YouTube Comments on Rebecca Black’s Friday

At this moment Rebecca Black’s Friday has a staggering 42 million hits, 65,000 likes and over half a million dislikes on YouTube.  Much has and will be made about (1) what this entails w/r/t ITunes sales and future self-starting young “musicians” (2) whether a 13-year-old kid deserves half a million dislikes worth of abuse heaped on her.  (3) whether ARK Music Factory should be tarred and feathered for taking people’s money to create this kind of content, etc.

Were these caption writers never 13 themselves?

However, this blog is going to look only at the YouTube comments.  They are wildly illiterate, racist, misogynistic, incredulous and intentionally/unintentionally hilarious.  I’ve compiled roughly 750 words worth of content, and I’m not sure I could write a sadder, funnier 750 words if I tried.

I tend to think YouTube comments provide a representative cross-section of our culture.  In the past I have been outraged to see comments advocating the My Chemical Romance version of Desolation Row as being superior to Dylan’s using the logic that, “I don’t want to listen to a guy who is like a zillion years old.”  Plus, I watch a lot of conspiracy/metaphysical/occult content that really brings out the whackjobs.

For some reason I did not copy the user names of the commenters, so if your comment is listed below and you want credit for your racist/misogynistic/unintentionally funny remark please have your lawyer contact my team of lawyers.  (I have led a libelous life and have been oft litigated against.)

 

Let us preface these comments with one of the all-time most necessary [sic]s of all time.  My occasional remarks are in bold and paren’d.

makes me laugh people moaning in their millions, you choose to listen to it  (oddly, unintentionally poetic—“moaning in their millions”)

This is clearly an epigrammatical virtuosic study of the divertissemental aspects of the fifth day of the week.

looks like whore

this is getting comments like shit!!!!!!!!!  (an elegant simile)

what a sexmonkey!!! OOOOOH WOW!

this song is shit and everyone who like it should be murdered brutally

Drink urine and eat shit ! Slutty whore dirty disgusting twat (this from a poster named “Glee Addicted”)

someone just fucked her ass, she sounds constipated !

She is going to kill herself. Half a million people think she is shit.

CUNT

JB’s whore ! Kill both of them

omg what a shity song

Libya said they would stop killing if we kill Rebecca Black.

i hope u fucking choke when u sing again

she have to much haters

I think you need your eyes and ears tested. It’s a GIRL not a GUY, and sounds…not too good!

why does people hate this song so much ?

Jesus Christ, and i tought Justin Bieber was the worst foreign “artist” i’ve ever heard. But this shit is so wrong in so many ways, i feel my soul slowly disintegrating.

the song is shit, the lyrics are shit, her voice is even worse and they all look about ten, i wood rather shit on my hands and clap tjat listen to that again, nuf said  (I feel more could have been said)

this bitch is whack. only good for a blowjob

I don’t even… are you being sarcastic? Cause… she’s just awful. There’s nothing good about this song, it shouldn’t exist, it should have never existed. It makes me want to construct a time machine so I can go back to the specific moment when the writer conceived the idea for this travesty and beat him/her with the soggy end of his/her own arm. She’s a human, and as such has rights, but she’s breaching our human rights by subjecting us to this abomination of a song.

nice robotic voice you got their …. its sounds like kwek kwek kwek ( friday, friday, friday)  (nice use of alliteration)

I love how the bieber fans are so pissed about this. she’s shit, he’s shit, they both really need to just die :/ kthxbai

i was actually looking forward to the weekend and then I heard this ..

Don’t let 13 year old kids drive… just sayin’

Oh Dear Lord, this is a hit song. I want to kill indiscriminately. Humanity is on a terrible decline.

Fuck, my ear is crashed

i think she’s looked da best when she’s gettin laid hahaha

OMG. seriously. is this even considered a song?!? she just singing what she either did or will do. 

She’s a kid. She’s doing more with her young life than any of US are.

No way in hell those kids are old enough to drive

INTERNET HATE MACHINE, PREPARE YOUR RIFLES, SOME RANDOM GIRL IS FAMOUS BY SINGING SOME SILLY SONGS, SHOOT!

why are you bringing justin in to this? SHE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH HIM?

she may well be the best lyricist of our time (a rare ‘bon mot’)

I can’t wait for the news story in about 6 months once she’s overdosed on crystal meth. You fucking idiot.

go fuck yourself you little whore. We all have an ACTUAL taste in music. You probably in a mental hospital

Just got diabetes listening to this

ppl want to stab themselves because of this.

COME ON!!!! WHY DON’T U LIKE HER!!! SHE’S JUST A TEENAGE GIRL WHO JUST WANTS TO BE FAMOUS BECAUSE OF HER TALENT IN SINGING AND NOT FROM BEING CYBER-BULLIED AND RECEIVING BAD COMMENTS FROM YOU!!!

WHY HAVE YOU ABANDONED US O LORD!? (comical, yet not without a broad truth)

Seriously? A 30 year old cruising for high school chicks? What is he, the local pedophile?

Jesus bum fucking christ, this is fucken shit.

My ears are bleeding due to the incomprehensible crap that she is uttering from that faliure of her voice. So please, do the world a great favor and jump off the nearest cliff. Or better yet, get run over by that car.

who’s the nigger?

Pretty much evrey body is a idiot here who does hate comments so what if you dont like the song you dont have to put hate comments on her Im 11 and im more macher then you idiots and yes i spelled macher wrong

maybe we dont like her because her singing sounds like a burning penguin

…and for good measure, to cleanse the palette and soul  [SIC]!

Infinite Jest and Why You Should Read It.

And so but it is understatement to say I’ve been heavily influenced by Infinite Jest in the 1.5 calendrical units I required to read it. I go into a food court and order a Millenial Fizzy.  I apologize to friends for inflicting, like, undue meta-analyses during our recent interfaces.  I start sentences “And so but…”  I am regularly and severely afflicted with the Howling Fantods.  At job interviews I recite from memory:

“I have an intricate history.  Experience and feelings.  I’m complex.   I read.  I study and read.  I bet I’ve read everything you’ve read.  Don’t think I haven’t.  I consume libraries.  I wear out spines and Rom drives.  I do things like get in a taxi and say, ‘The library and step on it.’  My instincts regarding syntax and mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with due respect.  But it transcends the mechanics.  I’m not a machine.  I feel and believe.  I have opinions.  Some of them are interesting.  I could, if you’d let me, talk and talk.  Let’s talk about anything.  I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated.  I believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been the antichrist.  I believe Hobbes is just Rousseau in a dark mirror.  I believe, with Hegel, that transcendence is absorption.  I could interface you guys right under the table.”

So in traditionally reductionist review mode:  IJ is about a tennis academy and a halfway house, Quebec separatism, and a film so entertaining it causes viewers to lose interest in doing anything else, like, as in eating, drinking, moving.   It’s about addiction, both societal and personal, to everything up to and including episodes of M*A*S*H.  It makes a lavish spectacle of charging the current of truth behind clichés.

It has funny character names:  Ken Erdeddy; Michael Troeltsch; The Mad Stork; Ted Schact; The U.S.S. Millicent Kent; Idris Arslanian;  Hal Incandenza; Ortho “The Darkness” Stice;  a Rastafarian group of “swaying infant cultists.”

It is the best writing ever done about marijuana.  Which couldn’t have come soon enough, the marijuana talk of say, Norman Mailer or any of his contemporaries had become like anachronistically, like quaint.

It is about clinical depression and its petulant prima donna of a little sister anhedonia.   Which I will here demonstrate with a, like, copyright-infringingly long quote:

“Some psychiatric patients — plus a certain percentage of people who’ve gotten so dependent on chemicals for feelings of well-being that when the chemicals have to be abandoned they undergo a loss-trauma that reaches way down into the soul’s core systems — these persons know firsthand that there’s more than one kind of so-called ‘depression.’ One kind is low-grade and sometimes gets called anhedonia or simple melancholy. It’s a kind of spiritual torpor in which one loses the ability to feel pleasure or attachment to things formerly important. The avid bowler drops out of his league and stays home at night staring dully at kick-boxing cartridges. The gourmand is off his feed. The sensualist finds his beloved Unit all of a sudden to be so much feelingless gristle, just hanging there. The devoted wife and mother finds the thought of her family about as moving, all of a sudden, as a theorum of Euclid. It’s a kind of emotional novocaine, this form of depression, and while it’s not overtly painful its deadness is disconcerting and … well, depressing. Kate Gompert’s always thought of this anhedonic state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content. Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy —happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love — are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation. The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts. Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location. I.e. the alhedonic becomes, in the lingo of Boston AA, Unable To Identify.
…
Hal Incandenza, though he has no idea yet of why his father really put his head in a specially-dickied microwave in the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, is pretty sure that it wasn’t because of standard U.S. anhedonia….

….It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millenial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romanic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip — and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded engagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where fact is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent (at least since the Reconfiguration). One of the things sophisticated viewers have always liked about J. O. Incandenza’sThe American Century as Seen Through a Brick is its unsubtle thesis that naïveté is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millenial America. And since sin is the sort of thing that can be talked about only figuratively, it’s natural that Himself’s dark little cartridge was mostly about a myth, viz. that queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive. Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.”  (pages 693-696)

The first 200 pages are the most difficult, as they teach you how to read the book.  It is experimental in the way that Thomas Pynchon or William Gaddis are alleged to be, but infinitely more rewarding as an “entertainment” once past those 200 hundred pages.  It invokes a wild syntax using many esoteric words and the funniest verbs of all time.

As Dave Eggers wrote of it, “there isn’t a single lazy sentence,” and that’s a feat in a book that, if the footnotes (as engaging as the proper text) were not in small font, would be at least 1300 pages.

What really bothers me is how the culture had failed to inform me of D.F. Wallace until very recently.  I was 13 when the book came out so I wasn’t up on literary news-makers.  Just by reading Entertainment Weekly I was like some kind of cultural seer to my television-informed hometown because I could predict theatrical releases months in advance.  So there was like, precious little motivation to go further.

And so but over time writers like Dave Eggers, lo, even Chuck Klosterman were recommended as voices for our times when they are but ants in the immense shadow of Wallace.  As Don DeLillo says of Wallace’s generation:  “Wallace stands alone.”

I was so ignorant as to have some vague associative-mixup where I had the work of Wallace confused with Wally Lamb if you can believe it.  This is now a source of great shame for me.  But I’m making up for it with an intense two hours of Wallace a day:  Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, Girl With Curious Hair, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and basically all things Wallace.

I watch the sad, sad YouTube clips.   I “whinge” when I realize, based on the tired footnote-themed questions, that the wonderful Charlie Rose hadn’t read Jest, even a year after its release, prior to interviewing DFW.

As a result of his 2008 suicide Wallace has been canonized years ahead of schedule.  DFW wings at various learning institutions are not far off.  Scholarly evaluations of Wallace outdo each other weekly.  There is no book more eagerly anticipated, nor, may there ever be again (I know that sounds hyperbolic, but given the state of literature, it’s not so big of a stretch to assume no writer will ever again build the type of reputation that comes from a work like Infinite Jest) than Wallace’s unfinished The Pale King, which will be released later this year.  It is about a bored accountant named David Foster Wallace.  Wallace had synthesized countless accounting volumes and was taking advanced level classes.  And if the small sections of it which have appeared in The New Yorker and Harpers are any guide, Wallace will do for bored functionaries what IJ did for addicts and teenage anhedonics.  I look forward to it, like, as in, in extremis, which means, like, as in, “to the farthest reaches.”

This 45-minute BBC-3 clip discusses Wallace’s life, legacy and the anticipation of The Pale King. It should interest neophytes and Wallace-nerds alike:  

<p><a href=”http://vimeo.com/19929771″>Endnotes: David Foster Wallace</a> from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/user2896451″>georgelazenby</a&gt; on <a href=”http://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a&gt;.</p>

Final Thought: I think a good writer with the right neuro-chemical balance can conceivably have a burst of Kerouacean so-called “bop-prosody.”  I think a master stylist can on his best days come close to F. Scott Fitzgerald, not Gatsby-ending Fitzgerald, but the broader work.  Even a novice writer can stumble home and pour out the naked emotional truth of a Bukowski.  But no one is ever going to write like David Foster Wallace again, which forget it.