa, these posts eventually created a bleeding effect; where bullshit just became accepted as "real, i guess". Media literacy lacking, a good chunk of these sensationalist drivel came off as semi-plausible.

Tumblr wasn't safe from sensationalism. Alongside the fan content, original works and cringe (now weaponized against "twitter refugee crisis") sit quirky trivia; some of it true, but filled to the brim with sensational bait ranging from common misconceptions such as "grass screams when they die" to straight up myths like Alexandria's Genesis. Add to it the reblog-addled culture jam of collaborative improvization (somehing that would only be replicated truly by TikTok's duet feature), the userbase of the platform at the time, and the fact that posts are also shared in other sites like facebook, it wasn't long until the site began adding to the internet's growing aggregate folklore.

Outside of Tumblr, scrolling apps and messageboards have a different crowd and different ethos. There were a lot of posts, images and videos (some of them altered for clickbait fodder) that catered to sensational shock and awe. Sharebait trivia and touching narratives are not the playground of the users, mostly passive observers and by design unable to garner a wide audience, but by the scores of mods behind these faceless pages with a match to burn. You wouldn’t believe what’s inside this microhome! The underground rainforest found within a Mexican Sinkhole! I made my own touchscreen mirror! Not to mention the endless top 10 lists that border on paranormal/conspiracy that caters to boomers and third world country users.

They offered a more mainstream kind of fantasy to the real world it purports to report on. In places like 9gag and Facebook where these posts are sandwiched in between #relatable comics and memes, they are made more to invoke the fantastic, like a Ripley’s Believe it or Not or a Guinness Book of Records kind of deal. In a general sense, these fascinating showcases of weird but believable sights in our world (like Son Doong cave and Inca bridges), got lumped in with the straight up historical revisionism (“and that kid was Albert Einstein.”), extremely cheesy sentimental love stories, and also like, really gobsmack pop science futurology, like the misleading “true shape of the planet”.

Looking back at these phenomena, most of these things felt like a surrealist alternate history. But perhaps, for the boomer user and also most internet users in the global south, its a source of wonder.

To those majority of enamored users, these posts, however misleading and overhyped as they are, doesn’t simply form an escape from reality; it expands on it, in a very absurd but plausible (to them) way. As the internet was our gate to the world, these folk-loric streams of content became our almanac, our view of the outside. In this blend of clickbait and reality, it paints a picture of a world where, while diverse and sometimes unpredictable as our real world, it feels like it exists in the minds of mainstream comic book writers.

Every narrative, slightly photoshopped image, and other fascinating things popping in our feeds tends toward a hollywood-esque mishmash of our everyday existence. It’s a 90’s blockbuster universe, where cryptids are real, historical figures become superheroic, flying cars are becoming closer to reality, the illuminati survives in secret, theophanies and paranormal events are an everyday thing, and crystals can heal.

II. Magical Realism

Magical Realism is a literary genre that delves within that broad spectrum of weird to absurd while being somewhat working around the gravity of the real world. Your Forrest Gumps and Big Fishes. Your Midnight’s Children and Life of Pi. Heck, maybe some Foucault’s Pendulum while you’re at it. They all point towards the fantastical in the face of the mundane, being short of becoming full on fantasy by making it interact/align with the laws of reality which dulls in comparison to it. This is how you get things like coming across an carnivorous mangrove island populated by meerkats after fleeing Emergency-era India or a mentally-impaired man managing to be the center of attention in Cold War-era America. In cases of more fantasy oriented elements such as those in Pan’s Labyrinth, it treats it with hitting you with the cold hard reality of the setting; ie. Falangist Spain.

The Magical Realism of early 2010s clickbait internet is grounded on reality by way of how conflicting and contradictory it is to itself. Politics and conspiracy perhaps played a part. I could see the Illuminati/New World Order shit on youtube, the Zeitgeist Project, the Venus Project, early meme culture (hell yeah buoye fuckin inject those photoshopped image macros to my veins) to be precursors of this phenomena, today becoming dime a dozen watered down and compartmentalized to cater to specific audiences. You’ll rarely see posts about the “eco-friendly solar powered technoparadise” of Rwanda from your sustainable living adventure Facebook friend being in the same league as a video made for Brazilian evangelists talking about Jesus’ face appearing on a bowl of soup nowadays.

In most respects, the early clickbait-fueled viral internet of the first half of the 2010s might perhaps be the most immersive piece of Magical Realism yet. Unintentional, organic, user/profit driven. Unlike its contemporaries, however, by its nature it doesn’t have an overarching theme. It doesn’t need to. At the end of the day, it’s just social media shitting out half-real information to our eyeballs to be sacrificed to the attention economy. Perhaps that’s what it is.

III. It's still going

In hindsight, the personalized nature of the internet fostered in the same forges as the Magical Realist phenomena is now seen as a detriment against liberal institutions. On the radicalization of modern politics, the “conspiracy singularity” and the rise of cultish populist authoritarianism, where deliberate disinfo on the lower classes with limited (but not total lack of) internet exposure has become the culprit. Talking about its implications would be a discussion that everyone and their dog has already pointed out (and validly unnerved about). Hell, most of this shit has moved to TikTok, where it's now getting mixed in with actual new age and ancient aliens woo.

Either way, the older sensationalist internet emains fascinating to me. It’s the place where we mindlessly believed random bullshit on the internet and found a world confirming the wild weirdness and adventure that we’ve seen in our pre-online media. If things haven’t become as social media-driven as we are today, how much of this aestheticized sensationalised world remain?

[jocia92]

(Google translated)

Dan Stevens, who grew up in Wales and south-east England, spent his summer holidays at the National Youth Theater at the age of 15, and he was drawn to the stage while studying English in Cambridge. Since his big breakthrough as Matthew Crawley in the hit series “Downton Abbey”, he has also repeatedly appeared in films such as “Inside Wikileaks - The Fifth Force”, “At Night in the Museum: The Secret Tomb” or “Beauty and the Beast” . Most recently, Stevens played the Russian Schnösel singer Lemtov in the Oscar-nominated comedy “Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga” from Netflix. At the beginning of June, the German film “Ich bin dein Mensch” by Maria Schrader celebrated at the Summer Berlinale Premiere, which starts on 1.7. comes to German cinemas regularly. Stevens plays the role of a love robot in it. Unlike on the screen, however, the 38-year-old prefers to speak English in the zoom-conducted interview. He chose a brick wall with a lion motif as the digital background. No allusion to the song “Lion of Love” from “Eurovision Song Contest”, but a photo of the famous Ishtar Gate in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, where “I am your human” was filmed last summer.

Mr. Stevens, in your new film “I am your human” you play a humanoid robot that is entirely geared towards fulfilling the romantic needs of a skeptical scientist. You yourself recently described the film as “delightfully German”. How did you mean that?

I wanted to say that here pretty big questions - such as what actually makes a person or how much perfection love can take - are negotiated in a very light-footed, elegant and sometimes humorous way. In my experience that is a very German quality. At least I have often seen with many of my German colleagues and friends that they are very good at not discussing difficult issues exclusively deadly serious and melancholy.

Where does your personal connection to Germany and the German language come from?

My parents had friends who lived in Bielefeld and we used to visit them in North Rhine-Westphalia during the school holidays. Traveled from England by car! That’s how I learned a little German as a child, and later I learned it as a subject at school. I even did a short internship there through our friends in Bielefeld. I really love the language. Funnily enough, I was later able to use my knowledge of German professionally, because my first film was “Hilde”, in which I was next to Heike Makatsch played the British actor and director David Cameron, who was married to Hildegard Knef. After that, I always hoped that there might be another chance to speak German in front of the camera, because playing in a foreign language is an exciting challenge. When the chance arose to shoot “I am your person”, I could hardly believe my luck.

Did you know the director Maria Schrader who gave you this chance?

Funnily enough, when the script for the film landed on my table, I had just watched the Netflix series “Unorthodox”, which she directed. I had also watched a few episodes of “Deutschland 89”. In general, I knew that she was a great German actress, not least because friends who knew their way around the German theater scene often raved about her. Working with her was a joy now. Her understanding of actors is quite instinctive and brilliant. I have seldom seen someone who can help an actor who is having difficulties with a scene with such simple means.

The fact that you had already seen “Unorthodox” shows, of course, how quickly “I am your person” must have been implemented in the past year …

Oh yes, that was really quick. In March I was still in New York and was about to premiere a new play on Broadway. But then the pandemic came, everything was canceled and I flew back to my family in Los Angeles. A few weeks later, Maria and I met each other via Zoom - and shortly afterwards I was sitting outside in a café in the Berlin June sun for the first time in months to discuss the upcoming shoot with her. That was pretty surreal because I hadn’t actually left the house since March.

Is it correct that you oriented yourself to Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart to portray the romantically programmed robot Tom?

In any case, these were role models that Maria and I spoke about. When you think of the game between the two of them, you always see an enormous clarity and directness. Cary Grant, for example, was always quite funny, especially in his romantic roles, but also flawless in an almost artificial way from today’s perspective. I found that very suitable for a robot. Apart from the fact that the ideas that Tom and his algorithm have of romance and love are certainly also shaped by the classic romantic comedies from Hollywood. Oh, the woman is sad, so I’ll bring her flowers! Such automatisms from the stories from back then were very appropriate for Tom now.

Keyword role models: Who shaped you in your career as an actor?

There were of course many. Jimmy Stewart was certainly something of a role model. My mom and I watched a lot of his films when I was little and I was always impressed by the kind of sweet tragedy that went into all of his roles. But maybe Robin Williams’ work influenced me even more. I always found the incredible variety of his films remarkable. He could make his audience laugh hysterically like no other, but also move them to tears in other roles. I always wanted to emulate this range.

In fact, the range of your roles is enormous and ranges from the Disney blockbuster “Beauty and the Beast” to a comic adaptation in series format such as “Legion” to bulky independent films such as “Her Smell” or the horror thriller “The Rental “, Which we just released on DVD. Is there a method behind this diversity?

Not in principle. I like variety, but I’m not just looking for roles that are as different as possible from one another. Rather, there are always similar factors that I use to select my projects. Sometimes there is a certain director that I really want to work with. Or the role itself is irresistible because it presents me with acting challenges. And sometimes a script is just fantastically written and I am interested in the topics it is about. With “I am your person” it was definitely the latter, especially since the timing was just right. In 2020 there were so many societal questions that ultimately touched the core of human existence. Such a script, which deals with something very similar in a light-footed way, was just fitting.

A few years ago you said in a questionnaire from the British Guardians that your greatest weakness was not being able to make up your mind. So every time you are offered a role, do you ponder whether you should accept?

No, no, when a script appeals to me, it actually does it very quickly. It’s such a gut feeling. If I’m unsure and skeptical, that’s a good indicator that this is not the right thing for me. That with the difficulty in making decisions related rather to something else. For example, it takes me forever to order in a restaurant because I can never decide what on the menu appeals to me the most.

You became famous with the role of Matthew Crawley in the series "Downton Abbey”. Did you immediately suspect at the time that something big was going on?

At first we were all pretty clueless. There are really many British history series, and we were one of them. When the first season aired in the US and was a huge success there, it was pretty unexpected. I never expected the impact the series would have on my career.

Barely ten years later, are you still being asked about the role?

Oh yes, regularly. Probably nothing will change about that either. I got out after three seasons!

In the meantime, however, the flamboyant Russian singer Alexander Lemtov from “Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga” should also be a character with whom you will be immediately associated, right?

Right, it has been mentioned more and more recently when people recognize me on the street. This charming, silly film obviously had a nerve with the audience last year in the middle of the corona pandemic. Especially since the real Eurovision Song Contest had been canceled.

The film was the number one topic of conversation on the Internet for a while - and Lemtov GIFs and memes were everywhere. Did you follow that?

It was really hard to avoid it. I wasn’t looking specifically for what people were posting. But of course my friends passed a lot on to me, and there were already some very funny Lemtov things. But he’s also a figure made for GIFs.

Another question every British actor under 40 has to put up with these days: Would you like to become the next James Bond?

Oh, of course, everyone gets to hear this question again and again who meets certain criteria. But it is completely hypothetical. Although a few years ago I read in an audio book by Ian Fleming’s “Casino Royale”.

You mentioned earlier that you and your family have lived in the United States for a long time. How big is your homesickness?

I actually feel very comfortable in Los Angeles. But every now and then I miss the sidewalk culture of European cities. People on foot, street cafes, things like that. Last year the longing for it was particularly great, although it was of course clear to me that there was a state of emergency in Europe too. In any case, I found myself reading books that were set in Europe and made me homesick. Which is why the unexpected trip to Berlin was really a boon.

You are also an avid cricketer. That’s certainly difficult in Los Angeles, isn’t it?

There are quite a few cricket clubs here. The only problem is that the few people who do the sport here are so good at it that I have problems keeping up. That’s why I always lose sight of the matter here a little. Even as a pure TV viewer, it is not easy to stay on the ball, because of course there is no cricket broadcast here at prime time. But as soon as I’m home in England in the summer, I really want to play again!

[letterboxd]

How I Letterboxd #13: Erika Amaral.

Film sociologist Erika Amaral on the blossoming of Brazil’s women filmmakers, the joys of queuing for the movies, the on-fire Brazilian Letterboxd community, and the sentimental attachment of her entire nation to A Dog’s Will.

“It is hard to produce art without institutional support and it is very complicated to produce art during this tragic pandemic.” —Erika Amaral

In the wide world outside of English-language Letterboxd, Brazil occupies a particularly fervent corner. Sāo Paulo-based feminist film theorist Erika Amaral has connected with many other local film lovers through her Letterboxd profile, and for anyone with an interest in Cinema Brasileiro, her lists are an excelente place to start.

From her personal introduction to Brazilian film history, to her own attempts to fill gaps in her Latin American cinematic knowledge, Erika’s well-curated selections are a handy primer on the cinema of the fifth-largest country in the world, and its neighbors. These lists sit alongside her finely judged academic deep-dives into filmmakers such as Luis Buñuel, Glauber Rocha and Sarah Bernhardt.

Endlessly fascinated by how “the history of cinema is all intertwined”, Erika has also written on Jia Zhangke for Rosebud Club, is an Ana Carolina stan, enjoys collecting films directed by women featuring mirrors and women, and, like all of us, watched many remarkable movies during quarantine.

Suzana Amaral (left, rear) with cast and crew on the set of her film ‘A Hora da Estrela’ (Hour of the Star, 1985).

Olá, Erika. Please give our readers a brief introduction to your brilliant Introduction to Brazilian Film History list. I’m so happy to see this list getting popular! I’m a sociologist interested in film and gender studies. It’s been four years since I started studying Brazilian film history but my passion for film is much older. I tried to combine those two aspects in this list; films that are meaningful to me, historically relevant films, and historically relevant films erased from film-history books, for instance, those directed by women. The main purpose of my list is to highlight Brazilian women filmmakers’ fundamental contributions to Brazilian cinema.

I listed some absolute classics such as Hour of the Star by the late director Suzana Amaral, and other obscure gems such as The Interview, by Helena Solberg, which is a short feature released in 1966 alongside the development of Cinema Novo. Solberg’s work was hidden for decades. No-one knew about it. In Brazil, especially in the field of film studies and feminist theories, we are experiencing the blossoming of public debates, books being released, and film festivals that look specifically into films such as Solbergs’s and [those of] many other women directors, including Adélia Sampaio, the first Black female director to release a feature film in Brazil in 1984, Amor Maldito. We need these debates on Letterboxd as well, so I wrote this list in English.

As a representative of the passionate Brazilian community on Letterboxd, can you provide some insight into the site’s popularity where you live, especially for those of us who have not learned Brazilian Portuguese? I feel at home using Letterboxd. Everywhere I see Brazilian members posting reviews in both Portuguese and English. It’s a passionate community. It’s directly related to Twitter where Brazilian cinephiles are so active and productive, always sharing film memes (and even Letterboxd memes). Many content creators are using both Letterboxd and Twitter to showcase their podcasts, classes and film clubs. I once started a talk at a university for film students mentioning that my Masters research project came into life when I watched Amélia, showing my mind-blown Letterboxd review in the presentation. I follow many of those students now and it is so good to be connected. Brazilian Film Twitter and [the] Brazilian Letterboxd community are on fire!

Alexandre Rodrigues as Buscapé in ‘City of God’ (2002), directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund.

When uninitiated cinephiles think about Brazilian cinema, City of God is most likely top of the list. It’s the only Brazilian film to be nominated for Best Director at the Academy Awards (despite co-director Kátia Lund being shut out!) and it’s the only Brazilian film in IMDb’s Top 250. After nearly 20 years, is it fair for City of God to represent Brazil? Of course, it is fair for City of God to represent Brazil! The only problem is if we think all Brazilian cinema is exclusively City of God. The film is entertaining, well-directed, has a great cast, but it has some flaws—for example, the aestheticization of violence and misery in Brazil, which scholar Ivana Bentes calls the “cosmetics of hunger”. Even so, it is a great film and it captivated Brazilian and international audiences. We shouldn’t limit any country to only one or two films.

If you enjoy City of God, check my list for Brazilian films directed by women in this period, which we call “Cinema da Retomada”—the renaissance of Brazilian cinema after the economic problems [that] hampered the film industry in the 1990s.

Selton Mello and Matheus Nachtergaele in beloved Brazilian comedy ‘O Auto da Compadecida’ (A Dog’s Will, 2000).

Several Brazilian films have stunningly high ratings on Letterboxd, giving them a place on many of our official lists. This includes A Dog’s Will, which is in the top ten of our all-time Top 250. On Letterboxd, A Dog’s Will reviews are cleanly divided into two camps: Brazilians (who absolutely love it) and everyone else (who fail to understand its popularity). What drives this home-team spirit? People truly love A Dog’s Will! It’s funny, has a fantastic rhythm, and it references many aspects of Brazilian culture, especially regarding north-eastern Brazilian culture. It was shown both as a film and as a miniseries infinite times on the largest and most popular television channel in Brazil. I can’t help mentioning that A Dog’s Will portrays Jesus Christ as a black man and Fernanda Montenegro as Brazil’s patron saint, Nossa Senhora Aparecida. It’s a brilliant moment for Matheus Nachtergaele, one of the greatest Brazilian actors ever.

Can you offer us a ‘Gringo’s Guide to A Dog’s Will’? I love the idea of a ‘Gringo’s Guide to A Dog’s Will’! You need to have good subtitles. The beauty of A Dog’s Will is that it is regional but it was made to be understandable to all of Brazil. You are going to need subtitles that [cover] the expressions, slang and proverbs—not mere translations. I would recommend watching some other films from north-eastern Brazil; Land of São Saruê, Love for Sale and Ó Paí Ó: Look at This. This can help you understand other social and cultural dimensions of Brazil beyond, for instance, City of God. A Dog’s Will is a movie that we would watch on a lazy Sunday afternoon with the family, so we have a strong sentimental attachment to it.

Leonardo Villar bears the weight of a cross in ‘The Given Word’ (1964).

Religion plays an important role in Brazilian cinema—for example, one of the few Brazilian films to win the Palme d’Or is the masterful The Given Word. Is this connection a part of what makes Brazilian cinema so potent for the local community? Religious symbolism and religious beliefs are extremely significant in Brazilian cinema. Its presence in cinema seems to address our daily challenges, rituals, history, but not always apologetically—as you can see in the despair of Zé do Burro in The Given Word. Religion does not seem to help him. There’s nowhere to run. The spiritual belief, as well as the cross itself, is a weight on his shoulders.

So you see, religion in Brazilian cinema is so potent because we can think beyond it, we can understand how people relate to their beliefs and how sometimes religion can fail a person. That’s what happens when a priest falls in love with a local girl (The Priest and the Girl), when a curse falls upon a man who turns against his people (The Turning Wind), when we teach fear and sin to young girls (Heart and Guts), when religion becomes a determining way of life that does not pay back efforts (Divine Love), when we accept the possibility of going against religious institutions (José Mojica Marin’s, AKA Coffin Joe, films).

We have all these movies fascinated by religion and how it creates meaning in our society. This is just from Christianity, because if we think of African and Indigenous heritage, we have another whole dimension of films to reflect upon, such as Noirblue and the documentary Ex-Pajé.

We have some Brazilian films in our Official Top 100 by Women Directors list, including The Second Mother, which sits in the top five with City of God. Who are some overlooked female Brazilian filmmakers that you want to celebrate and put on our map? Undoubtedly Juliana Rojas and Gabriela Amaral Almeida. They’re both on the horror scene and their work is astonishing. I strongly recommend Hard Labor and Rojas’ latest film Good Manners (if you are into werewolves). I can’t even pick one for Almeida—The Father’s Shadow and Friendly Beast are awesome. Beatriz Seigner’s The Silences—filmed in the frontier between Brazil, Colombia, and Peru—is really impactful. Glenda Nicácio’s films, co-directed with Ary Rosa, are among my favorite recent Brazilian films. Watch To the End immediately!

Eduardo Coutinho’s ‘Twenty Years Later’ (1984).

Brazilian documentarian Eduardo Coutinho has not one, not two, but three of his films in the Official Top 100 Documentaries list, including the all-time number one Twenty Years Later. Can you describe Coutinho’s significance in Brazil? Coutinho is a monument! Coutinho is an institution! Coutinho is everything. His works are of strong political importance, as you can see in Twenty Years Later. A movie he was making in 1964 was interrupted by the dictatorship installed in Brazil, and the main actor and activist, João Pedro Teixeira, was murdered, then his wife Elizabeth Teixeira had to flee and change her identity.

The documentary follows Coutinho and his crew looking for the actors from his movie from twenty years before. Later, his works developed many different tones and formats as you can see in Playing, an experimental portrayal of real women and their personal experiences side-by-side with actresses representing their real-life events as if in a play. Playing was one of the mandatory films to be analyzed for [my] Film School entrance exam, so I had to watch it a million times in 2017. His works are profound studies on Brazilian people and culture—piercing, but also delicate.

Contemporary documentaries are also doing well; Petra Costa’s latest, The Edge of Democracy, was nominated for an Oscar, and Emicida: AmarElo – It’s All for Yesterday was briefly Letterboxd’s highest-rated film late last year. How are these docs tapping into the zeitgeist? Those are both very different films. Emicida is part of a strong and structured movement against racism, against the marginalization of Black people, against limiting the access to art and culture to certain social groups, which is a common practice in the history of this country. Petra Costa’s documentary is another form of reflection on contemporary politics but in a melancholic tone since, recently in Brazil, we have been facing political storms such as the impeachment of ex-president Dilma Roussef, the imprisonment of ex-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (who has recently been declared not guilty), and rising far-right politicians. Not to mention another of our losses, the still-unsolved killing of Marielle Franco, a Black and lesbian political representative. These films have helped us face these difficulties and try to gather some hope for the future.

Bárbara Colen (center) and villagers in ‘Bacurau’ (2019).

How has Brazil’s cinema industry been affected by the one-two punch of the pandemic on top of ongoing social and political issues? And, can you talk a bit about how the acclaimed Cannes-winner Bacurau shocked the nation two years ago, and in what ways the film confronted these problems? This question is challenging because there’s so much happening. At this moment, we have 428,000 deaths [from] Covid and we are still mourning the Jacarézinho favela massacre in Rio de Janeiro. We have very troubled political representatives that are not fighting Covid in an adequate way to say the least, and we have had major cut downs in the cultural sector since, in Brazil, a lot of artistic and cultural projects are developed with governmental incentives. It is hard to produce art without institutional support and it is very complicated to produce art during this tragic pandemic.

Right before this chaos, we had Bacurau. Actually, I have a pleasant anecdote about my experience with Bacurau. Everybody was talking about how it was going to premiere at a special event with the presence of its directors. We had some expectations regarding the premiere because it was going to be free of charge and it would take place at the heart of São Paulo, the Avenida Paulista, in an immense theater.

We arrived at 1pm to form a line and people were there already. I discovered through Twitter that the first boy in line was hungry so I gave him a banana. I had brought a lot of snacks. The line was part of the event, and it got so long you couldn’t believe it. It was great to see so many friends and people gathered to see a movie—and such an important movie! There weren’t enough seats for everyone but they exhibited the film in two different rooms so more people could enjoy it.

I love everything about that day and I think it helps me to have some perspective on cinema, culture, politics and what we can accomplish by working collectively—people uniting to fight dirty politicians, people joining forces to fight social menaces, generosity, empathy, fight for justice and the power of the masses.

The life of 17th-century nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is explored in María Luisa Bemberg’s ‘Yo, la Peor de Todas’ (I, the Worst of All, 1990).

Would you like to highlight some films from your neighboring countries? I have been watching some fascinating films from South America. Bolivian filmmaker Jorge Sanjinés has an extensive filmography and his films were the first to portray characters speaking Aymara. I really like his Ukamau. I also love Argentine director María Luisa Bemberg’s films, such as I, the Worst of All. I’m currently studying Jayro Bustamante’s La Llorona, from Guatemala. I have no words to say how incendiary this film is. You’ll have to watch it for yourself!

Who are three Brazilian members that you recommend we all follow? Firstly, I recommend you follow my beautiful partner in crime and cinema, Pedro Britto. Secondly, a fantastic painter and avid researcher of Maya Deren and Agnès Varda, my adored friend Tainah Negreiros. Finally, I recommend you follow Gustavo Menezes, who is the author of many excellent lists [about] Brazilian cinema. He’s also the co-founder of a streaming platform called Cinelimite, which everyone should take a look at.

Related content

Silvia’s Cinema Novo list

Gabriela’s Cinema Brasileiro master list

Serge’s list of films that have won the Grande Otelo (Grande Prêmio de Cinema Brasileiro for Best Film)

Follow Erika on Letterboxd, Tumblr and in print

Follow Jack on Letterboxd

[matpisound]

memes, and the role of music

Yeah, you heard me right. I'm gonna be talking about memes. Lately, I've been thinking about how much music has become intertwined with meme culture, and how certain songs can become memes on their own. Given that I write a music blog, I thought I'd write about my thoughts on the subject. How DOES music reach meme status?

Well first, we have to define what a meme even is. Obviously it's not just an image edited with a funny caption in Impact font or oversaturated to the point at which it's incomprehensible. Music has to be involved somewhere in there, or else this whole argument falls to pieces. There has to be a broader definition somewhere, right? Yes, there is, and it gives us a perfect grounding for establishing the meme status of music. According to Wikipedia, the term "meme" was coined in Richard Dawkin's book The Selfish Gene, and it defines the word as a cultural entity that can be considered a replicator; basically an idea that can be spread by people copying it and showing it to others, and it can include images, melodies, behaviors, and anything else that can easily be transmitted.

So why does this matter? We can now devise a way to categorize music memes based on what aspect of culture they appeal to. I won't go into every single meme song that exists, but I will go over some of the biggest meme songs in the past couple of years, and there are four main categories that all of them fall into:

Songs that have some sort of cultural significance on their own

Songs relating to shared cultural experiences

Songs that serve as part of a meme, without which the meme potential is lost

Remixes, typically of a sound that has cultural significance

For songs with their own cultural significance, we need look no further that January 2021 with the sea shanty craze; specifically, "The Wellerman". It's a perfect example of how social media has become embedded in musical culture and how sites like TikTok can bring people together through features that allow collaboration. Adam Neely made an in-depth video on this, but the gist of it was that the duet feature in TikTok allows people to come together with collaborative projects like singing sea shanties in a time when we're forced to stay apart. There are other songs that became memes through similar means. "Gangnam Style", "The Cha Cha Slide", and "The Cupid Shuffle" all became popular to the point of memes because they went viral on social media (mainly YouTube) and they were participatory in the sense they had signature dances, which were easy enough for anyone to do, solidifying them into a widespread culture. Some songs are memes due to their established presence in this culture, and they're songs people are expected to know either within a certain group or just in general. Just think "September", "Mamma Mia", and even "Renai Circulation" all became memes simply because of their existence within modern culture.

Culture also follows songs that are entertaining, i.e. funny, and funny songs are part of the epitome of meme culture. These come from the very early days of YouTube all the way to some of the newest TikTok audios. Take the keyboard cat on YouTube for example. Who doesn't love a cat in a suit playing some funky tunes on a keyboard? And Nyan Cat; an upbeat tune made out of synthesized meows while a cat with a PopTart for a body flies through space while farting rainbows. These random gems reflect the spirit of the internet in terms of creativity and just pure fun. There are also songs that are almost like musical shitposts; songs that have almost no meaning but exist for the sole purpose of entertainment through the random. Big Shaq's "Mans Not Hot" is such a fun song, and was really popular a few years ago because of its random lyrics and especially the verse that was just beatboxing. Songs that are so bad they're funny are popping up a lot as well. "Gucci Gang", sporting a laughably terrible sounding beat and 99% of the lyrics just being "Gucci Gang", climbed its way up to meme status just because of how bad it was. The meme status of these songs depends on the hilarity and ridiculousness that internet memes were founded on, and because of that, have embedded themselves into the worldwide meme culture.

Next is songs that relate to shared cultural experiences, so basically all of the movie tunes, game soundtracks, and just other experiences that aren't inherently musical, but contain musical elements. Everyone loves Smash Mouth's "All Star", and was popularized through none other than the hit movie Shrek. On its own it's a great song, but it's unlikely it would have reached the fame it has today had it not been for Shrek, which in and of itself has become a meme. Of course, the other one that everyone knows is "Megalovania" from the game Undertale. Its simple musical motifs combined to make it the insanely recognizable tune it is today, and has almost detached itself from its source entirely. Mario Kart has had several songs that have become memes, including "Coconut Mall" as well as "Dolphin Shoals", which gave birth to the famous Mario Kart Lick. And who could forget about Star Wars with its main theme, "The Imperial March", and "Duel of the Fates" among others. Lazy Town gave us a few gems as well, like "Cooking by the Book" and of course "We Are Number One". Most of these reach meme status because there are simple musical elements that make them instantly recognizable and can trigger pleasant memories of whatever media they came from, that media being a shared piece of culture among the majority of a generation. "All Star" begins that iconic leap from the the root to the fifth of the scale on the opening line, and "Coconut Mall" creates that frenzied feeling like entering a Macy's on Black Friday which just makes it so fun to listen to.

I need to take a minute to comment on the songs in this category that arguably had the biggest impact on the culture of this generation: Minecraft Parodies. Simply say "Creeper" in a room full of high schoolers and I guarantee you it will be followed by a chorus of "Aww man", most likely followed by the rest of the song. You probably already know what song I'm talking about. "Revenge" by CaptainSparklez and Tryhardninja was the song that powered a generation of Minecrafters, and its resurgence in recent years was met with a flash flood of nostalgia and overall good vibes. We had other hits that grew to immense popularity, like "Fallen Kingdom" and "TNT", along with countless others (and I really do mean countless). The parody craze was so prevalent, some people who otherwise probably never would have gotten into music began releasing hit songs. Not to mention all of the original Minecraft songs that came into the spotlight, like "Take Back the Night", "Creepers Gonna Creep", and so many others. This craze spread beyond Minecraft to some newer games like Fortnite, which allowed the creation of one of the most popular parodies today: Leviathan's "Chug Jug with You". Overall, these helped define a generation and not only allowed musicians to be involved in the things they like, but also allowed many people into the world of music.

This next category involves music that became associated with a certain format, as in there's little to no meme within the music outside of that format. The one everyone knows is the iconic Rickroll, the act of building suspense and breaking the tension with the beginning to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" rather than whatever else would logically release tension. Meme formats are tailored to the individual song, and this is no different. The song begins with a sudden electronic drum fill before going into an upbeat 80s dance tune. Often the video preceding the Rickroll will build up to something desirable to the viewer, and that sudden fill subverting their expectations invokes a sense of disappointment, having been cheated out of their reward. However, the fun sound of the rest of the song helps ease that disappointment. The Coffin Dance and Shot on iPhone memes employed a similar concept by building up tension and releasing it by cutting to the music. However, here the music played throughout to help build up that tension while a video, often depicting someone doing something risky or getting hurt in some way, cutting to just the music at the climax of the clip. This employs driving principle of EDM, building up tension and releasing it at the drop. The meme works by mirroring that suspense and resolution of the video with that of the song, and that resolution being different than what would otherwise logically happen is what allows the meme to spread. Obviously, this isn't the only way songs can be part of a format; songs like "Baka Mitai" and "Shooting Stars" have all had their time to shine. However, these memes that work to subvert the expectations of the audience arguably have the biggest impact of the songs in this category.

Finally, we have the remixes, which typically involve altering any of the songs from the above categories. One of the most popular forms of the remix is the mashup, and who better to bring up here than the legendary SilvaGunner, whose videos advertise a track from a video game OST, but end up being some other meme mashed up into it. The reason mashups work as memes is because it subverts our expectations, even when we know it's a mashup. Our brains know how each song goes, but when we listen to them together it creates something completely new that either sounds great or absolutely horrendous. Yet we still listen to them because they're interesting. Additionally, remixing a meme song in a funny way is a common form of musical meme. It can occur through, super heavy distortion, or repeating a section of a song throughout the song at a level far more than a mere motif, or deleting parts of a song leaving only the memeable parts, or simple pitch shifting, among so many other ways of remixing. The possibilities are endless. The reason remixes are such good memes is they take songs with cultural significance and change them entirely, giving them a whole new meaning.

Well there you have it. Music and memes have gone hand-in-hand since the very beginning, and as culture evolves and memes become more advanced, there's no doubt that these threads will entangle themselves even further. Thanks for reading and if you have any interesting thoughts on music memes or just wanna talk about your favorite ones, feel free to share! That's all, and I'll catch you at the double barline!

[incarnateirony]

I get blends of innocent beans confused with what queer coding is or isn’t, and malignant beans misappropriating points, so we’re gonna do a quick run through.

Queer coding started as a malignant thing. The truest use of the phrase “queer coding” came from stereotypes and villainizations that straight people found sCaRy. This is like, why Scar seemed classically flamboiyant, or a variety of Disney villains were long, lanky, gestured exaggeratedly, wore eyeliner, etc. There’s a million examples but I’m not going to cover them all because I think you get what I mean. At the time, straight culture was painting gays as bad so painting villains as how straights perceived gays was like, super useful, cuz it creeped the straights out oOOoooOOo.

When people talk about queer coding enforcing stereotypes, if you’re talking about the original form of queer coding, this is inherently true. However, coding reached other levels, and has adaptive forms.

For example, watching (as I’ve been mocked for saying 10,000 times, but because it’s needed) The Celluloid Closet will clear up a lot for you. Subversive queer coding is when queer creators use a great deal of things to communicate with a queer audience past censorship. The film documentary (if you can’t read the book -- which I understand, it’s difficult to find) clears a whole fuckton of this up.

There’s some things that, quite frankly, we as gays know as part of our language. It is what it is. While it’s not a stereotype, it’s quite literally a language I highly warn straights against stepping into, because then they flounder around confused on what’s our actual language and what’s a stereotype

A truly innocent bean asked of me yesterday, well why then is menthols fair subversive queer coding? How is that not a stereotype?

Well like, because it’s facts. And that’s really, really hard to wrap ones’ head around from an outsider straighty perspective or even someone who’s queer but trapped heavily in a hetnorm world outside of where this is visible and/or in the wrong demographic otherwise. A black person who hangs out with black people of all orientations is not going to blink at a media dude getting menthols generally, because it’s one of the cultures that statistically engages in it to the point of memes about Kools or whatever. That’s not my culture, I can’t comment on much beyond that, but it’s just something to take note of.

But even if you don’t want to take someone’s word on “no, seriously, white dudes smoking menthols is queer culture and literally like a great sign for a hookup to another queer white dude”, google the various intersections of gender and menthol, race and menthol, and sexuality and menthol.

This isn’t pulled out of thin air. These were populations quite literally heavily targeted by Big Tobacco and, by nature, are the ones that smoke it, whereas Big Tobacco put(s) on airs of masculinity and chick-magnetness to smoke good ol non-menthol shit. It’s literally marketing. Yes, it does literally impact who buys product and yes, it does after generations have a noticeable affect. Track the numbers I told you to google down and you’ll realize less than 3% of menthol smokers identify as straight white men (depending on the way the numbers sort out and the year of polling, often 1.x%, 3% is the liberal number).. Lemme tell you, on the street, that’s an “okay, honey :)” when you do find it. Maybe a little pat on the head. An invisible brochure for Welcome To The Gays.  Like, White Men make up more than 31% of America and they still refuse to tally more than 25% of the US as queer [some censuses as low as 6% and LOL] so like-- that should be like minimum 25% of dudes available and nope, 1-3%)

(that’s not to say all gays or even all white gays smoke menthol, but this is that rule of “not all fingers are thumbs, but all thumbs are fingers” in loose application.)

But understanding these things, these signals, from the outside is utterly flabbergasting to people.

No, someone making an immasculating joke is not subversive queer coding. No, a dude wearing a certain kind of shirt or eating a certain kind of food generally isn’t queer coding (Unless it’s a rainbow flag BITCH IM GAY shirt, or uh, maybe for food quiche or hummus? I mostly joke for the latter two, but that’s the kind of self ball punching queer community sometimes does to itself in awareness that yes, there ARE elements. No, eating hot dogs and burritos isn’t gay. Yes, we make make penis jokes. No, that isn’t itself queer coding.)

When a queer author codes a piece, it’s designed to communicate to the resonant audience. It also may not communicate to /all/ gays. The language of a middle aged cis gay man that lived through the AIDS crisis is a whole other fuckin adventure from the language of 17 year old trans gays squatting behind their Xbox, it’s just fact, it’s just what is. Completely different cultures and lives being lived, completely different experiences resulting. A few things here or there may connect across generations but some shit that’s written by a gen Z gay is gonna whiff by a boomer gay, sorry. Also just facts.

Explaining exactly what is and isn’t queer coding is almost impossible beyond the fact that “if you don’t get it, it’s probably not for you.” -- At the same time, that leaves the problematic room of people taking that grey area and packing in a bunch of shit and we’re back to ground zero on the original problematic queer coding.

I once read a meta of uh-- I’ll just say, [Fantasy Character]. The fantasy character had an addiction problem that gave them villain-like attributes. Someone implied the “villain coding” made it queer coding. Okay like. Fucking absolutely not. Because if the show in question WAS doing that, first off, that’s literally the kind to make mockeries of gay people so you literally shouldn’t be reaching for that and second off they’d be doing that lanky sassy bitch with eyeliner bullshit like Disney villains with it, give or take. You don’t apply this shit in reverse, “he has villain attributes and so he’s gay” is literally the worst possible angle to take a discussion while trying to slap fight in a representation arena. Like I can’t say enough DO NOT DO THIS SHIT. 

If you wanna write fic or headcanon whoever as gay or whatever have fun but like once people keep trying to talk about “coding” you’re talking about conscious elements inset by the authors. Does a character have a bunch of on the record sexual encounters that just happen to include dudes persistently even if we don’t exactly get the exact angle or Proof Of Dicking? That’s gay (also depending on the phrasing, as settled in older stuff, that’s just deadass queer text and settled long before this fandom ever had pissing matches about this shit in older cinema.) Does the character happen to be respectful and use like gender neutral pronouns on people? Sorry folks that unto itself isn’t gay, that’s gays writing allies at best, unless you can give specific and directly applicable situations relevant to the character rather than eternally vague blogging through and swearing up and down it’s just about their partners or some shit. Yelling it in general though, sorry, no. 

Does the character engage in things or events with non-het gendered partners that in the very least are heavily coded into the areas of relationships even if they’re unclear (eg, do they routinely go out with non-family people and hold deep or meaningful conversations in things that LOOK like a date, even if nobody SAYS it’s a date) -- congrats, you have coded text. Alone it could even be queerplat stuff, depending on the suprastructure of the plot, text, subtext and everything else around it (same way, gasp, a man and a woman can sit at a table and not necessarily be in a relationship, but if they’re trading courting gifts and having unique and powerful exchanges or have big like, “the heart is the thing that binds us together uwu” shit, we all figure out what the fuck is going on like grown assed adults.)

It’s easier to list things that are NOT subversive queer coding:

Insults against gay people

Immasculating commentary

Random foods short of it deadass being a gay author making fun of some gay meme shit in some gay equivalent of ‘right in front of my salad’

Favorite colors or clothing

---

We got it? Good. Rule of thumb though. Deadass unless you are involved in some thick-ass queer culture don’t try to queer code shit. I don’t even care if you’re queer yourself because that doesn’t mean you’ve actually been subject to the culture in a meaningful way. There’s 30 year old bis that grew up in white picket fence suburbias on top of trust funds with hovercraft parents guiding them through 17 degrees and keeping them out of party culture that married a het-passing relationship and settled down and started having babies and their grasp of queer culture ends at what they perceive out of memes online, if they even hover in actual queer crowds online at all as much as general ones. That person literally is not going to speak much of the language. They aren’t. At best they’ll speak the language of 30 year old trust fund het-married bisexual mothers which, I mean yeah, technically some queer language but that’s a very, very fucking niche experience path right there compared to street-dwelling club-goers that attend pride, hold D&D parties with all their coworkers they figured out are gay on the weekend, occasionally brick a window in a riot. The latter is gonna have a far more diverse queer experience. And by such, a far more diverse queer language.

That’s not even to gatekeep. 30 year old trust fund het-passing-marriage bi-mom is in fact bi. So yeah, they’re queer. But we’re talking about language and culture, which is related to but not something you inherit. It comes by lives and experiences.

And I think this is where a LOT of the fucked up early Queer Coding fuckery comes from in discourse. Yes we have a language. Hell, to some extent a few things might even kinda BE stereotypes but there’s a certain amount of living and being where you know the difference between “this is a stereotype made by straight people villainizing us that has no idea what we’re fucking like” or “this is a stereotype born out of mass marketing that targeted and victimized then imprinted on an entire population that we’ve come to recognize among ourselves.” Or even “this is a stereotype but FUCK YES it’s one we embrace, go get fucked, straights.” And it’s not NEARLY as ambiguous as fandom circle jerks try to make these things out to be in the interest of wanting every interpretation to be valid or every character to be gay or not wanting to admit some person may know what the fuck they’re talking about more than they do. 

Huge point on that last one though, because like. I’ve seen some angry straights that are pissy about the show try to throw wrenches in the gears by concern trolling as if in defense of the gays about “offensive queer coding” and most of the time they’re basically that “how do you do fellow kids gays” meme. “How do you do gays I am very concerned about *checks notes* the twitters talking about gay men walking fast” and half the time turn around like two tweets later like “besides the character doesn’t even have a lisp anyway” or some bullshit that is outright offensive ass stereotyping while they’re out here trolling over the fact that a gay man admits to diva worship as a cultural trait.

General rule of thumb: ask a queer culture immersed gay about queer coding.

Shipping culture in the blue hellsite is not queer culture, for the record. Even if a bunch of queerfolk are in it.

Thanks.

Sincerely,

A very tired gay

[recentanimenews]

OPINION: The Life and Times of an Indian Otaku

  Makoto Shinkai's Weathering With You marked a historic first in my anime watching career. Contrary to popular belief, being the first anime to be released in Indian theaters is not the historic first in question (that honor goes to Shinchan: Bungle in the Jungle). Rather, Weathering With You would become the first film I'd ever watch on opening day — "first day first show" as we Indians call it. In the mad scramble to get tickets, I'd emerged a winner. Was it worth the struggle?

An emphatic yes. It was so good I went on to rewatch it twice.

    To fans in India: I’m so happy to tell that ‘Weathering With You’ (Tenki no ko) will release in India this October! We have licensed the Indian distribution rights to PVR Pictures and BookMyShow backed company Vkaao.

— 新海誠 (@shinkaimakoto) August 10, 2019

  The Indian theatrical release of Weathering With You in 2019 marked an important moment in the history of the Indian anime fandom. The story of how Shinkai noticed (and fulfilled) an online petition by Indian fans asking for its release here is already the stuff of legend. Because access to anime (especially in theaters) was so scarce in India, even in 2019, fans sought to have the film legally released in theaters. And thanks to Shinkai, it worked. To Indian anime fans, this represented the moment Japan — and the rest of the world — recognized our existence in the fandom. But Indian otakus didn't spring up overnight. Anime has had nearly three decades of history here. It just looks a little different than the rest of the world. The origins of anime in India go back to the '90s. Prior to the economic reforms of 1991, we had one — yes, only one — TV channel, the state-owned Doordarshan. The post-1991 wave of private TV channels brought with it a flood of international TV shows, among them anime like Robotech (which aired on the newly-created Star Plus). Ramayana: The Legend of Prince Rama, the anime adaptation of the Indian mythological epic of the same name, was released in 1992 and had a long and troubled production history, but the end product was a grand success, with its all-star Hindi cast and catchy songs turning it into a TV fixture for well over a decade. It even received a US release, with Bryan Cranston voicing the lead role. The remainder of the '90s would see various anime achieve varying degrees of success, from Nippon Animation's 1989 adaptation of The Jungle Book — which became a nationwide hit — airing in India starting in 1993, to late-night anime like You're Under Arrest and Gunsmith Cats. Despite this, there wasn't yet an actual fandom surrounding anime at the time. That would all change upon the turn of the century.

  Cartoon Network revolutionized the Indian anime market when the channel arrived in 2001. The launch of dedicated anime programming block Toonami brought with it two anime that would permanently shape the future of the fandom: Dragon Ball Z and Cardcaptor Sakura (albeit in its heavily-edited Cardcaptors form). While I never watched Dragon Ball Z (compared to all my friends at school), I did watch some Cardcaptors with my sister, which would actually be the very first anime I watched. My own viewing habits notwithstanding, DBZ was very much the anime of the moment. Schoolkids would frequently shout out famous lines from the iconic English dub. We'd even invented various hand games based on attacks and moves from DBZ. In 2003, another monumental shift would come as the childhood classic Pokémon hit the small screen, followed closely by Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Beyblade. The merchandise associated with these franchises turned them into smash hits with a younger audience. All the cool kids had Pokemon cards and Beyblade tops. Battling with them at school was the stuff childhood was made of. To this day, these toys continue to sell well. Beyblade tournaments are still very much a thing. While many of my schoolmates were avid fans of DBZ, there were other trends in anime that could be observed, trends that had to do with language. From my experience, certain anime were only available dubbed in Hindi — a language spoken largely by the northern half of the country. Coming from a south Indian city with a significant north Indian population, I could observe a clear trend wherein Hindi-speaking north Indians grew up with these Hindi-dubbed anime, while people in the south (who spoke other languages) largely grew up with titles that were available in English (or Tamil, as fans of DBZ's Tamil dub can testify). Interestingly, these Hindi dubbed anime tended to be ones that were popular in Japan but not so much in the West — stuff like Doraemon, Shin-Chan, KochiKame, and Case Closed. This gave the north Indian anime scene a rather unique flavor. An even more interesting case is that of India's northeastern region (comprised of states like Nagaland, Manipur, and Meghalaya). Being culturally different from the rest of India, these states have had a history of consuming Korean and Japanese media, and they embraced anime and manga in a way the rest of the nation had not. Anime-related cosplay is huge in the northeast, with some of the best cosplay conventions in the nation taking place there and becoming a part of the local fashion scene. The general acceptance of otaku culture in the region continues to be high.

Eventually, anime would become a little more accessible to all. The launch of dedicated channel Animax in 2004 represented another watershed moment in the fandom. The shows Animax brought over were unlike anything we'd seen in the medium. Shows like Bleach, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Inuyasha, and K-On! redefined what anime meant for Indian audiences who had previously seen anime as a childhood interest and no different from other cartoons. As the channel slowly began to shift its focus to the older teen/young adult demographic, more mature anime like Cowboy Bebop, Hell Girl, Akira, and Welcome to the NHK challenged our conservative notions of what was acceptable to air on TV, especially considering these shows aired in daytime slots rather than late-night. This honeymoon period did not last. Animax was delisted by service providers in 2012. The years to come would be some of the most frustrating for us anime fans, as availability was at its most inconsistent and uncertain. While the channel attempted to make a comeback later on in 2016, it eventually disappeared for good in 2017. Despite all these problems, I look back on Animax fondly. Thanks to it, we became aware of the existence of the entity known as "anime." We began to actively seek out anime over other forms of animation. In short, it resulted in the formation of an actual fandom centered around anime. Anime fan clubs began to pop up in major cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, and Kolkata. Widespread conventions outside of the northeast region came next. Anime Con India was started in 2010, followed closely by Delhi Comic-Con in 2011. Anime conventions in India are a curious thing. They are very unlike the sprawling, sophisticated conventions of the West. The funds simply aren't there for that sort of thing. I don't recall a single Indian anime convention that was attended by a voice actor, animator, or the like. So what are Indian cons about? In an interview with The Citizen, Anime Con India founder Nitesh Rohit talked about his reason for starting the con: "like any other belief and faith they all needed a temple to congregate (at)." This statement really resonates with me, and sums up what Indian cons are about. What they lack in scale and facilities, they make up for in intimacy and a feeling of togetherness. They are more or less small-scale events for anime fans to find other fans, to network with them, and basically feel less alone. Because feeling alone was part of the original Indian otaku experience. The early fandom was largely an urban phenomenon, as going to cons wasn't an option for everyone and the internet wasn't what it is today. So, you had these disconnected pockets of fans. People around you were unlikely to share your interest in anime and may have even judged you for it. The general consensus in India was (and still is) that animation is a medium for children. And remember, for a long time, anime accessibility varied by region. So, if you were lucky enough to find a kindred otaku, there was no guarantee they were into (or had even heard of) the same titles as you. This meant that we hadn't really had the ability to develop any sort of unique culture or traditions of our own. Things like going to cons, renting anime DVDs, memes and in-jokes — these things didn't exist for the vast majority of early fans who were school-going kids or college students of little means. A culture of our own wouldn't arise until much later — when that generation grew up.

  Of course, it wasn't just us who grew up — technology did, too. The internet became more ubiquitous. Social media and forums enabled us to network with each other regardless of location, in ways we'd never have imagined. To the scattered fandom of the early days, this has been nothing short of a blessing. The other big change ushered in by the internet was the era of streaming. Until then, most of our anime viewing took place on television and as previously stated, was not always very consistent. Accessibility improved greatly with the launch of Netflix in 2016. In today's India, Netflix is a household name, with a significant portion of young adults having access to a subscription. With a catalog of over 200 anime, Netflix has been responsible for pulling in many new fans. Plenty of people "come for the movies, stay for the anime." Series like My Hero Academia, Death Note, and One-Punch Man have become mainstream successes in this fashion, with a significant following even among non-anime fans. Another streaming service that is beginning to make inroads into the Indian market is Crunchyroll, with simulcasts like Boruto and originals like Tower of God, and the fact that it is free makes it accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Most Indian anime fans I know of have heard of Crunchyroll, and as more titles get licensed it is inevitable that its popularity will rise. And us otakus are doing plenty to help it do just that.

The success of Weathering With You is a shining example of the tight-knit nature of the Indian anime fandom. All it took was one person (an anime fan named Divishth Pancholi) to create a Change.org petition asking for its release in Indian theaters. The petition went viral, getting over 50,000 signatures and attracting the attention of Shinkai and the producers, resulting in its release here. Today, that event is seen as a smaller part of a greater Indian anime movement that is pushing for increased availability and acceptance of anime in India. Hashtags like #IndiaWantsAnime frequently make their presence felt on social media. This fandom isn't without its problems — it isn't the most inclusive when it comes to non-male fans, the "animation is for kids" specter hasn't been fully shaken off, and I'd love for anime BluRays/DVDs to be more widely available here. But I am grateful for the fandom's existence for getting me into anime in the first place. Without them, I'd have never been sitting in a movie theater on October 11, 2019, watching Weathering With You.

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[katiewattsart]

29/10/19 : TEDDY BOYS. HAUL GIRLS. #1

What are they? 

Teddy Boy: (in the 1950s) a young man of a subculture characterised by a style of dress based on Edwardian fashion (typically with drainpipe trousers, bootlace tie, and hair slicked up in a quiff) and a liking for rock-and-roll music.

Haul Girl: A girl or women who makes a haul video.

The revolution will not be televised. 

The tv shows you what it wants to show you.

Television tells us what the people who run the TV stations want us to know. But social media today sometimes provides an alternative.

Subculture - Under/Beneath 

We are looking today at youth and subcultures… their historicity and their contexts, and where we are with what might be called subcultures and youth cultures today.

GUIDE TO THE CULTS

A genuine piece from the mirror in the 1980s.

Sex Pistols : This is one of the most infamous moments on television. Today it seems tame, but in 1976 this was enough to get the presenter fired.

Like Duchamp's 'ready mades' - manufactured objects which qualified as art because he chose to call them such, the most unremarkable and inappropriate items - a pin, a plastic clothes peg, a television component, a razor blade, a tampon - could be brought within the province of punk (un)fashion...

Dick Hebdige - Subculture: The Meaning of Style

Hebdige’s book has long been consider the authorative text on subculture.

In the book he discusses the ready made aesthetics of punk. Punk was the first reaction to the developing politics of Thatcher and Reagan… here a refusal to take part in business as normal led to music that sounded amateur and fresh… the opposite of the progressive rock that had dominated the mid 1970s and early 80′s. 

Vivienne Westwood

Objects borrowed from the most sordid of contexts found a place in punks' ensembles; lavatory chains were draped in graceful arcs across chests in plastic bin liners. Safety pins were taken out of their domestic 'utility' context and worn as gruesome ornaments through the cheek, ear or lip...fragments of school uniform (white bri-nylon shirts, school ties) were symbolically defiled (the shirts covered in graffiti, or fake blood; the ties left undone) and juxtaposed against leather drains or shocking pink mohair tops.

Jamie Red and others made zines that could be assembled in this same way, collaging and making work that felt it could have been made in the house, and often was.

Subcultures

Subcultures are tribal, bringing people together to form loose relations outside of the mainstream.

Different subcultures:

Even subcultures have subcultures… specific types of goth (steampunk, lolita) rude boys, K Pop sub genres, grunge punk rock etc

Once about a specific youth culture movement based around the disco music of the 1970s, clubbing subculture developed into rave culture in the late 80s and 90s, and has become a mainstream movement in the last few years. 

Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, Mark Leckey, 1999

“Something as trite and throwaway and exploitative as a jeans manufacturer can be taken by a group of people and made into something totemic, and powerful, and life-affirming.”

Subcultures are about a sense of belonging, often to people who feel excluded or disenfranchised from the mainstream.

Cosplay - form of subculture 

The Joker and Harlequin are both characters who live for misrule, and both of them come from characters in the commedia dell’arte.

Harlequin relates directly to Harley Quinn… the Lord of Misrule was the peasant who was given the task of making sure that Xmas revellers got very drunk and very naughty.

The World Turned Upside Down

These characters link back to the ideas of the carnival, a time when the world was turned upside down. Christmas was initialy this kind of festival. People didn’t know if they would make it through the winter, so they made merry whilst they could. In the carnival Kings become Jokers, Jokers became kings. 

Carnival extracts all individuals from non-carnival life, non-carnival states and because there are no hierarchical positions during carnival, ideologies which manifest the mind of individuals cannot exist.

...And finally in a few relatively rare instances, we find an extreme form of revelry in which the participants play-act at being precisely the opposite of what they really are; men act as women, women as men, kings as beggars, servants as masters, acolytes as bishops. In such situations of true orgy, normal life is played in  all manners of sins such as incest, adultery, transvestitism, sacri- lege, and lese-majeste treated as the order of the day...

Edmund R. Leach, Rethinking Anthropology

In Rabelais and His World (1965), Mikhail Bakhtin likens the carnivalesque to the type of activity that often takes place in the carnivals of popular culture. In the carnival, according to Bakhtin, social hierarchies of everyday life—their etiquettes, and normal structures—are turned on their head.

Court jesters become kings, kings become beggars; opposites are mingled (fact and fantasy, heaven and hell).

Drag Cultures

Much in the same way that Madonna, undeniable icon though she is, in no way invented voguing, neither did the queens on RuPaul’s Drag Race invent the concept of "shade", "realness" or any of the other essential sayings liberally adopted wholesale by the internet. But what the show has done is continually provide a potted queer history. Whether it’s through highlighting ball culture, trans activism, gender fluidity, or queens like the legendary Lady Bunny; or simply by allowing the contestants to talk about their lived experience, the show has put an all too rare slice of gay and trans history in American (and the world’s) living rooms and laptops.

Drag Race has brought a subculture into the mainstream. It has brought secret languages into modern parlay.

From RuPaul raising a pair of opera glasses to say archly, “I can’t wait to see how this pans out”, to season four queen Latrice Royale’s “the shaaaaade of it all”, social media’s gif game has been vastly bolstered by nine seasons of this show. A gif reaction needs to encapsulate maximum emotion, drama, and appearance – and the queens on Drag Race have all three in spades. Tumblr couldn’t create gifs fast enough in the early seasons, and the joy of so many strong characters, and sound-bites, means that there is a reaction for absolutely every occasion. Season 6 winner Bianca Del Rio named one of her world tours after her own much-gif’d catchphrase, “Not today Satan”.

Memes and online culture have helped the show become part of the everyday.

Historically, "sissy" has been used as an insult against feminine-seeming men. Ru-Paul’s Drag Race not only reclaims the word – “now sissy that walk” is the phrase said at the top of each catwalk, usually preceding a demonstration of almost gob-smacking creativity – but shows that adopting a truly feminine character requires massive amounts of charisma and self-confidence. The show is wildly popular with women, not simply because of the incredible looks and transformations served by each queen, but because it is a celebration of feminine mystique in all its forms.

It has helped reclaim a sense of agency in an era of toxic masculinity.

The little show that could has turned into a global behemoth, with tours around the world each year, and an annual convention in Los Angeles. Last year, a second US convention launched in New York, while London hosted the first European edition, DragWorld UK, which saw a number of the show’s queens and RuPaul’s right-hand judge, Michelle Visage, holding court. And as fabulous, glamorous and downright funny as the queens are, the real joy came from seeing the response of teenagers to meeting their idols. RuPaul and Visage are giving hope to lost kids around the world, whatever their gender, ethnic background or sexuality. By sharing their stories, the Drag Race contestants are giving comfort and inspiration to viewers, as well as swathes of entertainment.

The show has brought disenfranchised, often hidden cultures into the open. And given people something that not only entertains, but also empowers.

The difference between Drag Race US and Drag Race UK summed up in one perfect tweet…

With RuPaul’s Drag Race UK finally airing on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, it’s got fans realising just how different the two editions of the show are… International fans were subjected to the colourful world of British slang and swear words, leaving dozens bemused about what exactly the UK queens are actually saying…. But in a viral tweet shared by one of the British queens, it’s managed to capture the crucial difference between the US and UK versions of Drag Race.

Sum Ting Wong shared a screenshot of a Facebook post that so beautifully sums up the two shows:

Pink News JOSH MILTON OCTOBER 8, 2019

Drag is culturally derived, and finds its forms based on local customs. In the UK drag has a relationship to Vaudeville and play, which means it does something different to the american show. It is less about the act of putting on a show, and more about the comedic, slightly catty relations that we have come to associate with saturday evening tv here in the UK.

But that doesn’t mean it is mean in itself… it still brings a subculture to a mainstream audience. Remember, if I talked about this with you in the 1990s, I would face prosecution under Section 28

"shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality" or "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship".

New Subcultures

‘It's hard not to be struck by the sensation that, emos and metalheads aside, what you might call the 20th-century idea of a youth subculture is now just outmoded. The internet doesn't spawn mass movements, bonded together by a shared taste in music, fashion and ownership of subcultural capital: it spawns brief, microcosmic ones.

In fact, the closest thing to the old model of a subculture I've come across is Helena and the haul girls. Their videos are about conspicuous consumption: a public display of their good taste, carefully assembled with precise attention to detail. When you put it like that they sound remarkably like mods.’

Alexis Petridis 

Marie Antoinette, 2006 (Sofia Copolla) 

[unexpected-readings-of-poetry]

Ratatouille the conceptual musical; online musicals and intermediality from the other direction

When musical theatre creators use intermedial techniques, live onstage performance combined with new media technology is brought before an audience, either in person or by proxy. Intermedial technologies such as projection allow performances to feature pre-recorded material or to include live performance from another location, expanding the depth of the musical by stepping outside the limits of conventional live performance. In 2020, young people on TikTok built a musical from the inside out, in a piece of intermedial theatre unlike any produced by theatre makers for the stage or for deliberate performance. Ratatouille the TikTok musical lacks official direction, staging, script, score, cast, scenography, and pretty much everything else that goes into making theatre. However, the medium of musical theatre, the medium of the TikTok app, and the medium of the meme culture that grew up around it create an intermedial performance that breaks the mould for musical theatre performance of the future.

Throughout the first year of the COVID-19 lockdown, many young people flocked to TikTok, a social media platform in the form of short videos, up to 60 seconds. The amount of creators experiencing the boredom that came out of enforced lockdown with reduced opportunities spawned a massive influx of new memes and entertaining content, and TikTok was the perfect place to explore that. The app allows users to combine their own video with existing sound as well as creating their own, and offers video editing tools such as filters and captions. Once a video is uploaded to TikTok, other users can use the material in their own videos. The audio can be used alone or played over a new video, with the second user being able to include their own sound as well or decide to work only with what another TikTok user has created. They also have the option to duet a video, placing the original material on one side of the screen, and themselves on the other. The audio from the original video can be added to, and many users create interactive videos designed to be duetted, leaving gaps to be filled in their speech, or looking off-screen in the direction of the duetting user. Multiple duets of a song can be used to build harmony, or complete multi-voice videos. Much of the creative culture that developed around TikTok relies on pre-existing knowledge of video or sound, which is then re-created and re-interpreted multiple times by different users.

Before Ratatouille, TikTok creators had already been creating remediated musicals based on existing popular media and recognisable concepts. Alexa Chalnick became popular in August 2020 for creating a song for a musical version of the 2012 movie ‘The Lorax’, and Daniel Mertzlufft, one of the foremost creators of Ratatouille, had previously become famous for Grocery Store: The Musical. In Mertzlufft’s original video, he demonstrates various vocal techniques stereotypically found in an emotional climactic breakup scene taking place in a grocery store. This was duetted by over 500 people adding characters and background to the setting of the grocery store, including shop employees, squeaky wheels on a trolley, and a bystanding can of soup (Chen, 2020). Creating comedy through this extreme attention to detail and over-dramatisation is highly indicative of the type of humour throughout TikTok’s user base, and provides a springboard for the creation of Ratatouille. At the end of of 2020, all of this combined to produce The TikTok Ratatouille Musical, a conceptual musical rather than a concept musical; conceptual in that the musical itself does not exist, but the concept of it is an established musical, recognisable to the many TikTok users who came across it. The overall musical is not determined by a definitive script or performance, but is made up of whatever fragments of the musical make their way to viewers, and the idea of the musical that this creates in each person’s head becomes the musical itself.

The first contribution to the Ratatouille Musical was ‘Ode to Remy’, a 20 second melody made in August 2020 by Emily Jacobsen, praising Remy the rat, the protagonist of the 2007 Disney/Pixar film Ratatouille. In October, another TikTok user, Daniel Mertzlufft, arranged the song in the style of the finale to a Disney musical, especially inspired by “[t]he end of Hunchback [of Notre Dame]” (cited in Alter, 2020). The video’s sound was made digitally using Logic Pro X, and features vocals from Mertzlufft and Cori Jaskier. The video features Mertzlufft dancing and lipsynching to the music, with captions describing the context and intended visuals for the “Big Act II finale”, with “lots of glitter […] Confetti everywhere! Lights going crazy! Remy on a lift flying over the audience!” superimposed over an image of Remy from the movie. This video is the most widely used and referenced song from the musical, featuring in duets proposing scenographic (Ardell, VOID, msfashionbunny, Shoebox Musicals), contextual (Katie, Cleary), and promotional material (Siswick) for the musical. After Mertzlufft’s song gained traction, more creators began composing music for the musical, such as Gabbi Bolt’s ‘Trash is Our Treasure’ and Blake Rouse’s Kitchen Tango duet. People started to duet the videos with proposals for choreography (Simonis), set (Shoebox Musicals) and costume design (Ardell), and even demonstrating what the backstage crew of the musical would be doing at crucial moments (Cook). This carried on developing through the end of 2020, culminating in a concert run by Seaview Productions, featuring performances by many of the creators involved in Ratatouille, as well as Broadway singers and performers such as Tituss Burgess and Andrew Barth Feldman.

TikTok provides an unusual context to explore the concept of intermediality. TikTok as a performance medium consists at its base level of visual and auditory components, created and/or combined by the user. The use of TikTok as a performance platform allows multiple performance types, and facilitates the addition of extra materials, such as a green screen function to provide background images, the combination of pre-existing and simultaneously recorded sound, and the interactive aspect of duetting or otherwise featuring other users’ videos in one’s own.

Ratatouille challenges the notion that liveness in theatre is a necessary component for intermedial performance (Klich & Scheer, 2012, p71). Blending of live, in-person performance and virtual or pre-recorded material is becoming more widely accepted practice throughout all forms of theatre.Robin Nelson suggests that theatre “as a live phenomenon in the here and now” is “being re-qualified contextually as it accommodates an integrated production, recording and storage medium” (2010, pp. 13-14). While the audience doesn’t experience Ratatouille live, the concept of liveness within the musical itself is blurred. When TikTok users add new content to the musical by duetting and adding to existing content, the mixing of existing media in the form of the original video or sound, with new media adds multiple layers of liveness and intermediality. This is evident in Rouse’s ‘Kitchen Tango’ open duet, in which he performs one part, leaving the part of Colette to be sung by other users. Some users, such as Amber, film their reactions to videos within the musical. This contributes to the feeling of liveness in the musical, as viewers of the reaction videos experience the original material alongside the reactor.

Although TikTok as a technological medium is closer to film technology than theatre, Ratatouille is closer to a stage musical than a celluloid musical. The construction and performance style of the musical is almost entirely consciously theatrical. Shoebox Musicals’ demonstration of the visual scenography includes a revolving stage, flown in set pieces, and a cyclorama, lit by miniature stage lights. Similarly, msfashionbunny’s set model features a split set on a revolving stage, demonstrating the use of scale to differentiate the size of the rats and the humans, similar to the use of scale in the set design for Lloyd-Webber’s Cats. Ardell’s costume designs propose using one of the performers’ legs as the rat’s tail, a design choice which would be frowned on in a film musical, where believable realism is the goal, but the suspended disbelief of the theatre fully allows for. Broadway performer Kevin Chamberlin composed Anyone Can Cook, and Karina Simonis choreographed a dance for Rouse’s ‘Kitchen Tango’.

Ratatouille supports Nelson’s argument that “the relations between different media in a multitracked text are ultimately a matter of perception and interpretation” (2010, p13). Not all of the videos contributing to Ratatouille are performances of songs or demonstrations of visuals. Some creators propose a scene, costume, visual effect or theatrical decision simply by describing it. Jack Cleary describes a scene in which food critic Anton Ego eats the ratatouille, proposing this as his first song in the musical. Despite the relative lack of visual or auditory material, these videos are linked with the rest of the musical by using hashtags in the video description, or by using a song from the musical in the background. These are often still included in the accepted canon of the musical, because audiences build a mental representation of the musical themselves based on the pieces provided by other people.

The musical does not need to be seen in a specific order. The purpose of the Ratatouille musical is not to tell the story of Remy, as most viewers are familiar with the plot from the movie. Instead, the purpose is to remediate the concept of the story through recognisable scenes, which the viewer can assemble in their own head. Every consumer has a different experience of the musical. Most viewers will be familiar with the audio of the most popular songs, and some of the more popular videos featuring choreography, visual design, or contextual explanations. Users have some control over which parts of the musical they see and therefore which songs, performances or proposed stylistic choices are included in their mental version of the musical. Some people even began proposing changes to the accepted material content, such as whether or not to replace the lyric “Remy the ratatouille”, as the character is a rat, rather than a ratatouille. Despite not adding material to the musical itself, this internal discourse contributed to the experience of the musical, becoming something of a metanarrative within the overall concept of the musical, as audiences could decide for themselves whether or not to include the song in their interpretation of the musical.

While the purpose of most conventional theatre is to create a production for audience consumption, the medium of TikTok means that the creators of the musical are also audience members, and the creation of the musical is done for the enjoyment of the creators. Although TikTok does provide payment to a few creators with a large number of viewers, many of the contributors only became popular enough to qualify thanks to their role in the development of Ratatouille. Instead, the creation of the musical was borne from a desire to create and share with other TikTok users.

On January 1st, 2021, Seaview Productions staged a performance of the songs from Ratatouille, featuring many of the original creators. The concert was hugely popular, and raised over $2m for The Actors Fund. However, I would argue that the concert marked the end of the Ratatouille musical. Rather than creating a vague framework for audiences to transpose their imagined version of the musical onto, Seaview Productions cast actors and celebrities as the lead characters, providing one definitive image for the musical, rather than allowing audiences to fill in the visuals using context from the film and the recognisable TikTok videos. After the concert, interest in the production of new Ratatouille content dropped almost completely, and the focus of TikTok users shifted elsewhere. Although the intermediality of TikTok allowed the musical to take flight, once Ratatouille entered a new performance medium, it was all over.

The internet musical

The internet allows musical fans to experience musical theatre outside of attending live performances by listening to soundtracks, discussing with other fans, and watching recordings, legal or otherwise. However, the experience of watching a recording of a stage musical is very different from watching an online musical staged for the internet. In 2009, A Very Potter Musical by Starkid, a musical parody of Harry Potter, reached internet fame in fandom spaces after a video recording of a performance was uploaded to YouTube. The musical became extremely popular with fans of Harry Potter, and Starkid produced two sequels, which were also uploaded to YouTube. However, the intermediality and the use of the internet in this case is very different to how it is used in Ratatouille. A Very Potter Musical was produced for live, in-person performance, rather than internet consumption, and the recording is not designed to be the main form of consumption. The use of the internet in the distribution and popularity of A Very Potter Musical largely takes the form of fandom and social media marketing, rather than as the primary vehicle of the musical.

Similarly, the internet musical differs from a celluloid musical because it relies on a framework provided by the internet. The experience of watchingThe Greatest Showman (2017) on Netflix is effectively no different to watching the same musical on DVD, and even in cinemas the material is received in the same way. However, watching AV byte’s 2016 short video ‘The Internet is Down - THE MUSICAL’ relies on the audience accessing it via YouTube. The context of the internet contrasts with the content of the song: a worldwide internet blackout. Watching the video on DVD or a non-internet based format would remove the context and reduce the effectiveness of the piece.

The intermedial use of the internet as a performance vehicle for music and performance has already been established before being necessitated by COVD-19. Choral performances using the internet have been pioneered by choirs and composers such as Eric Whitacre. In Lux Aeterna (2012), Whitacre uses pre-recorded videos and audio tracks of 185 singers in a grid on screen. At 1:00, a singer’s video is expanded during their solo, drawing attention to the performer in a way that is difficult to achieve in live choral performance. In Sing Gently (2020), Whitacre assembles 17572 singers, which would be very difficult to bring together for a live performance, and the use of the internet to facilitate the creation of the video allows Whitacre to use material from performers in 129 countries simultaneously.

The internet is an integral part of modern-day culture, and is used in almost every aspect of life, from education and employment to entertainment and socialisation. It’s natural that theatre and performance finds a new home online, and finds innovative ways to do so, especially under the circumstances of a global lockdown. Using the internet as a platform for musical performance has been a necessary move due to the pandemic, but has also succeeded in making musicals much more accessible for people who would otherwise be obstructed from seeing them (Schiavon, 2020). Since most popular theatre, especially megamusicals and performances featuring popular performers, takes place in major cities such as London’s West End and Broadway in New York, people who live in remote places are less able to attend them. Additionally, people with disabilities, either physical or mental may be prevented from seeing musicals due to added obstructions to travelling, accessing to theatre spaces, and the multisensory experience of a large-scale theatre performance being incredibly overwhelming. Therefore, moving more theatre and performance online opens up opportunities for more people to access musical theatre. While making recorded stage musicals more readily available online is a very positive step, musical theatre makers should fully embrace the available technology to usher in a new generation of online musicals.

The conventions of intermedial theatre are difficult to define, as people at the forefront of theatrical innovation are always finding new ways to integrate new media with performance, meaning that “previously existing medium specific conventions are changed” (Kattenbelt, 2008, p 25). Innovation in technology pushes artistic creators to come up with new ways to use technology in performance and to make performance with technology. When faced with cancellations and boredom, creators turned to newly available technology to do what they do best, and in doing so, redefined the conventions of the musical. As intermedial technology continues to develop, so too, hopefully, will the creation of musical theatre.

Bibliography

Alexa Chalnick [@alexachalnick] (2020); ‘~WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE~’; TikTok; available from: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMebxyVrK/

Alter, R. (2020); ‘Broadway Is Closed, But Ratatouille the Musical Is Cooking on TikTok’ [online]; Vulture; accessed 09/05/2020; available from: https://www.vulture.com/2020/11/ratatouille-musical-tiktok.html

Amber [@missfionnacharming] (2020); ‘Ranking Songs from the Ratatouille Musical’; TikTok; available from: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMebvCY5R/

Ardell [@ardellyfoshelly] (2020); ‘Untitled Video’; TikTok; available from: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMebPtQFF/

Avbyte (2016); ‘The Internet is Down - THE MUSICAL feat. Thomas Sanders’ [online video]; YouTube; accessed on 08/05/2021; available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc30xP-8OH0

Bay-Cheng, S., Kattenbelt, C., Lavender, A., & Nelson, R. (Eds.) (2010); Mapping Intermediality in Performance; Amsterdam; Amsterdam University Press; accessed 10/05/2021; available from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46mwjd

Bolt, G. [@fettuccinefettuqueen] (2020); ‘Trash is Our Treasure’; TikTok; available from: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMebPByQe/

Chamberlin, K [@chamberlin_kevin]; ‘Anyone Can Cook’; TikTok; available from: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMebvVfSW/

Chen, T. (2020); ‘This Guy Posted A Silly Video On TikTok And Accidentally Created A Whole Musical Number’; Buzzfeed News; accessed on 08/05/2021; Available from: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tanyachen/epic-tiktok-chain-musical-fighting-in-a-grocery-store

Cleary, J. [@jackattackcleary] (2020); ‘Untitled Video’; TikTok; available from: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMebPtymc/

Cook, K. [@keegscook] (2020); ‘Stagehands for the Ratatouille Musical standing by.’; TikTok; available from: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMebPXEWm/

Elleström, L. (2021); The Modalities of Media II: An Expanded Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations in L. Elleström, ed. Beyond Media Borders, Volume 1: Intermedial Relations among Multimodal Media; Palgrave Macmillan; pp 4-84

Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir (2010); Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir - 'Lux Aurumque' [online video]; YouTube; accessed 09/05/2021; available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7o7BrlbaDs

Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir (2020); Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir 6: Sing Gently [online video]; YouTube; accessed 09/05/2021; available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InULYfJHKI0

Jacobsen, E. [@e_jaccs] (2020); ‘Remy – Emily Jacobsen’; TikTok; available from: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMebPe7SY/

Kattenbelt, C. (2008); ‘Intermediality in Theatre and Performance: Definitions, Perceptions and Medial Relationships’; Cultural Studies Journal of Universitat Jaume I [online]; Vol VI, pp 19-29

Mertzlufft, D. [@danieljmertzlufft] (2020); ‘Grocery Store: A New Musical’; TikTok; available from: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMebxPbgB/

Mertzlufft, D. [@danieljmertzlufft] (2020); ‘Remy: The Musical OG Song’; TikTok; available from: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMebPkMv8/

Simonis, K. [@karinasimonis]; ‘Colette’s Kitchen Tango’; TikTok; available from: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMebQdPKM/

Klich, R., E. Scheer (2012) 'Chapter 4: Liveness and Remediation' in Multimedia Performance, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 67-87.

Morales, C. (2021); ‘‘Ratatouille,’ the Musical: How This TikTok Creation Came Together’ [online]; The New York Times; accessed on 09/05/2021; available from: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/theater/ratatouille-tiktok-musical.html

msfashionbunny (2020); ‘Set design for Ratatouille’; TikTok; available from: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMebPtnaS/

Nelson, R. (2010), ‘Mapping Intermediality in Performance’; Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam; Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central

Rouse, B. [@blakeyrouse] (2020); ‘Ratatouille Tango’; TikTok; available from: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMebfotB1/

Rouse, B. [@blakeyrouse] (2020); ‘The Rat’s way of Life’; TikTok; available from: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMebPYxvD/

Schiavon, I. (2020); ‘BWW Blog: Make Theatre Accessible - A Pandemic Lesson’ [online]; BroadwayWorld; accessed on 10/15/2021; available from: https://www.broadwayworld.com/cleveland/article/BWW-Blog-Make-Theatre-Accessible-A-Pandemic-Lesson-20200814

Shoebox Musicals [@shoeboxmusicals]; ‘’Set design for Ratatouille’; TikTok; available from: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMebPsSJq/

Siswick, J. [@siswij] (2020); ‘The #RatatouilleMusical marketing department is brainstorming visuals’; TikTok; available from: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMebxos3v/

Team Starkid (2009); ‘A Very Potter Musical’ [online video playlist]; YouTube; accessed 2012; available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmwM_AKeMCk&list=PLC76BE906C9D83A3A

TikTok (2021); ‘TikTok Creator Fund: Your questions answered’ [online]; TikTok; accessed on 10/05/2021; available from: https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-gb/tiktok-creator-fund-your-questions-answered

Katie [@the bigandsexy70] (2020); ‘Untitled Video’; TikTok; available from: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMebPsAA4/

Virginás, A (2021); Electronic Screens in Film Diegesis: Modality Modes and Qualifying Aspects of a Formation Enhanced by the Post-digital Era in L. Elleström, ed. Beyond Media Borders,Volume 1: Intermedial Relations among Multimodal Media; Palrave Macmillan; pp 141-169

VOID [@donttouchthevoid] (2020); ‘Here’s the Remy puppet no one asked for’; TikTok; available from: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMebPqP58/

[cjames59]

Evaluation

Overall I believe we had a strong performance. Our rehearsals leading up to our performance were strong and we felt very confident going into the performance. I felt at the the time that the material we were working with was strong. Linking to work that we had discussed with Helena and Tom. Who’s this for? Who’s story being told ?was a consistent thought within our work. We felt that combining sections of auto biographical and biographical script would although us some variety as well as a way to bring us to gather as group with something that we have in common with each other. We knew our audience would be drama students so using our own biographical sections played by each other would allow us to connect with the audience but also have weight to the lines we were speaking due to the respect that we had for each other. Then when we were thinking about who’s story is not being told we thought of people that we could connect with our ideas of “Dreams” with people outside of university. University can often feel like a bubble constantly living in the moment of our lives potentially never thinking how far down the line in the future. So thinking of older people's dreams would be a good way to connect our ideas together. I also believe visually during our performance we encouraged a lot of experimentation in our online performance. Firstly we incorporated elements of a multimedia into our piece. We used a animation during of performance which I thought offered a variation from a normal acting as well as thematically relating to the idea “age” in our piece, the idea of our dreams changing as we grow up, and the use of cartoons or animations linking back to the idea of youth and cartoons often inspiring our dreams from a young age. Also not as effective but still good use stylised performance, our use of bubbles and gallons help carry visual and thematic advantages. The bubbles linked back to that childlike nature of our piece but also represents the idea of “Eve’s bubble being popped”. However in my opinion this prop did not reach its visual potential. The bubbles were difficult to see on camera, difficult to create enough bubbles and also to try and not cover our laptops in soap. But the balloons we used were quite effective, the barons were thematically relevant and worked well as being visually interesting to watch. Overall these elements were incorporated to give a sense of liveness to our piece incorporating the ideas of using off the frame of the screen and ensuring all dialogue was spoken to the camera, giving the feeling of direct address.

Influences

When we first began work on this project we all came to the conclusion that we wanted to work with auto/biographical work. We came to this conclusion within the first two weeks or so of work. During our first meeting we established a common thing between all of us as a group that we could then begin working. We came to that common factor being our love of Drama. From there we began to ask ourselves a question that we had taken away from Tom Marshman’s lectures “who’s story is not being told”. From there we looked into the current events of how the subject of drama is lacking attention from the government. This was highly influenced by the recirculation of the governments old “Fatima retrain advert”. Although this advert was not a response by the government to the covid crisis it still echoed how many felt this is how the government was reacting. From this we began to focus our piece on the difficulties of being involved in the creative arts industry. This suggestion on focusing on sociopolitical issues reflected some influences of Brecht is that we initially discussed in our group, discussing the idea of including a didactic message in our piece as a response to the lack of response by the government to the arts industry. However we discussed the idea of “who’s story is being told” and the ethical issues of potentially taking someone’s words and using them for our own kind of message and ideology.

When of the teachings that we had pick up from Helaans lectures were the idea of “letting the testimony’s speak”. This inspired us to make sure our piece was more focused on the stories and ideas being spoken by ordinary people rather than having something overall complicated going theatrically

Research

First step of our research into our subject was looking into how the arts are viewed in politics. We first started looking into the advertisement that launched us into the topic of our piece , “Fatimas next job could be cyber”. This was the first thought that came to mind when we discussed the idea of lack of government support for the arts. Originally this advert was part of a restraining campaign from when cannot be identified, so although the ad was not part of any suggestion by the government to retrain due to covid it still felt to many as a kick in the teeth and a reflection of the government’s response to the arts during lockdown. What hit even harder was the original artist behind the photograph named Krys Alex, who was unaware her art was to be used in advert. According to a BBC news article Krys commented on the resurgence of the ad,”"I was shocked," the Atlanta-based photographer said in a YouTube video. Artists "should not be encouraged to stop doing what we love", she added.” "I woke up Monday morning to a bunch of emails and tags, and I really felt devastated," she said. "I immediately thought of Desire'e and how her face was just plastered all over social media and the internet, different news articles, and memes were created, and she had no clue. All of that really hurt me. We found this resonates with us quite quickly and acted as almost a mission statement for us, the government took Krys art and used it against her wishes, as such we would not do the same to anyone’s testimony.

During one of our major rehearsals we discussed to move away from mainly just the subject of Drama and the struggles in our industry to shifting focus on something that is a much more relatable subject, that one being one of achieving your dreams versus the way reality treats your dreams and aspirations. From there we discussed going away and doing our own certain research. What we came with was Ted talks from British author advisor on education in the arts to governments . Ken Robison discusses the idea of why the creative arts are not taught like other subjects. This helped provide a starting point in our piece as well as a major talking point we wanted to focus on. We wanted to slowly show the progression of dreams over a human life. But the talking point we wanted to focus on was the influence of education on our dreams, in relation to drama inside of education.

This led to us conducting research of how the arts are viewed in politics. We found articles that discussed the lack of support by the government during lockdown according to Art Review “There has been a 37 percent fall in entries for arts subjects at GCSE over the past decade.”and “The National Campaign for the Arts’ Arts Index 2020 report calculated a 43 percent fall in local authority arts funding from 2007 to 2018.” This was not helped by the fact that the “Cultural Recovery Fund is worth £1.57 billion.” This was a key sectioll

We also looked into drama at university how university students were dealing with the current lockdown. This section of the script came from research into how universities have been adjusting drama for new online learning and a personal place for me of not being able to enjoy the course I paid for and used to truly love.

Rehearsal Diary

Entry 1)

I would say the earliest rehearsal that was of our project was I think was around two weeks into our groups being formed. Within our first meeting we had decided upon a certain topic and style. However during our second meeting and rehearsal we expanded upon the idea of focusing on the difficulties of being a part of the creative arts. This is due to the resurgence of the fatimas advert as well as the government's response to the creative arts during the pandemic. This expanded into us all having a discussion of the difficulties of doing drama, whether to it be because of our education and how that related to drama or in Eve’s case a genuinely harmful experience during a performance. As we spoke to Helena we discussed the idea of moving away from a piece soupy focused on drama and instead focused on human nature and it’s Tesla toon to how our dreams change and how reality affects us from achieving our dreams. This then moved onto us discussing ideas of how to gain testimony.

Entry 2

After our previous rehearsal we went away and discussed ideas of how to gain testimony. We decided upon using a questionnaire as it would allow us to gain large amounts of testimony in a short period of time and would allow for a large amount of variation, some responses being short and brief, whereas others would be long and detailed. But this would be beneficial to us and it could potentially control the pace of our script. Overall thinking of questions was difficult as we wanted to balance complex questions of “what does a dream mean to you”, “what would you be if you could achieve your dream and trying to balance questions of dreams with questions to do with the creative arts and education. Finally this rehearsal concluded with us settling on questions we would use to then interview each other.

Entry 3

After our meeting with Helana after we had completed our interviews with each other and demonstrated the testimony we felt like we were in the right track we only had to wait for the rest of the questionnaires to be completed. After said questionnaires were completed we moved onto structuring the script and thinking of what else we could include. Because we had got a variety of responses from teenagers to adults we decided to structure our piece in terms of age. We first started by including voice recordings of young kids being asked what they want to be when they grow up, a relatable question that we would play at the start. We then focused on growing up in drama as a teenager talking about the times we have felt encouraged or discouraged about our dreams. During the adult portion of the pice we discussed the idea of using animation to break up the performance. Finally Angel spoke of Grandma being in the arts industry so we decided to take that as part as the elderly representation in the performance.

Entry 4

Our final critical rehearsal I would say would be our final tech rehearsal. This rehearsal was important as even though we were very stressed about all the technical aspects of our performances going well but in actuality we need to focus on the smaller physical aspects of our performance and we needed to go away and work on it.

Bibliography

https://www.creativemoment.co/that-fatima-ad

https://youtu.be/rh4WEXNmLaI

https://leftfootforward.org/2019/11/policy-spotlight-what-do-the-party-manifestos-say-about-the-arts-and-creative-sector

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/business-54505841

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.dazeddigital.com/politics/article/50747/1/a-brief-explainer-on-the-government-dystopian-fatima-cyber-ad%3famp=1

[swimintothesound]

Lil Pump Versus The Elderly: A Long and Storied History

Letter From the Editor: The writer of this piece would like to apologize in advance for the abject stupidity contained within the following wall of text. If you’re brave enough to subject yourself to the mania that’s about to unfold, then you have my admiration, gratitude, respect, and appreciation. Thank you for understanding, and may God have mercy on your soul.

Pumpology 101: The Mystifying Origins of Gazzy Garcia

Lil Pump is a dreadlocked 17-year old rapper from Florida who first began making waves in late 2016 when his song “D Rose” became an unexpected viral hit. Over the span of a few short months, the wrist-obsessed track had garnered millions of plays on Soundcloud and over one hundred million curious YouTube clicks. By the end of 2017, Lil Pump (whose real name is Gazzy Garcia) had established himself as a mainstream success when his song “Gucci Gang” peaked at #3 on the Billboard charts. Spawning from his self-titled debut, the alliterative hit quickly became the focal point of a heated debate on the declining state of rap music rap music, the ongoing idocratization of popular culture, and the bare minimum required to pass for lyricism in the year of our Lord 2017.

Expertly covered by both Rolling Stone and The New York Times, Mr. Pump has become a figure at the forefront of the budding “Soundcloud Rap” movement. This subgenre is a spin-off of Trap that’s focused on crafting a particular brand of blown-out, vapid, and repetitive hip-hop that, while lyrically substanceless, still manages to be catchy, memorable, and (most importantly) energetic. It’s hype-up music that’s been distilled so many times that words practically don’t matter.

I’ve already discussed my conflicted feelings on the genre back in August, and while some members of this scene are still objectively-horrific human beings, I’m willing to admit that I’ve come around to Lil Pump thanks to the catchiness of the aforementioned “Gucci Gang.” While the man himself should never be looked up to as an idol, Garcia is still making exciting creations within a field that I’m morbidly fascinated by.

The Lyrics (or Lack Thereof)

Like most rappers, Pump’s songs typically center around the same award-winning trifecta of drugs, money, and women. What makes “Gucci Gang” unique is the fact that it ticks all these boxes while also managing to be accessible to a mainstream audience. Soundcloud Rap’s previous biggest success came in the form of “Look At Me!,” a song whose lyrics are probably just a touch too edgy for mainstream audiences.

Meanwhile “Gucci Gang” has just the right mix of garish colors and catchy lyrics, both of which are accompanied by a distinct feeling of “newness” that helped it stand out from the crowd. Additionally, the song’s bouncy three-syllable chorus proved perfectly memeable, ripe for parody, and endlessly reworkable, all of which led to a song that hit, and lingered in the cultural consciousness for longer than anyone ever expected. Possibly even a reflection of our society at large, “Gucci Gang” is an undeniable success no matter how you cut it.

Outside of the song itself, Lilliam Pumpernickel has also gained fans through numerous extra-musical antics including second-floor balcony jumps, a love for iCarly’s Miranda Cosgrove, and a running joke that he’s a Harvard Graduate. Essentially, he’s not afraid to be a meme, and that lack of fear makes him even stronger. Complete with his own catchphrase, there are many reasons to be entertained by Lil Pump, and all of these elements combined help explain his meteoric rise to success.

The Emergence of an Astronomical Happening

Though my numerous listens to “Gucci Gang,” I began to approach the song the same way that many others did: first with curiosity, then ironic enjoyment, then genuine adoration. I can’t stress enough that the lyrics are nothing to write home about, however one stanza in particular stands out amongst the rest like a bright, shining star:

My lean cost more than your rent, ooh (it do)

Your momma still live in a tent, yuh (brr)

Still slangin' dope in the 'jects, huh? (yeah)

Me and my grandma take meds, ooh (huh?)

These bars initially seemed like a single metaphysical barb amongst a sea of relatively-straightforward brags and boasts, so I explained them away as a one-off lyric with no deeper significance. Unbeknownst to me at the time, this line was just the tip of the iceberg.

By the time December had rolled around, “Gucci Gang” had won the honor(?) of being recognized not once, but twice in Swim Into The Sound’s 2017 Un-Awards. While part of a largely-negative post, I shined a relatively-positive light on “Gucci Gang” as my second-biggest “WTF” moment of the year (second only to Bhad Bhabie) in which I found myself surprisingly endeared to both equally-trashy artists. Later on in the proceedings, I cited the lyrics above specifically as the single “Weirdest Flex” of 2017 (barely edging out a Drake lyric about napping).

In researching the Pump-penned lines for that write-up I found myself jumping between various Genius pages and in doing so, I quickly began to uncover a conspiracy deep as the Carly Rae Jepsen Cinematic Universe: Lil Pump has an unshakable fixation with the elderly.

The Quest For A Universal Truth

It’s no secret that artists tend to use the same concepts, thoughts, and ideas over and over again throughout their work. Usually in hip-hop, these recurring topics (like drugs, money, and women for instance) are framed by using twists on conventional language that are given new meanings within the scene’s culture. From “bricks” to “bands” to “bitches” every possible theme has dozens of different synonyms that can be switched out interchangeably to keep the rhyme fresh and the topic from going stale.

However, slang goes in and out of popular vernacular like the tides of the ocean, and Monsieur Pump is not above these familiar tropes. While drugs, money, and women remain the primary topics around which Pump waves his tales, he, on more than one occasion, has used his grandma, or the grandmother of the listener as a reference point for these interests.

Of course he likes lean, and naturally, he talks about it, but what makes Pump unique is his ability to relate that commonplace idea to the elderly in a hilarious and unexpected way. He’s using age as a barometer by which to measure his own life; the elderly representing an extreme through which he can cover these well-trodden topics.

It’s quite the signature flair for a 17-year-old to brandish, but perhaps through these lines he’s revealing his own obsession with death and mortality. Maybe these grandparent-based lyrics are allowing us a brief peek into the inner machinations of Lil Pump’s mind and we are learning what troubles him on a deep, cosmic, existential level. The philosophical reaper that keeps him up at night. These lines act as an illumination of the human experience as told through the grounded eyes of one man who yells “ESKETIT” like it’s his Pokemon name. What follows is a comprehensive list of every time Little Pump has rapped about senior citizens. You are welcome.

Exhibit #1 - “Gucci Gang”

My lean cost more than your rent, ooh (it do)

Your momma still live in a tent, yuh (brr)

Still slangin' dope in the 'jects, huh? (yeah)

Me and my grandma take meds, ooh (huh?)

For the sake of completeness, we’ll begin with lyrics that started it all. The quote above comprises exactly 25% of the sole verse found on Lil Pump’s breakout hit “Gucci Gang.” In it we find Pump surveying his surroundings, living situation, and pattern of systematic drug use over a bassy beat and twinkling piano line.

First, we get the worrying comparison between the upkeep of his own opiate addiction to monthly rent, then the (uncalled for) implication that the listener’s mother is homeless, and the final cherry on top: the fact that Pump spends quality time popping pills with his grandmother. While the specifics remain vague here, it’s implied that he’s taking drugs recreationally while she is taking them for health reasons.

This being one of Pump’s numerous references to the elderly, the topic’s pervasiveness now leads me to believe that this is both a genuine lyric, as well as a thinly-veiled cry for help. As distressing as the lyric may be, at least he’s spending some quality time with his elders before they pass. Even if it’s a drug-fueled haze, I hope that both parties treasure their remaining time together and cherish each other's company.

Exhibit #2 - “Fiji”

I got Fiji on my neck

I got Gucci on my chest

And my grandma sippin' Tech

Off a Xan like Ron Artes

In this one-off Lil Pump loosie, Young Gazzy uses the artesian water brand as a descriptor for both his jewelry and his sex life. Following a similar structure as “Gucci Gang,” this track features a brief intro, and one verse sandwiched between two short choruses. Clocking in at a mere 88-seconds, “Fiji” is a striking minimalist creation that embraces reductionism and revels in ambiguity.

Within the world of hip-hop, “Water” can actually mean many things. From sex to swagger, the use of ‘water’ in-song is generally something you have to pick up from context clues, and this track is no different. In “Fiji” Pump walks a beautifully-ambiguous line between these typical definitions of earthly possessions and literal water, turning the brand’s name into a primal chant of “I pour Fiji on her neck.”

After a brief water-laced refrain, Pump proceeds into the meat of the song: a 45-word verse that discusses his public persona and ticks all of the seemingly-mandatory drug-based name-drops. He has jewelry on his neck, a Gucci logo tattooed on his chest, and most importantly the incongruous mention of his grandmother casually enjoying some hitech (aka Lean).

Perhaps elaborating on the lines of “Gucci Gang,” this lyric implies that maybe he and his grandmother both enjoy drugs on the same recreational level. Later on in the song he continues:

Slice your auntie in the neck

Lil Pump disrespect

Run up on you with that 40

Grab your grandma by the neck

After the verses earlier drug revelry, Pump seems to “set his sights” on the listener, attacking us via multiple familial ties. In a single moment of clarity he utters “Lil Pump disrespect” as if he knows what he’s doing is morally reprehensible, but remains out of his control. A haunting sentiment to say the least.

His hunger is insatiable, and your grandmother is his target. Violence is the only thing he understands, and your grandmother is the only thing he can grasp onto, both physically and metaphorically. And then, just as suddenly as the attack unfolded, the song fades into nothing, leaving the listener in the bloody aftermath.

Exhibit #3 - “Smoke My Dope”

Whippin' up dope in the trap spot (what)

Sellin' cocaine to your grandma (yuh)

Whippin' up dope in the trap spot (yuh, yuh)

Sellin' cocaine to your grandma (yuh, yuh, yuh, yuh)

In this early-album cut Lil Pump and fellow Florida rapper SmokePurpp trade verses for a compact and chaotic 2-minutes. In Garcia’s second verse he exerts himself enough to present one specific instance of creating and selling drugs over a series of escalating “yuh’s.”

In this simplistic portrayal of Pump’s supply chain, he gives his process away to the listener:

Whip up an indeterminate amount of “dope” within the “trap”

Proceed to sell that cocaine to the listener’s grandmother

Perhaps connected to the seemingly-uncalled-for violence depicted on “Fiji,” these lines seem to explain how Pump has obtained his wealth. I imagine that the elderly are comparatively easy-going when it comes to the purchase and intake of drugs, so it’s presumably easy money for Pump and a decent enough business model. Backed up by voracious twitter claims that echo the song’s lyrics, Pump has given us no reason to doubt him or his business acumen when it comes to selling the white stuff to the Greatest Generation.

Exhibit #4 - “Had”

My loud pack smell like fish tank

My backwoods filled with dumb stank

I can't fuck with you, cause I know all you ni**as stains

My grandma selling loud pack and she selling cocaine

She run up on your block and she'll shoot you in the fuckin' brain

With “Had” it seems that there’s a new wrinkle to Pump’s drug operation as it’s revealed that he’s running a family business by employing his grandmother as a key player.

Depicting his bubbe as savage and violent as himself, this example could possibly explain Pump’s own outwardly-destructive actions as a learned behavior. In portraying a systematic issue within our society, this line directly tackles how family can fail us, or lead us to repeat the same mistakes as those that came before us. It’s a tortured and agonized call for help as Pump removes himself enough to realize the trauma that he has indirectly absorbed and the conditions that he has had no choice but to grow up in.

This all said, it’s still nice that people like Pump’s grandmother can find purpose in the fast-paced working world and be driven by the fulfillment of a hard days work. The fact that she’s willing to kill on top of the drug dealing means that she’s committed to the cause, and is likely quite experienced, even in her old age. At the very least, Pump must come from good genes!

Exhibit #5 - “At The Door”

I got junkies at the door

I could serve you 2 for 4

I could serve you couple Xans

I could feed your bitch some coke

Yeah my Uzi automatic

Make your grandma do a backflip

On this mid-album cut, we see yet another allusion to the violence that Pump has inflicted upon the listener’s grandmother specifically. Perhaps wielded by Pump himself, or maybe even his grandmother (as we saw in “Had), it appears as if the drug dealing illustrated on “Smoke my Dope” has gone sideways for one reason or another, and Pump has been forced to resort to violence.

This line is actually one of the multiple familial references within this verse, the others being father, daughter, and aunt, so while this reference fits squarely in the bounds of the topic at hand, there’s no getting around the persistently-elderly angle that Pump takes.

This is yet another line later echoed in a Tweet by Pump, either lending further credence to his unfeeling savagery, or (perhaps) his commitment to our society’s collective physical fitness by inspiring the elderly to do advanced-level gymnastics.

In Conclusion

None of this was good. While Pump’s initial references to the elderly seemed to be a twisted form of mutual enjoyment, things quickly devolved into selling drugs, and eventually inflicting violence directly on the listener's grandmother.

This analysis is absolute stupidity, but I find it too amusing that a 17-year-old who has so few songs officially released has referenced the elderly half a dozen times throughout the history of his recorded work. The way I see it, there are a few explanations for this lyrical ouroboros:

It’s a creative crutch.

Lil Pump has that little to say that he keeps defaulting to “grandma.”

Deep-seated familial trauma in his own past that Pump may or may not be cognizant of.

Pump thinks that the savagery of his grandma implies, dictates, and directly translates to his own.

By “attacking” the listener and showing disregard for their loved ones, his devil-may-care attitude is preemptively deflecting any criticism they may have of Pump or his music.

Lil Pump truly does fear the uncertainty of death and projects that concern through the multiple references to the elderly in his music. 

It very well could be all or any combination of all of these, but in any case, I feel it’s safe to say that this qualifies as an unhealthy fixation. Whether it’s a profound fear of death, a thinly-veiled attempt to address his own mortality, or irreconcilable childhood trauma, I genuinely hope that Gazzy Garcia can get the help he needs to get over this mental block.

He’s still got many years ahead of him, and a full life to live. If he wants to make it to the status of “Grandpa Pump” he’ll have to overcome this irrational fear and tackle his issues head-on, or else they will continue to emerge in unhealthy ways.

Here’s to you Mr. Pump, I hope you get the help you need and deserve.

I’m sorry for writing this.

[ninacormire27]

This week is all about public opinion and forming ways of thinking that the elite society creates for us by constructing a variety of surveys for the population to determine what opinions change throughout decades. Every five years the government sends out a large survey for households to fill out so they can know what kinds of things are best to produce, distribute for us to consume. We are living in a doxa society where we have a chance to voice our own opinions to create a comfortable society for everyone to live peacefully. An episteme society was more useful in the olden days when there was only one ruler like a king for example to create all the rules and everyone had to follow the facts coming from one ruler. It is easy in a doxa society however to manipulate people’s opinions through advertising and social media exposure. Technology has made it easy for information to reach the masses of demographic groups to separate us into mini colonies. Boots and Hearts is an example of the country community can come together and enjoy the music; however, it consists of white male singers singing about getting drunk and having a good time with friends and love songs to women. Not reaching very many demographics.

Instagram has an explore feed based on what you search on your own platform. I like fashion, food, celebrities so therefore my explore feed includes this content that I don’t follow but reaches out and gives me more options to check out. It makes it easy to find interesting things that I wouldn’t have searched up and was looking for. Netflix gets you to rate your shows so they can offer similar shows or movies based on your choices to find new and interesting topics. Genre is a big platform for everything that separates emotions so you can find exactly what you are looking for at a certain time in your life. If I feel sad, I look up happy movies or something that will make me laugh. I will watch a couple episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine and then Netflix will give me the option to watch another show along the same cultural practices such as The Office or Parks and Recreation because they are all workplace sitcoms that put comedic spins on life at work. Television and movies must give you an escape outlet from reality so you can relate your own opinions and actions to, to not feel so bad about yourself because you’re being exposed to it by elitist so it must be okay. Whether it’s bad or good, they give you situations and ways to solve them.

Bourgeois’ public sphere is created by institutions to give you a space to chat about your opinions about society in a compact area such as a hair salon. Whenever you’re going somewhere to receive a service, the nice thing to do is talk to your peers even if they’re strangers about common topics whether it be something going on in the world or as simple as anything you came across. Small talk is created for a limited time to get another person's viewpoint on a subject. This information was the first kind of collection of data through public opinion before they had platforms like twitter to voice your opinion. It spreads fast if it’s important information, if it’s something that interests a large group of people.

Interviews is the best way to receive public opinion from a certain demographic or even just an individual. Face to face interviews help you ask questions directly to the person and you get also get a feel of who they are the way they respond and present themselves versus telephone interviews where you can’t see their facial expressions. I hate getting solicitors calling and asking questions, I don’t like being caught up for a while on the phone and they state they are recording the phone call for future training. I don’t trust phone calls, when I can’t see their face. I’ve never done a mail survey, but I remember my parents asking me questions to fill in for the census survey that gets mailed to households.

My public agenda right now consists of checking social media constantly to keep up with the drama that is not going on in my life which isn’t healthy because it makes me not think about my own problems and just curious about what everybody else is doing. I guess it makes me feel not so lonely and not to worry about my own problems because people have it much worse? Apple makes it very easy to stay connected with the outside world with its news app that you can add onto your search dash even if I’m not searching news it’s there anyways so I can glance at it and get an idea what the world is talking about at the moment. It helps us receive positive or negative inspirations to either proceed us to pursue something or not depending on the outcome of someone else doing it and sharing a photo or a post about it on social media. Blogs are a good platform for expressing what you want people to know about you. What the right and wrong things are in the world.

This brings me to the topic of framing. Which most sitcoms that I watch have displayed. Friends, Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Family Guy all present ideas about realities you can live in while incorporating environmental factors into them to create comedy. Friends frames a certain way to live in New York City with your friends and how to treat one another. What it means to good friend to someone while also creating cultural archetypal characters that people can associate themselves. Same with Family Guy, creating an environment to live with your family but including real controversial issues of the world to get people thinking about what our government is creating us into. Puts a different perspective on life and environment within a family home. Brooklyn Nine-Nine is a show taking place in a workplace environment that puts a lighter look on life as a police officer which is supposed to be a stressful job but creating characters that are relatable and giving it something to laugh about. These shows have given me comedy insights and things to say in situations to make things lighter. The media tends to create situations that are worse than they are. They are supposed to scare us into the world only putting more pressure on youth to be the best and conform to elite ideas. Everyone has bad times all and these shows just create a safe place where you can escape to and watch someone else go through life. How could the television companies gather information on what to put out without those surveys? People get ideas from what they see. It’s all inspiration. They have access to these survey documents in order to create ideas for certain demographic groups of audiences.

They talk about bandwagon and underdog effects in audiences when a certain minority or majority has most of the power. I jumped on the Raptors bandwagon as soon as they started getting closer to the championship title because it was something that the Toronto news outlets, even Niagara news outlets, it was all they were broadcasting about. Whether or not they were going to make it to the end. The way the media and news kept releasing facts and data on the Raptors made everyone want to tune in and watch. I couldn’t exactly avoid it, all over social media as well. Memes and gifs were being created so I had to participate in the sharing of those because it was a common ground for everyone to talk about.

[miss-harper-reid]

6 Winning Strategies For Marketing to Millennials

Marketing to millennials has its own unique set of challenges.  

This technology-savvy generation has very different expectations compared to the generations before them.

An effective marketing strategy is a marketing strategy with the ability to adapt to ongoing changes.

If your business is struggling to attract a millennial audience follow these six strategies for marketing to millennials.

1. Prioritize Social Media Engagement

If you want to reach a wider millennial audience social media marketing is a great way to go.

Millennials are the generation that grew up with technology and the growth of social media.

Platforms like Facebook and Instagram have been ingrained into their lives and culture.  

For many young people it’s hard to even imagine a world without social media.

Here’s an infographic to help put the demographic divide in perspective.

When scrolling through social media millennials are bombarded with all types of information.

For your content to be successful online you have to get creative and think outside the box.  

Companies that create shareable, viral content are the ones that connect with a wider audience.

2. Use Humor Using humor is one of the most effective ways to engage an audience.  

Funny gifs, shareable memes and entertaining videos have a lot of impact in social media.  

It’s important that all your content is relevant and relate able to your millennial audience.

When you use humor right you can connect with more people on a deeper level.

3. Create Authentic Content  

The goal of your marketing strategy should be to establish a meaningful relationship with your customers.  If your audience feels connected to your brand, your business will go far.  

This Sticker Came From Authentic Banksy Street Art The best way to establish this connection is to be authentic.  All the messages and videos you create should be true to your company’s values.  

Many millennials can be skeptical of big corporations and their advertising efforts.  

They know when a company is just trying to sell them something. Inauthenticity kills trust and lack of trust kills sales.  Genuininity grows trust and an abundance of trust helps create sales.

4. Make Use of Genuine Influencers

If you’re considering working with influencers to market your product or service, ensure that you are working with trusted and genuine influencers.  

Millennials prioritize valued influencer-brand relationships.  They are more likely to engage with your product if the influencer promoting it is genuinely interested in your company.

Find influencers that are already using your product or service and establish a business relationship with them.

5. Keep it Simple  

Marketing in the online world is a whole different ball game to traditional forms of marketing.  When you’re marketing to millennials online you have to keep things simple.

Everything from your brand logo to your website copy should be minimal.

If you think about it, some of the most successful companies in the world have simple brand messaging.

Facebook, Google and Apple are the most obvious examples.

These well-known companies have clean, simple logos that are instantly recognizable.

The copy on your website and social media pages should be short and scan able. There is so much to see and read online, so you have to get to the point fast.  

If your posts are too wordy your audience will get bored and move on to the next one.  

The user experience on your website has to be speedy too.

Your customers won’t stick around if your website is too difficult to navigate or too slow to load.

6. Move Away from Traditional Ads

Look to create authentic and inspirational online ad content.

Millennials are more likely to engage with and share adverts that appeal to their interests.  

This is where understanding your target audience is key.  

Create videos adverts that appeal to their interests and you’ll be sure to see an increase in audience engagement.

Bonus Strategy: Support a Cause

Any business that wants to improve their reputation could benefit from supporting a cause.  

Businesses that have a philanthropic mindset often attract more loyal customers.

Millennials, in particular, like to support companies that make a difference.  

If your company makes a genuine effort to support a charitable cause, it will leave a good impression on your millennial customers.  

In turn, they may feel more inclined to buy your products and spread the word about your company.

To attract and hold on to a millennial audience, you have to think outside the box.  

Find unique ways to capture their attention and keep them interested, but don’t lose your authenticity.

By establishing real and meaningful connections with your audience you are building the foundation of a strong network that will stand the test of time.

[engl2030021]

War Over Corn Syrup?

Morgan Huskey

February 18, 2019

Imagine a dark world, full of death, disease, hardship, and… beer without corn syrup? In the 2019 Super Bowl Bud Light released an ad that was supposed to relate to a popular show while also trying to persuade people to buy more of their beer. The only problem with how they presented this ad. They had a complete lack of forethought when it came to the bashing of their competitors. 

This commercial is based around the fictional world of Game of Thrones, which has a medieval setting. The commercial is all about how Bud Light is not brewed with corn syrup but with something different, that is never mentioned in the ad. While they attack their competitors, they never state what it is exactly that is used to brew their own beer.  They convey this through a long trek of transporting a large keg of corn syrup to all of the different “kingdoms”, signifying the different beer brands. On the surface this ad can be seen as witty and comical, but when broken down this ad has a very hostile connotation to it. First of all, the ad never does state what Bud Light is brewed with, if it is not corn syrup, causing people to not know why they should buy their beer outside of them being partnered with Game of Thrones, which is a different subject altogether. When the keg of corn syrup is first introduced in the beginning the actors elude to Bud Light being brewed with corn syrup but then immediately start saying it is other brands’ shipment of corn syrup without stating what they use as an alternative. The king and his subjects first travel to the “kingdom” of Miller light where they are told that their shipment has already arrived and then travel to the Coors Light castle to find them admitting to their use of corn syrup in the brewing process. Throughout this journey the Bud Light crew experiences comical hardships that are similar to those experienced in the Game of Thrones. The ad uses many aspects of comedy to lighten the mood and appeal to a broader audience. Not only does Bud Light's company gain likeability from a large and rather obsessive fan base, they also attract those who appreciate “quick” humor or are interested in a “healthier beer”. This is an improvement from previous beer commercials that play off of the sexualization of women and the idealization of party culture to sell their product, now, companies are thinking outside of the box to appeal to different consumers and stand out from their competitors. Although, most of the characters taking the dangerous journey to deliver the corn syrup, are men. Proving that there is still a societal stereotype that the mass market of beer drinkers are male. The men in this ad portray the strongest and richest patrons of the medieval times and the best company or “kingdom” are seen drinking their own beer and socializing with one another at the end of a long day of travel. Not only sending the message that beer can provide a sense of relief or relaxation from a long day, it will also help you socialize with the other men around you and making you fit in with the likeable crowd.

(Seen above is the group socializing at the end of a long journey). Not only is the king of the Bud Light kingdom a tall, white, male, so are the other two kings of the Miller Light and Coors Light. This reinforces the stigma of white men holding the strongest positions of power, and that all of these powerful men, also drink beer. Now, some might argue that they were just being “historically correct” when portraying kings as white men, but there is no necessity for a 2019 beer ad to be historically correct. In fact, there were only two people of color in the entire advertisement, and they were the king’s henchmen, being subject to pushing the enormous keg of corn syrup along the journey. This follows the path of racial hegemony and further pushes the notion on consumers that people of color and women are only important because they serve for the white men in power. Further into this ad, not only are white men in power, all of the men that own the companies and kingdoms are rich. This provides the audience with the idea that those who drink beer or Bud Light in specific, are seen as higher up. More intelligent, more wealthy, and more regal. Now someone who watches the film won’t directly think, “If I go out and buy this beer, I will be as wealthy as a king and seen as royalty!”, but this notion intrigues the subconscious consumer mind. It pegs individual insecurities about like-ability and socio-economic status. In the U.S., individuals have a divide of self in our capitalistic society. This division is between the producer self and the consumer self. Naturally, we work to create money and strive to be financially stable (which is seen as success is western society), and after all of this work, capitalism tells us that we deserve to treat ourselves. So, while the men in this ad end a long day of travel with a Bud Light, the traditional American can come home from a long day of work, spend their money on a pack of Bud Light, and relax.

Touching more on the aspect of the partnership shared between Bud Light and Game of Thrones, the television show is highly suggestive and hyper sexualizes the women in the show, proving a constant pushing of sexual content on TV. Now, this connection isn't explicit or directly seen through the ad, but devoted fans of the show are exposed to these images, that they can then relate to the advertisement and the company themselves. The show portrays images of multiple rape scenes and the subordination of women through physical violence, providing that beer companies, even though they are straying from the direct path of “sex sells”, are continuing to assert themselves in relationships with similar ideals. And Bud Light has a history of using similar tactics to sell their products. Seen below is a photoshoot sponsored by Bud light from 2006, the scantily dressed, thin, blonde, women represent a similar image to the women used and abused in the Game of Thrones franchise.

And this isn’t a coincidence. The consumers of Bud Light pick up on similar encoded messages (whether they are conscious or not) and create memes based of their ideals and values placed around this product. Seen below is a popular meme stating, “If I give you this bud light, are you up for whatever happens next?” and the context is a photo of Bill Cosby making a smug

expression.

  Anyone you ask can tell you who Bill Cosby is and the scandals he has been involved with in recent years. The meme not only proves that the stigma behind Bud Lights Beer is not one of pure content and humor, it's one of a deep history of sexualizing women, providing a platform for party culture, and inherently supporting rape culture. With their support of Game of Thrones, they are showing that even if their ads have changed, the meaning people take from it has not changed.  

  Citations:

“Kara7’s Blog.” Wordpress.com. November 24, 2009/ February 10, 2019. https://kara7.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/bud-light-is-everywhere-literally/

ME.ME. “IFI GIVE YOU THIS BUD LIGHT ARE YOU UP FOR WHATEVER HAPPENS NENT? IMGFLIPCONM BUD LIGHT IT IS 😍😍😍 BUDLIGHT WHATYAGONNADO WHATHAPPENED WHATHAPPENSNEXT MEME.” ME.ME.com. August 8, 2017/ February 10, 2019. https://me.me/i/ifi-give-you-this-bud-light-are-you-up-for-18228116

[discoursecommunityproject-blog]

The Impact of the Tumblr Discourse Community on the Harry Potter Series

Since the first Harry Potter book was released in 1997, the series has been a cultural phenomenon. Thousands of people lined up to purchase each new book and see each new movie. They dressed up for premieres, bought all different types of merchandise, even held Potter-themed weddings. The franchise is considered “one of the most financially and culturally successful enterprises in entertainment history” (Brummitt, 2016, p. 114). Despite the fact that the final book in the series came out ten years ago and the last movie was released six years ago, Harry Potter still thrives and remains relevant in pop culture, as evidenced by the success of the 2016 stage play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Now the question is, how has Harry Potter retained, even grown, its fanbase over time? I will argue that the discourse community surrounding the Harry Potter series – aka the “Harry Potter fandom” – has allowed the series to maintain popularity over time, even after the conclusion of the book and movie series.

Background

Let’s start with the obvious question: what is a fandom? A fandom refers to the collective and active groups of superfans surrounding any given topic. Often, these fandoms have unique names and those in the Harry Potter fandom call themselves Potterheads. Potterheads are an extremely large and diverse group of fans stretching around the globe.

Potterheads make up their own discourse community both in person and online. Though there is significant overlap between the “physical” and online Potterhead discourse communities, for this essay I will focus on the online discourse community, specifically that of Tumblr. As Catherine Tosenberger (2008) writes, the online “Potter fandom is an invaluable repository of the creative and critical responses of the series’ most dedicated and engaged readers” (p. 200). The fandom uses their discourse to contribute to the fandom and the series as a whole. Fan contributions to the Potter universe–whether fanfictions, parties, or blog posts—keep Harry Potter relevant, even years later.

 Method

I focused on the website Tumblr for this project. While the fandom is active on many different websites, Tumblr is the central hub of fandom activity. To take advantage of the Tumblr platform, I incorporated it into my project, highlighting examples of the Potterhead discourse community. I utilized the “tag” feature to group different genres of discourse into the blog. As Power states, “Built-in audiences… are linked by the ever-crucial tagging element” of Tumblr (2014, p. 91), and thus tagging is essential for the discourse community. The goal of this project is to submerge the reader into the Harry Potter discourse community on Tumblr.

 Why Tumblr is the Fandom Hub

Tumblr has gained widespread popularity due to “its accessibility to users and the important factor of community interaction” (Yunus & Salehi, 2012, p. 388). Essentially, Tumblr easy and customizable. One user can have as many blogs as they want, and typically each blog centers around a unique fandom or theme. Thus, it is easy to follow and interact with blogs connected to specific interests. Longtime Potterhead Jacqueline Gordon states that Tumblr “lends itself to fandom discourse” compared to other social media sites that are “geared towards self-promotion” (personal communication, 2017). Blogs are generally anonymous and tend to focus on the blog’s content, not the blogger. Compare this to websites like Facebook and Instagram where each profile is entirely centered around a person. Furthermore, the tagging feature allows users to easily search for posts relevant to their fandom community. Additionally, “many Facebook and Instagram posts that focus on the Harry Potter fandom borrow content directly from Tumblr, often in the form of screenshots” (J. Gordon, personal communication, 2017). While there are many Harry Potter posts on various websites, most of them come back to Tumblr. 

Beyond setting up a prominent presence for discourse on Tumblr, the fandom has developed its own vocabulary unique to the discourse community. Potterheads naturally incorporate unique vocabulary and phrases into otherwise common genres, creating their own language. People take words created for the series and add deeper meanings to them that people not in the fandom would never know. An outsider may understand the difference between a Gryffindor and a Slytherin, but they don’t question the greater meaning behind these things. Does Dumbledore symbolically represent death in the Peverell story? Should the relationship between Barty Crouch Jr. and his house elf be considered healthy or hostile? Was Harry justified in using unforgivable curses? The fandom takes words that were created and only used in the Harry Potter series and uses them to discuss greater and more important topics in the fandom.

Combining its unique fandom vocabulary with Tumblr’s specific website features, the fandom perpetuates Harry Potter’s relevance by creating different genres to appeal to a wide range of community members. I identified six main genres in the community: memes, informative posts, photosets, fanfictions, headcanons, and Q&As.. All of these genres incorporate the fandom’s unique forms of discourse. Though these genres are still very much unique to the Potterhead community, they help the series to stay relevant by recognizing a spectrum of fans, from those who know lots of details about the series to novices.

 The first genre, memes, appeal to by far the widest audience. Memes are comedic photos with written captions and are usually just for entertainment. These posts are often found on other social media platforms and though they require that the viewer have a basic understanding of the Potter universe, they lack the same depth as some of the other genres I will discuss. They are brief, clever, and “shareable” and make the discourse community visible to those less invested in it.

 Like memes, informative posts and photosets appeal to both highly invested and less-invested fans, but are not generally comedic. Informative posts simply contain facts both about the series and about other things in the fandom. They can be anything from logistics related to an upcoming fandom event to descriptions regarding a character in the story. It is common for them to look like an announcement or a list. This genre is used by the vast majority in the fandom. Photosets are mainly picture collages mixed with limited discourse. Any words are usually used to describe the photos. These generally appeal to a wider variety of Potterheads, those who may not know every Potter factoid but have a basic understanding of the series and vocabulary surrounding it. Additionally, these photosets generally are formed out of images from the movies, making them more recognizable to those who are less familiar with the books.

 For those more involved in the series and the discourse community, fanfictions and headcanons offer a niche. Fanfictions are fan-authored stories based upon the Harry Potter franchise. These can be very loyal to or stray heavily from the book. Some may take place at Hogwarts and some may take place at an ordinary “muggle” high school. Headcanons are similar to fanfactions in that fans create unique content based off of the series, but these headcanons are usually short (2-5 sentences). It’s common for a headcanon to be a made up conversation between two real characters. Unlike informative posts and photosets, fanfictions and headcanons appeal to a somewhat different audience, those who are more invested in the fan community.

 And lastly, for those most dedicated members of the fandom, Tumblr’s built-in Q&A feature appeals to them.. Users can ask a blog owner a question and when the owner responds, the entire Q&A is posted to the blog. In the Harry Potter fandom, these questions usually have to do with a person asking another about their views on something. Q&As generally cater to the most intense Potterheads, those who spend time and energy thinking out plot nuances and theories and debating them. Again, if you look in the top right corner of this Tumblr blog, there is a button for “Tags”. From that, select any of the genres listed and you will be shown examples of that genre.

 These various genres allow for different views and interpretation of the series. Potterheads can add in their own ideas and opinions of the series through the genres. One extremely interesting example that I would like to highlight is a headcanon. The first example in the headcanons section of my blog is a photoset. Somebody reimagined aspects of the series to take place in the present day instead of the early 1990s. This is one individual reimagining the series literally keeping it relevant to modern times. The genres on Tumblr offer a place for fans to contribute to the series and also allow access to any level of fan. Instead of creating an insulated group of super-fans, the various genres

 How Tumblr Has Increased Harry Potter’s Popularity

 We’ve talked about Tumblr Potterheads as a discourse community and also why Tumblr is a hub for fandom activity. But the community on Tumblr has done more than just house fandom activity: it has helped the fandom grow overtime, even after the end of new books and movies. One reason is that the posts, blogs, and conversations on Tumblr are constantly increasing. So there is more information out there in the fandom. Members into the fandom are increasing because people can see new content. These unique ideas blending together allow the series to grow over time. Essentially, the series grows with the audience. The more that the fandom contributes to the series over Tumblr, the bigger the series becomes. Whatever the background of the Potterhead, whether grizzled, old fan or just a Harry Potter moviegoer, Tumblr offers something for everyone, from shareable memes to outlandish headcanons. 

 Even more importantly, these fandom members on Tumblr insist on new content. They want to see new angles in the series and what happened to characters after the books ended (epilogues). When persistent enough, these new angles have the chance to continually shape the series. After the series ended, author J. K. Rowling “announced that Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore was gay” (Tosenberger, 2008, p. 200). Fans are torn as to whether or not this is actually canon in the series. It is common belief that “Dumbledore’s homosexuality… may be connected to her awareness of slash fans” (p. 201). Slash fans are members of the fandom who actively seek out homosexual relations in characters in the book. Not only did these fans help the series stay relevant in pop culture through engagement in the discourse community, but it is possible that fan pressure pushed the author to alter her vision of the story.

 The Harry Potter fandom is its own discourse community because members communicate largely over social networking. They use vocabulary and diction that are unique to the Harry Potter series. People reading their blog posts that are outside of the fandom would not know what is trying to be communicated. Tumblr is essential to the Harry Potter discourse community as most other social media websites refer back to Tumblr. The fandom’s various genres allow for personal interaction with Harry Potter content. This allows for a constant growth in information about Harry Potter to spread, thus making the series relevant even after it has ended. What’s more, the Potterheads’ influence upon the Harry Potter series expands to people even outside of the fandom. When utilized properly, Tumblr acts as a great hub for any fandom, or even any group of people with shared beliefs. It is easy to spread your ideas across a wide variety of audiences. If there is enough noise behind you, you may just influence something great, as Potterheads did with Dumbledore’s sexuality.

References

Brummitt, C. (2016). Pottermore: Transmedia Storytelling Authorship in Harry Potter. The Midwest Quarterly, 58(1), 112-132.

Power, J. L. (2014). Tumblr. Journal of Access Services, 11(2), 91-96.

Tosenberger, C. (2008). “Oh my God, the Fanfiction!”: Dumbledore’s Outing and the Online Harry Potter Fandom. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 33(2), 200-206.

Yunus, M. M., & Salehi, H. (2012). Tumblr as a Medium to Improve Students’ Writing Skills. Journal of Applied Sciences Research, 8(1), 383-389.