response work 2

Unruly Media YouTube, Music Video, and the New Digital Cinema

C A R O L V E R N A L L I S

1

127

C H A P T E R 7

YouTube Aesthetics

Because YouTube is vast and uncharted, this chapter makes no claims of com- prehensiveness. ! e number of clips streamed on YouTube stretches to the sublime"1.2 billion videos a day, enough for every person on the planet with Internet to watch a clip each day. # ! is chapter provides close readings of popular YouTube videos with the aim of identifying broader generic features. Li$ le schol- arship exists on the topic, so we’ll need to do our best. Part of what separates YouTube from other media are the clips’ brevity and the ways they’re o% en encountered through exchange with others. A clip’s interest derives from its asso- ciations with colleagues, family, friends, and contexts within communities. Clips can get forwarded because there’s an intensity of a& ect that can’t be assimilated; humorous or biting, the clips might be di& used by a friend, associate, or colleague.

I like to think of YouTube as a whoopee cushion. Sometimes the mad rants and drivel in YouTube comments exist for a reason: other people get excited too. I worry we’re infecting one another with potentially unsavory feelings and behaviors. If my work were only on YouTube, I’d aim to disentangle myself and develop a more authorial tone, but I’m multitasking here, engaging simulta- neously with several media. ! e most expedient approach has been to immerse and respond in kind. So here we go under the veil, or across the interface, as Alex Galloway might say. '

“Badgers” is a typical YouTube clip in a popular genre. ( For me, it’s one of the best exemplars of YouTube, even though it has an unusual past and a for- ward-looking future (more on this in a second). My students found it for me. ! e constraints of “Badgers” are simple. Suddenly, behind an animated pastoral image of grass, a tree, and one knoll, a badger pops up, and then more and more, alongside a mounting chant of “badger, badger, badger.” A mushroom appears (with a song “mushroom, mushroom”), and then a snake (“It’s a snake”). ! en we start over again (see ) gure 7.1 ).

I’d argue that the “Badgers” song’s aesthetic e& ects hold us in a state of sus- pension, as if we were caught in the beam of a low-voltage Taser. It also excites primitive brain-alarm systems: some Neanderthal self sees badgers as a potential

128 YouTube

foe. Badgers look cute and beckoning with their outstretched arms, yet they’re regimented and pop up suddenly"a badger army gathers (even if they’re doing calisthenics). Mushrooms are risky as well"their poison looms. And of course snakes.

But besides the threatening or ominous signs of badgers, some are more friendly. ! e “Badgers” song replicates the kind of cognitive play that toddlers enjoy"the disappearance and appearance of objects. Perhaps tracking the constancy of objects might be too simple for an adult, but there are enough badgers that one really needs to pay a$ ention. ! e swelling and terraced calls of “madger” holds one in a state of ru* ed alarm. ! ere’s also camp"some German dude singing “Shnake! Ooh!” High above the low conga-like drum- ming is a wheezy metallic sound, an artifact of the low-) recording. Camera and movement within the frame set up a looming response and then release. Badgers pop, mushrooms lurch, and then, as a laughing snake rolls to the right, the background glides le% . ! is creates a comforting pa$ ern of hop- hop-hop-slide.

Musically “Badgers” is surprisingly rich. ! e tune shi% s between major and minor. ! e mushrooms build intensity on the upbeat of three; the snake comes in on four. ! e badger clip’s encouragement of viewer participation may help explain its popularity. Seeing a gesture of popping up and raising hands may elicit a similar response from us. A student told me that in high-school hall- ways he would pass friends who would suddenly call out, “Badger badger bad- ger!” and + ail their arms up and down. ! e “Badgers” song is also fun to do when you’ve been drinking too much with friends. One person grabs a sleeping bag; another puts a napkin on his head. You’re o& and running. We may sense that we’re one badger in a larger community of them"rising up is our big chance to take part in the event. Does “Badgers” speak for YouTube in general? Each one of us makes a proclamation with our uploaded video clip and hopes all will respond in sympathy. Also, its buzzy a& ect"barely tolerable") ts with so many modes of labor and recreation.

I think everyone should always have a few YouTube clips in their backpocket. One might want to share them with friends, at a cocktail party, or around the water cooler at work. More important, a few favorite YouTube clips gives one a center against such a vast, changing media landscape. Some clips might be ennobling and others may provide guilty pleasures. I have to admit that,

Figure 7.1 “! e Badger Song”: YouTube aesthetics.

YouTube Aesthetics 129

long-term, I’ve always loved “! eremin Cat” and “In My Language,” and felt hurt that my students are so blasé about them. , YouTube demands a raising of the stakes: one clip is never enough. ! e YouTube e& ect may be most powerful if the next clip is crasser, bigger, or more ridiculous than the previous. So pulling from my pocket, and upping past “Badgers,” we might consider “! e Gummy Bear Song” that boasts 316 million hits, which I can’t seem to wrap my head around. Perhaps it’s just the perfect thing for parents to give to their 3- to 6-year-olds and the kids have been watching it repetitively (like 100 times apiece). Nevertheless, in case there are a couple of adults watching it too, let me provide a reading.

“! e Gummy Bear Song” is a novelty dance/pop song in homage to Gum- mibär, a German brand of bear-shaped candy. - It features the green Gummy Bear singing “I’m a Gummy Bear” and dancing or hopping to a Polka “oom-pah” ac- companiment through a variety of se$ ings. Like “Badger” and “Crazy Frog-Axel F,” its main features are an obnoxious repetition of lyrics and catchy melodies. . “! e Gummy Bear Song” feels like it has a hundred ways of singing the lyrics, “Oh, I’m a Gummy Bear.” All of the choruses’ and verses’ words are taken up by this phrase, alongside variants (yummy, tummy, funny, lucky, chummy ././. bear). ! ere’s one exception: “movin’ its groovin’ jammin,’” and, in the break, “boing day ba duty party.” It’s not much di& erent from “Crazy Frog-Axel F.” One verse goes “Ring ding dingdingding ding / Ring ding dingdingbembembem / Ring ding dingdingding ding / Ring ding dingding baa baa.” (I hope I’m not running into copyright infringement here.)

“! e Gummy Bear Song”’s visuals combine production techniques, switch- ing from old-fashioned, so% 60s-style animation, to the newer, harder, Pixar-like CGI. ! e clip is intermedial, moving between comic-book spaces to jarring 3-D a$ empts to pierce the viewer’s fourth wall. Sometimes Gummy Bear has an odd halo for no apparent reason. Gummy Bear’s materiality is uncertain. Does its + esh wiggle, is it hard or so% ? How fast can its body go, and in what ways? As Gummy Bear hops up and down we can’t quite ) gure out its nature. It turns around and shows us its bu$ -crack and then wiggles its bu$ ocks, which should give us a lot of information (very + exible!), but we’re not sure! ! ere’s etched-in furriness on the hard plastic face that makes li$ le sense. (A bear, why not the rest of its body?) ! e voice is heavily Auto-Tuned, rendering Gummy Bear even more opaque. Music-video aesthetics help ground the clip to some extent. Two- thirds of the way in, the bear starts playing the tuba, which helps explain the soundtrack’s + atulent sounds. He then starts bouncing on a big exercise ball, which makes endearing “glom, glom, glom, pop” sounds. When the song’s har- mony modulates upward, Gummy Bear ricochets into the stars. We have a be$ er, if not completely certain, sense of the environs and our over-“bear”-ing protago- nist through audiovisual relations.

130 YouTube

I

Scholars have a$ empted to map YouTube, but they only provide a glimmer of what YouTube entails and how it works. Alex Juhasz calls it a space for crass com- mercialism and further rei) cation of mainstream media. For her, YouTube fails to build communities. 0 Michael Wetsch and Henry Jenkins, on the other hand, claim that YouTube fosters community and acts as an agent for self-expression: the site makes possible new identities, sexualities, and modes of interaction. 1 Virginia He& ernan could be considered a connoisseur who classi) es clips as high-art, indie, quirky, and “the outsider.” 2 ! ese authors, I feel, have been the best at describing YouTube’s landscape. Since YouTube remains open territory, it may be useful to begin mapping its aesthetic features. I’d claim salient a$ ributes include (1) pulse and reiteration; (2) graphic values; (3) a sense of scale that matches the medium; (4) irreality and weightlessness (what I’ll call the “digital swerve”); (5) reanimation; (6) unusual causal relations; (7) intermediality and transmediality; and (8) sardonic humor and parody. Any clip may embody some of these features, though not all. Sometimes a YouTube clip can seem to possess many of the elements commonly present in music video, though in a YouTube clip these can appear even more distorted and strange.

P U L S E A N D R E I T E R AT I O N

! e most prevalent prosumer YouTube aesthetic is insistent reiteration. (Forms include AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA, and variants like AAABAAAB- CAAAA.) Many YouTube genres take up an obsessive pulse. Crazy or overly anthropomorphized animals, such as in “! e Sneezing Baby Panda,” “Gizmo Flushes,” and others, show animals acting repetitively in videos sometimes punctuated by a sudden departure from the pa$ ern. #3 ! e homemade docu- mentaries with personal testimonials linked one a% er another o% en lead to something even more repetitive: people make compilation clips with the best smiling faces or the funniest falls out of chairs. So% ware tutorials"for ex- ample, how to do things in Photoshop"suggest each repetitive new touch (a new color, border, scale) is near-identical to the last. Millions of “one-trick pony” clips based on stop-motion or single frames also saturate YouTube. In YouTube’s early days, Noah Kalina took a photo of himself every day for six years and then collated the material. ## In another clip, arty college kids paint, repaint, and then repaint a room again. A new LEGO animation, this time featuring di& erently colored dots on their block-like surfaces, achieves a slight turn on all other LEGO videos. Athletic clips of accidents are megapopular. Skateboarders tumble o& walkways, sides of buildings, canted ramps, and side rails. We can count on the rise and the plop. Mashups are built up through

YouTube Aesthetics 131

videos sliced together, anywhere from two clips to hundreds. Clips start forming a regular progression. A march-like obsession and equal opportunity take hold.

Of course, not all of YouTube is stuck in a loop. For one thing, corporate ma- terials can + aunt striking classical and alternate forms. ! e trailers for Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse and Wes Anderson’s Darjeeling Limited on YouTube are cinema in mini forms"chock-a-block with drama and wielded tightly together through a narrative arc. ! ough sometimes the ways my students watch whole movies on YouTube when they’re feeling too busy or ) nancially strapped to rent the video for an assignment"clip 1, clip 2, clip 3, clip 4"also recreates You- Tube’s reiterative feel. Old-school music videos circulating heavily on YouTube look fabulous. (! ey blow away contemporary ones, though no one could ever imagine shooting such grand creations today. Money and labor would vaporize on the postage-stamp-sized venue"yet why not go for a widescreen extrava- ganza shrunk to a shadow of itself, if viewers like it, and it carries greater weight than current music videos?)

And of course operas, experimental art forms, and university lectures are le- gally available for downloading on YouTube, although their view counts are low. I’d still claim reiteration reigns supreme on YouTube, and within each genre, dis- tinct features linked to repetition are foregrounded. ! e mashup on the one hand sometimes seems to possess a struggle in search of an epiphany, a yearning for freedom, for salvation. In a music video like “Chocolate Rain,” on the other hand, the repetitive keyboard pad, the over-and-over return to the lyrics “Choc- olate Rain,” and singer Tay Zonday’s recurrent dip to the side (as the clip says, “I step away from the mic because ././. ”) are surely repetitive, but repetition becomes a virtuosic experience because the viewer engages in multiple streams of pat- terning as she rejudges time and space. Here, the Philip Glass minimalist synth pad reiterates; the higher-pitched, more buzzy, timbrally di& erentiated “rain- like” articulations clock in on another cycle; the head turns adopt a slower peri- odicity; the faint, vertical stripes on the set’s wallpaper suggest another gridded, spatial-temporal dimension.

Many recent straight-ahead music videos have also been taken over by an insistent pulse. “El Sonidito” is one of the most marked examples that cele- brates a repeating one (one pitch over and again)"others include “Chacarron Macarron” and “Sunday A% ernoon.” #' Not only the image but also the music accompanying these videos strips down to the near minimal. ! e numbing low-grade stimulus induces a feeling of being stoned or under hypnosis. Reit- eration in political viral web media occurs in clips like “APT Obama Obama,” where Obama’s name is sung over and over again. “Barack O’bollywood,” an homage to Bollywood, reiterates the word “acha” as the imagery disperses into kaleidoscopic replication.

132 YouTube

Why would reiteration become so central to YouTube clips? ! ere’s a sur- prisingly wide range of reasons including aesthetics, production practices, pro- sumers’ level of training, contemporary technology, and sociocultural contexts. One key factor is YouTube’s production practices, most particularly, prosumers’ do-it-yourself aesthetics. Fans with no training want to make something. With favorite materials"things to be deformed and recon) gured anew"they start projects but they may not know how to put materials to- gether. Cultural forms like the pop song are well-honed products that have been studied and taught. In contrast, today’s makers eschew these constructs, jumping in instead with their editing so% ware and ge$ ing going. In the midst of alternating their materials, a realization dawns near the two-minute mark that they’d prefer to make something resembling a pop song and they peter out. Professional makers with more training may pick up on the style, even if it’s primitive, because it seems like the next big thing. Such processes seep in, sometimes on a subterranean level, transforming culture on a global scale.

Reiteration also suits our time"YouTube clips project what we are and where we may be heading. ! e pace and demands of business and leisure time have been accelerating and the number of inputs continue to proliferate. Expe- riences are based on quick, overlapping hookups: the email to which we must respond, the cell-phone text message calling for an answer, the tweet that demands immediate a$ ention, the voice of the person next to you, the song coming up on the iPod, the slot you occupy in the queue for the IVR phone bank. A fast pulse helps put it all on one gridded timeline. In addition, as a shot of repetition, YouTube can also work like a tonic. Jammed into that space for a minute, locked into a fast, repetitive, jackhammer mode, the web surfer, sud- denly released back into the everyday media sphere, experiences wide open spaces.

Competition among media also encourages obsessive repetition. YouTube’s response to the hyperintensi) ed, CGI-laden, blockbuster-seeking, new digital cinema and to video games may reveal a sharp competitiveness. ! e nagging quality may not only pull viewers away from other YouTube clips and more distant websites but also away from all external screens. ! ough more intui- tively grasped than understood, all clips may bear the knowledge that they reside within a conversation with a million others. ! e only way to pierce is to deploy something that grips"an audiovisual earworm, a slick, fast, robust meme. One reiterative approach is psychedelia (like Cyriak’s work). ! ese clips may provide a low-) , low-cost, mind-twisting, blockbuster-like intensity in miniature. #(

Reiteration has an aesthetic function as well. ! e marks surrounding the YouTube clip and the frames strewn across the computer monitor can create a sense of baroque obsessiveness. YouTube links must respond to everything on

YouTube Aesthetics 133

the page: all the tiny graphs and signs repetitively laid out, and everything else on the monitor’s screen. Together these establish a clu$ ered ) eld from within which the clip seizes a$ ention.

! e types of work we’re doing support clips that foreground repetition. Typing away at the computer has a “11111” pulse, as does following link a% er link a% er link. ! e clips mimic back these rhythms to us. We can set ourselves to the 1 + 1 + 1 rhythm. ! e clickity-clicks we make match the website clips’ speed.

But perhaps we should not be surprised by so much reiteration. ! e fea- ture may have always been a$ ractive to us biologically, yet never before could it be so easily achieved. Young children love it, as do many adults. As a Girl Scout I loved repetitive songs"“Ninety-Nine Bo$ les of Beer on the Wall,” a song that subtracted a number with each refrain (98, then 97), until we’d sung our way down to one. But perhaps the repetition of today has a partic- ular valence. Repetition in a media-saturated environment has been ongoing since the 50s, as musicologist Robert Fink has argued. #, Supermarkets with nearly identical products lined up in rows produce a numb, slightly stunned state. But today is di& erent. All spaces seem like they’re nearly or fully taken"a Rubik’s Cube. Where can something slot in? Perhaps all one can do is turn over a slot. Hence, today’s repetition is about a search for a term that must ) nd its place in the web’s landscape, the small bit that will lock into a place against recurring others.

Put another way, we might say the reiterative one represents the contempo- rary con) guration of the individual Internet citizen in relation to the larger whole. Each one of us at the computer faces out into the web. We occupy a slot. One’s aware of the pressure of proximate neighbors in the virtual cubicles linked straight or swerved at angles to mine. As each web user uploads a clip, a bouquet-like blip of pixels, she broadcasts a miniature digital signal, radiating out as a single voice alongside a million other monads. ! ese self-assertive blooms start seeming like they’ve all been done before, though now with a slightly di& erent turn (a new e* orescence). YouTube’s repetition is an a$ empt to deal with the unfathomable depth and breadth of YouTube"it’s sublime. ! e mind seizes up as it tries to re+ ect upon it. (Here, a YouTube clip is a micro- cosm of the whole.) When all the clips are parodied, YouTube will reach a state of near entropy. ! e parodies will make it seem like the game’s nearly over, reminding us, similarly, of how entropy will seize up the universe.

Reiteration also has to do with late capitalism and the consumption com- pulsion. When the megapopular lead singer in YouTube’s “Shoes,” dressed in drag, sings “Shoes” in the most a& ectless style possible, over and over, s/he suggests that repetition is tied to the impulse to buy, buy, consume, consume, must enjoy, must enjoy, start over. Yet as Deleuze would argue, with the Darwinian turn can come a slight di& erence. YouTube clips can mysteriously

134 YouTube

trip themselves into another place"sometimes darker. In “Shoes” we start from a suburban family zoned out on couches as if they’re on ludes, to ) nally a frenzied rave. Perhaps only the reiterating word “shoes” has raised the family’s level of delirium.

Repetition may re+ ect sociocultural changes. Howard Hawks’s 30s screw- ball comedies were popular in an era when the popular press and other socio- cultural forces encouraged couples to become helpmates and friends. Today’s repetition may help anchor us in enormous sociocultural disruptions as we switch jobs, become unmoored from friends and family, and compete against factory robots and global labor. Similarly, childhood memories like those of coping with a steady stream of legal and biological parents may have a chance to be ameliorated. Clips like Dan Deacon & Liam Lynch’s “Drinking Out of Cups” seem to suggest that a moment might be dislodged and held. #- If we con- trol repetition we can insulate ourselves a li$ le from outside forces. ! ese last forms of repetition are o% en accompanied with lost objects and surrealism (see ) gure 7.2 ). #.

Drug culture may play a role too. ! e new drugs like Adderall, Ritalin, and Focalin help us exceed at repetitive, slightly odious tasks. ! e repetition of one syncs with it. Arguing for the importance of drugs might seem odd, but there’s been much scholarship about the ways drugs help shape a historical moment. #0 ! ink of LSD and the psychedelic sixties, heroin and bebop, rave and ecstasy. Other factors, of course, are at play as well (what youth culture is up to, for example).

YouTube may be the new digital cinema’s shadowy twin. Both can possess a sharp, quickly reiterating pulse. ! e hyperstylized Bourne Ultimatum fea- tures reiterative articulation. ! e jagged editing and sharp shi% s in camera movement"zooming, dri% ing, jerking, and then reframing again"as well as performers’ physical articulations, such as a hand stretched forward, a head turned, or an eye blinked, establish a rapid pulse. Once hewn to this rhythm there seems li$ le way to deviate far from it. We can pass through patches with a bit more nervous activity or less, but reiteration, at some level, seems nearly ever-present.

But perhaps this emphasis on repetition (and its frequently accompanying surrealism) is only a temporary condition. It’s there because we feel we don’t

Figure 7.2 Dan Deacon’s “Drinking Out of Cups”: desirable, free-+ oating sonic and visual fragments.

YouTube Aesthetics 135

have control over the web. Soon more powerful search engines will make be$ er use of social networking (Facebook is trying to optimize searches through friendship pro) les, for example) as well as more e& ectively tag sound, image, and moving media. It won’t be so necessary to ) nd a basic pulse, tie ourselves in, or drug ourselves out.

S C A L E A N D G R A P H I C VA LU E S

YouTube’s aesthetic values include bold graphic design and well-judged scale. ! is may be related to the medium and its mode of delivery"a clip’s limited length, its level of resolution, the forms of a$ ention it encourages. Poorly lit, small environments shot and uploaded with low resolution may tend toward fuzziness; in response, makers, viewers, and consumers may seek stronger au- diovisual de) nition. YouTube clips must o% en garner a$ ention in a competi- tive environment; many that struggle to gain legibility, go bold.

What makes a successful YouTube clip? If we can imagine the forms traced as a cartoon"crudely outlined and colored in very simply"and it still speaks, my bet is it has a be$ er shot at success. “! e Sneezing Baby Panda,” “Haha Baby” and “Evolution of Dance” would all make catchy cartoons. Of course these already have had cartoon remakes but they lack the same charm (and view counts), perhaps because their shape, color, movement, and proportion don’t fall into exactly the right ratios. “Best of YouTube” clip homages, with celebrity medleys like Weezer’s music video “Pork and Beans” or South Park’s cartoon skit, seemingly convey li$ le of what’s magical, charismatic, or won- derful about the top-ranked YouTube clips. #1 Some of the most popular clips’ particularity must be locked in the ways these ) gures reside exactly where they are within their + at, miniature cubicles. One wonders whether there’s some majestic Darwinian phenomenon going on. Millions of baby clips. Millions of clips of li$ le boys in the backseat going to the dentist. Why does one emerge?

YouTube clips tend to feature simplistic and evocative representations of the body and shape"either as face, body part, or body whole. Clearly legible objects trigger rich a& ective responses, and help quickly give the performer a pseudo-context (chairs, cups). Contrasting textures"the shiny and the dull; the smooth, bri$ le and rough"also help clips come forward. Color schemes di& er from television: color on YouTube distributes around uni) ed tones, the blues in “Laughing Baby,” the muted greens in “Numa Numa”; or showcase the luridly pastel, or monochromatic; but whatever the color scheme, there is less room for the widely various, free, or ad-hoc. Space contracts. While long-form media take us in and out of corridors, alleys, countrysides, and intimate spaces, YouTube sticks to single frontal views. (! e di& erences in art and design between CD covers and album covers mirrors YouTube clips in relation to

136 YouTube

television. Both YouTube clips and CD covers tend to project reduced, tele- scoped information.)

Not only graphic values but scale counts too. Today we watch media on a va- riety of di& erent screens and audio-playback setups"everything from home theaters to cell phones. Do YouTube clips have a sweet spot"the right visual scale and resolution and audio ) delity? Or is it sweet spots ? (A clip might nestle into some optimum set points"the tiny, the monumental, and the in-between.) When I saw ! e Watchmen trailer in the theater, I almost fell out of my chair; it was so beautiful. On YouTube and my PC desktop, however, it looks like nothing. ! e images are meant to engulf or embrace. Widespread metallic human ) gu- rines’ arms, monumental bird wings, arcs of electricity are meant to spread past me tip to tip. We want max shake-my-bones-and-+ esh sound too. Gordon Clark’s 24 Hours Psycho plays all right, I think, on a screen covering an entire wall at MoMA (the Museum of Modern Art in New York City). I also don’t mind Psycho projected from a DVD onto a smallish screen in a classroom. Yet I don’t want to watch it on a tiny television or laptop. “Leave Britney Alone” is right on a thumbnail window mixed in with everything else on my computer monitor. YouTube clips’ pleasure may stem from the illusion of conjuring up the per- formers. ! ere may be some sadism here. I enjoy watching YouTube performers because I have the pleasure of stopping them. “Fred” is fun on a dinky scale, not on a ) lm’s widescreen, because he creates the illusion that he’s a mosquito beg- ging to be quashed. So is the li$ le boy in the backseat or that baby panda. Not that I would but I could rub them out.

D I G I TA L S W E RV E

! is parameter may be both harder to describe and make a claim for. I’d like to say relations between image and music on YouTube show us that both modal- ities exist in a state of lightness or ungroundedness"they’re infused with what I like to call the “digital swerve.” Let me explain. When I started working on this project, I concurred with David Bordwell that the new global aesthetic colonizing today’s moving media forms could best be described through in- tensi) ed continuity"a style partly de) ned by camera technique (prowling, moving, handheld)"as well as shi% ing lens lengths and rapid editing. Accord- ing to Bordwell, technology is the key driver in the new heightened audiovi- sual aesthetic: so% ware like digital intermediary, Avid editing, Pro Tools and such make a painterly, capture-based aesthetic possible. Bordwell also sug- gests (and I followed suit) that not only technology but also users’ practices have shaped the new style"for example, the embrace of the remote control and DVD extras made possible more disjunctive editing and fragmented sto- rytelling. Solutions to earlier production problems"like the roving cameras

YouTube Aesthetics 137

deployed for 70s on-location shoots to cover superstars (like Marlon Brando) who were available on set for only one day"also contributed to cinema’s changing look and sound. For the new style I thought music video’s in+ uence deserved at least as much credit. It had been watched studiously by so many viewers (people forget that at one time the latest music video was a go-to topic of conversation), and had been the means by which so many directors honed their cra% , embracing it as an alternative low-entry art school, the conduit through which they’d build the portfolios that landed them ) lm contracts.

But recently I’ve thought di& erently. ! e digital itself produces an intensi- ) ed audiovisual aesthetic"with both buzziness and weightlessness. Celluloid is very di& erent from digital capture and storage. As Lev Manovich argues, ) lm possesses some properties that belong to the digital: the single frames (all 1s), the ) lm projector’s beam of light as it + ashes on and o& (0, 1s), and cel- luloid’s succession (more 0s and 1s). #2 Andre Bazin, however, argued strongly for celluloid’s analog component. It functions as a mask of the world, an an- alog, a replica; light falling on the randomly placed silver halides leave a mark or trace, something directly from the world remains on the ) lm. '3 Extending Bazin’s argument, Laura Mulvey claims that ) lm possesses contradictory pulls that shadow our own biological processes. '# One of cinema’s aspects is teleo- logically driven, an Eros. ! e motoric ) lm projector (and the camera as it records) drives forward, it purrs. ! e frame’s constant passaging, ) lled with changing con) gurations that press forward and away, resembles our own life- drives for power, sex, reproduction. Cinema’s motoric nature is also why we see so o% en literalized trains, cars, people running, people walking. Yet half of the ) lm is comprised of stillness"a black, a darkness that occurs in the tran- sition from frame to frame. Cinema itself, replicating so many of our beloved narrative forms, has a teleological drive"just as much toward Eros and power as toward a death-drive, a willingness to embrace cessation.

! e digital possesses di& erent properties, as David Rodowick argues. '' ! e digital is a transcriptive, rather than an analog, process. ! ink ) rst of a grid, a ) ne tic-tac-toe la$ ice, and within each block resides a pixel that + ips on and o& within its slot. ! e grid remains constant even as the pixels switch. Our expe- rience is that of the grid’s continuous burn, and the weightless + uctuations of pixels blinking on and o& . ! e electronic light continually oscillates, appear- ing and vanishing, yet never completely rests. One way to give life to this dig- ital weightlessness is through phantasmagorically embodying it, making it musical. ! e digital music in tandem with the digital image creates a mon- strous hybrid automaton. ! is phantasm is literalized in Hellboy 2 : here the Green Monster that terrorizes the city, once shot down, becomes + owers’ spores and green goo rolling and dri% ing away"nothing but dreams and nearly substanceless pu& and stu& . Similarly, Hellboy 2 ’s clunky robots crumble

138 YouTube

like wet meringues as soon as the switch is + ipped o& . In ! e Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) the globe and locusts seem comprised of gossamer. In Trans- formers: Revenge of the Fallen , metal machine monsters melt into ball bearings or turn into ) lament-dust. In Speed Racer cars careening into each other some- times go right through another as if they were ghosts. ! e digital images’ swerve or momentum calls for a shadow schema, a ) lling in. As Jonathan Sterne claims, the soundtrack is digital as well"we might say we have digital on digital"but perceptually the soundtrack provides a more continuous func- tion, more closely aligned to our analog experiences. (Digital sound samples from both the top and the bo$ om of the wave form create a stronger illusion of continuity.) '(

I’m not arguing sound always a& ects more embodiment than does image. Which media asserts more presence is based not only on its mode of presenta- tion but also on its level of resolution. To date the digital image tends toward the colder, more inhospitable in the partnership between sound and image; in the collaboration, sound does the heavy li% ing of making it real. It’s not always this way: today we watch on multiple platforms, moving + uidly among IMAX theaters, HD home systems, TV computer monitors functioning as television circuits, and lower-res cell phones and iPods. Occasionally the sound becomes more schematic (try to watch a DVD on an airplane with your multi-thousand- dollar laptop and o& -the-shelf iPod earphones). Yet overall it has become the soundtrack and its image: the heightened audiovisual aesthetic is sound- driven. Reiteration put in play either in the sound or image sutures the music and the image together, it nails it down. ! e “Badgers” song’s aesthetic derives from its jackhammer pulse and buzzy timbres. It re+ ects and is true to the me- dium itself.

R E A N I M AT I O N A N D D E AT H

In a postindustrial era as nearly all forms of media are converted into digital sub- stitutes, and one experiences an expanding shi% from the real into simulation, I’d claim a deathly taint creeps into the mix. Jason Stanyek and Ben Picke$ in their forthcoming book Digital Recreations: ! e Intermundane consider the ways new technologies make possible the reanimation of older media so that, for example, an older deceased ) lm star like Gene Kelly dances in the rain to techno music in a Mac commercial, and the now-dead Nat King Cole sings a duet with his still- living daughter in a music video. I maintain a parallel track to their work, ) nding examples on YouTube that focus not on the dead, but the nearly dead. For ex- ample, the band Journey dropped their lead singer Steve Perry when he became ill. (Perry asked his fellow members to wait until his health improved.) ! e record company and band held a global YouTube contest to replace him and

YouTube Aesthetics 139

found singer Arnel Pineda. Pineda’s singing is so good, he’s almost a new and improved Perry"all the phrasing, all the nuance, but a younger voice and body. Now that employers can draw from a global pool of workers, it feels as if any- thing or anybody can be imitated; a replacement copy with even be$ er-shaped contours can be slo$ ed in. ! e replica improves on the original and the original becomes more inanimate. ! at Pineda was discovered in the Philippines might elicit anxiety and racist sentiments for Journey fans.

Another example is that YouTube is full of the nearly dead. ! e prosumer YouTube clip “Charleston Style” takes footage of African American dancers doing the Charleston in the 40s and subtly alters their movements, like pup- pets, so they now dance to the recent Da% Punk song “Around the World.” ! is clip almost certainly was inspired by the “Around ! e World” music video di- rected by Michel Gondry. ', “Charleston Style” could be thought of as ri4 ng on the Gondry video, but the Charleston remix uses the real memory, not the screen memory, of people of color. It now seems clearer that Gondry’s robots and skeletons re+ ect a desire to hold on to some fragment of black culture and make it dance, but his bodies have become deracinated, lost of history and autonomy.

C AU S A L R E L AT I O N S

Music video can raise questions of cause and e& ect, foregrounding relations so ambiguous that the music seems to be the engine mobilizing people, objects, and environments. '- YouTube clips raise questions of cause and e& ect even more sharply"however one sometimes wonders if this is the primary hook energizing the clip. A quick glance bears this out. In “! e Sneezing Baby Panda,” did we know a panda could sneeze? And so hard that it would blow away both mother and baby? What animates that dancer in “Evolution of Dance”? Mexican jumping beans? Perhaps some wiry worms wiggling inside him, or mysterious powers rippling throughout his limbs? Why would the li$ le boy in the car’s backseat be so punch drunk, as if a parent had possibly malevo- lently slipped him a mickey? '. One might argue that many media in their in- fancy focused on mysterious relations of cause and e& ect. '0 Since YouTube is just ge$ ing started, its development might trace its sibling’s, the cinema’s, ) rst steps, which began with a “cinema of a$ ractions”; here, a fascination with the basic mechanics of things like Lumière’s earliest ) lm strips with a train coming into town; Edison’s “Fred O$ ’s sneeze”; Méliès’s ) gures popping in and out alongside pu& s of smoke. '1 Music video ) rst featured male musicians who terrorized women alongside awkward animation that made things appear and disappear (like ! e Cars’ “You Might ! ink”). In truth, YouTube’s strangeness might have to do with the fact that we are experiencing its ) rst iterations.

140 YouTube

Political YouTube videos emphasizing mysterious causality include the Rickrolled series. '2 ! e multiple iterations of Rick Astley’s 1987 music video hit “Never Gonna Give You Up” became one of the most intertextual, its pop- ularity perhaps second only to “Yes We Can.” A fan took the original song, stripped out Astley’s voice, and edited in snippets from Obama’s ) lmed speeches. Remarkably, Obama had spoken every word contained in Astley’s lyrics at some point, and Obama’s words merged with the backing tracks of the song directly, without any noticeable alterations in Auto-Tune. In the most causally obscure of the series, “John McCain Gets BarackRoll’d,” Obama + ashes up on an enormous screen behind McCain, as the elderly candidate gives a speech from the podium at the Republican convention. At some level one wonders how Obama became so musical. What gave him the right to ap- pear here? Is the audience aware of what’s going on? Who made and endorses this clip? A second example, “Obama and McCain"Dance O& !,” features the heads of the candidates gra% ed onto younger bodies who breakdance. It’s not clear whose body belongs to whom, how that body moves, what the performers think of the music, or where the clip’s going to go (see ) gure 7.3 ). (3

! ere are multiple reasons why obscure causal relations are central to You- Tube aesthetics. David Rodowick provides one. (# Our experiences of screens have changed with the computer’s multiple windows we can activate, click through, resize, move, and hide. In video games, too, we enact spatial transfor- mations of the environment within the frame. Our gestures transform coordi- nates as we surf through the web and participate in the game experience; these might, through contagion, be transferred to YouTube. ! ough we cannot truly modify the inner workings of a clip, the most popular YouTube clips seem in- tensely bound up with powerful, obscure causal relations. ! ough we can’t, we have the illusion that we might, through one click, control the internal work- ings of these clips. And at some metalevel, we still, of course, can stop the show.

“Chocolate Rain” is a music video that emphasizes causal relations and ) ts the scale of YouTube. In this video, singer Tay Zonday leans back from the mic. (' Zonday must have found this gesture so ba* ed viewers that he needed to add a clunky kyron-text-generated disclaimer: “I step away because ./ ./ . .” A mystery remains, however, concerning the song’s strange sources, especially since the re- cording equipment remains o& screen. (Imagine if we saw Zonday at the mixing

Figure 7.3 “Barack O’ bollywood,” “John McCain gets Barack-rolled,” and “Obama and McCain—Dance off!” spoofs provide insightful criticism of the candidates.

YouTube Aesthetics 141

board. How much allure would that have?) Zonday’s mature voice emanating from a young person’s body adds to the enigma. And the screen’s yellow tint? Does it speak with the lyrics? Does “Chocolate Rain” become golden? Occa- sional synth a$ acks in the upper register might suggest the beginning of falling rain. Where’s the rain? Shouldn’t it be there? ! e lyrics have an apocalyptic bent"perhaps Zonday is an emissary from the future. We feel pressure to listen. Repressed fantasies might be evoked as well. As it points to the future, the video mines a historical sense. “Chocolate Rain” is powerful because it elicits so many responses"awe, disdain, envy, a& ection. Of course, there is an audiovisually oriented political version"“Obama Sings Chocolate Rain.” ((

Another clip to consider: can a cat really + ush a toilet? In “Gizmo Flushes” perhaps there’s a secret mechanism set to go o& a% er each of Gizmo’s circular runs. And why does the cat want or need to do the revolutions? Does the cat exert strange powers over the owners? Have the owners somehow tricked the cat? Do they know when they are supposed to provide commentary; are they on cue just like the cat?

“BallsCrash” has the everyday boredom followed by a sudden twist. Just like many other YouTube clips, there is a lull followed by a sudden confusing action that creates disarray. In “BallsCrash,” father and daughter loll on the bed, while a mother videotapes from a distance. Suddenly the soon-to-be tod- dler, who has been kicking periodically, stretches her leg out further and drives the heel of her foot down into her father’s groin. How will the father react? He doubles over, obviously in pain, but we can’t determine how much. And what does the baby think of this? (,

Many of the ) gures in YouTube’s top videos have a touch of remoteness to them. ! e baby in “Haha Baby” as well as panda in “! e Sneezing Baby Panda” sit on a Dutch angle, facing toward yet also away from us. ! e two boys in “Charlie Bit My Finger” are pushed back, protectively swaddled in blankets. In “Leave Britney Alone” Chris Crocker’s face becomes a mask. (He resembles the famous theater’s smiling and frowning faces.) “! e Asian Backstreet Boys” (one of my favorite clips) has an ambiguous ) gure in the background typing away. “Numa Numa” resides very low in the frame. Obese, his features sag downward, succumbing to the weight of gravity even as he joyously raises his plump arms. Why do these dispositions work? Is it that we, as viewers, want to participate, to do some work? Is it that we ) nd pleasure in seeking out these characters to claim them as our own?

CO N D E N S AT I O N

YouTube clips that have garnered over a million hits tend to elicit deeply Freud- ian wishes and desires. YouTube is full of hostile puns, jokes, and returns to childhood. In “Numa Numa” a subtle allusion to Humpty Dumpty unfolds.

142 YouTube

Gary Brolsma’s singing karaoke alongside a high, male, but feminine-sounding false$ o pushes the clip’s a& ect into a state of delirium. His facial gestures are so quick and malleable he becomes a Disney animation. (Watch: he’s good with choreography for the camera, judiciously moving back from and toward the camera’s lens in relation to the music. He’s expert at navigating the small space he’s been given. But he might topple or slide down from the screen.) ! e fact that the clip conjures forth childhood fantasies, along with more adult anxieties concerning control and sexual desire, and that we sense we can click away from the clip and remove his audience, makes it overwhelmingly a$ ractive.

“Gangnam Style” may be one of the best for dirty li$ le jokes. (- ! e clip’s theme starts kicking in with recreational riverboats, designed as big ducks with their perky tails rising up from the river. ! roughout the clip many pre$ y girls appear; soon we’ll cut to a woman’s moving bu$ ocks, as she does aerobics from a crouched position while Psy bends over her silently screaming, in awe or due to overstimulation. Earlier he had been si$ ing on a bench, and then bang!"two men seemingly explode from his bu$ . Psy’s love interest shows up on the subway, wearing black, shiny short-shorts and an orange mini-apron ducktail. (Our a$ ention is quickly drawn to her apron-tail because her hair is also dyed black and orange.) Psy will emerge from the smooth surface of a standing pool of water, head up, perhaps with a desire to subtend both the ducks and the girls. He’ll next reemerge, to strengthen this point, with head and toe pointed up. ! e horses in their stalls, with their heads bobbing up and down, and the dancers’ wrists, mimicking the horses, support the subtending. Uncap that thing! ! e clip’s concerted about its derrière humor. A too-long green shirt-tail (like an alligator tail) dangles from the pelvic thrusting “horse rider” of Psy in the elevator; the rider’s coat-tail so long it tickles Psy’s back. Psy turns sideways with his hand cupped like a li$ le duck tail. ! e singer seem- ingly has an overaccentuated bulge on the toilet (the illusion created through dark shadows in the toilet water). Earlier, a large piece of newspaper had + own up to cover his crotch in the white-mush blizzard inside the horsey corral. Oh well, that’s the front end, but front ends may mean the same as backends in this polymorphously perverse clip. “Gangnam Style” takes liberties. We begin with the female love interest wielding a paddle! (! e racket has a cartoon of Psy’s face on it.) Psy emphatically retorts through strong wrist gestures, calling “Gangnam style.” Perhaps we have a happy Taming of the Shrew or Kiss Me Kate story. At the end, Psy’s paramour’s lacy coral dress shortens up.

Gangnam Style is so engaging for many reasons. It ri& s on and pokes fun at the history of music video style (for example, the tracking shot of the performer stru$ ing down an aisle toward the camera; the group dance). It suggests a unique place and community"the Gangnam district in Seoul. It has a wonderful dance (the horsey dance, as infectious as earlier hits like Soulja Boy’s dance, and ! e

YouTube Aesthetics 143

Macarena). ! e song is crammed with catchy hooks"”Gangnam Style ././. whoop whoop whoop,” and these sonic hooks seem to help trigger the visual upendings described above.

Like “Gangnam Style,” most popular YouTube clips o% en have a bit of ribald body-humor, even a bit of sadism. “David A% er Dentist” and all of those drugged- up, post-doctor-visit people (many with extremely high view counts) are exam- ples, but we can ) nd cruelty in almost all the most popular clips. Mishka the dog doesn’t look very happy to be singing “I love you.” ! e mother ki$ y taking away the ki$ en is a li$ le scary in “Mama Cat Comes to Rescue Her Li$ le Ki$ en.” “Charlie Bit My Finger” and “BallsCrash” show real pain. I think even Keenan Cahill in his lipsync performance of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” looks a li$ le miserable. His expression shi% s between elation and grimaces. (.

I N T E R M E D I A L I T Y

YouTube is loquacious. Intertextuality and hybridization occur across plat- forms, among users, and within clips. Here’s one example about the ways You- Tube exists in a conversation with other media. In a Hulu commercial now on YouTube, Alec Baldwin admonishes viewers that television turns brains to mush (he passes scientists working on brains in vats and human subjects already devolved into propped-up couch-potato tableaus). Of course, here, we have multiple layers of intermedia rivalry"a ) lm star trashing television in favor of web broadcasting, which now appears apart from its original source. ! e clip reflects Thomas Frank’s arguments about mass contemporary culture—no longer is there any outside space beyond advertising. Corporations have inter- nalized all forms of discontent and dissent and they’ll pimp it back to us with a wink. Alec Baldwin states that aliens have come to warp our mind and force us to watch the Internet while some green tentacles start to wrap around him. Here he ri& s on the cultural critique that advertisers seek to capture and transform us into good consumers. He and a scientist exchange a maniacal laugh. A few days later, Yahoo posts the world’s most annoying laugh ever. Is this a link? Was one clip a response to another or is this a synchronic event? ! e laugh is one of the most perfect memes. ! e small fragment pierces like a doubly punched mos- quito’s buzz and sting. Hulu and YouTube talk about themselves and try to con- sume “the Other.”

YouTube links talk to one another"they make a turn on previous iterations. Today’s audiovisually based culture tends to coalesce around contested aural and visual signs rather than extended text"during the presidential election 2008 on YouTube there was strong interest in Edwards’s haircut, Palin’s dress or moose kill. When the Right didn’t get its desired mileage from Reverend Wright’s “Chickens Have Come to Roost” speech, Fox News fans started distributing

144 YouTube

clips insinuating that Michelle and Barack Obama had engaged in a terrorist ) st- bump. ! e Le% responded speedily, with an a$ empt to shi% our culture’s under- standing of the ) st-bump from the globally threatening to the paci) c"a cool “how are ya?” Audio and visual signi) ers then erupted, as long chains of re- sponses, across Twi$ er, blogs, YouTube, et al.

Similarly when Obama’s book Dreams " om My Father appeared as a book on tape, viral web media remixes mashing up Obama’s street-style cursing quickly followed. Soon appeared “! e Whitest Kids” doing a sendup with Abraham Lincoln’s street-cred “homey” epithets before he’s assassinated at Ford’s ! eater. (0 ! e sound and visual bytes slid in and out of the web, some- times crystallizing into an icon, and then circulating back. ! at so many ac- tors, sportscasters, and celebrities have been mashed up, from Christian Bale to Kanye, turns Obama into more of an average Joe.

Dense conversation and intermediality can happen internally within clips too. On YouTube this happens less frequently than one might expect because sophisticated production skills and a strong sense of art and music history are o% en needed to pull it o& . Nevertheless, internal cross-mediality suggests where media and cinema might be going. Trailers are some of the best exam- ples here: consider the trailer for the ) lm ! e Spirit . (Note: Remashed trailers and ) lm scenes are some of the most popular content on YouTube.)

The Spirit trailer is a segment Alfred Hitchcock might have dreamed of if today’s technologies were available to him. The director often quipped that film was like life with the boring bits cut out: he wanted to play audiences like an orchestra, propelling them along the paths of his moods. The Spirit achieves a similar control over its audience through hyperstylization. Ferried across a series of affective flashpoints, viewers traverse media. An animated line comes into focus and the sound before the drawing helps us identify it as a heart monitor’s flatline. The music and animated line swell and generate a tree turning into birds taking flight. An audiovisual whoosh streams across the frame. We follow it as it becomes a figure leaping off a building. The words “Silken Floss” impress themselves on the frame—the inky blacks, fire- house reds, and strongly bolded text suggest S & M. The movement across medial surfaces makes it seem as if we’re a hot potato, as if we were a stone skipping across a lake. Intermediality can create an experience in which we shift our attention so rapidly among media—text, sound, animation, CGI, live action, music—that our experience is of only touching surfaces, never ground (see figure 7.4 ).

Trailers are a great form of cross-mediality, especially blockbuster ) lms’ trailers. ! e Transformers trailer keeps us busy. We hear a sound, our a$ ention turns toward it, something leaps across the frame, we follow it, then another sound ) lls in what we heard. But our a$ ention is already elsewhere. Trailers of

YouTube Aesthetics 145

this sort, including the one for Miami Vice , o% en become full-+ edged music videos toward the end. (! ey tend to open with enigmatic sounds of machine noises, heartbeats, or suggestions of drumming, and two-thirds in, work them- selves into pop songs.) ! ese are small, worth watching again, and more satis- fying than the movie. Perhaps because YouTube is short and o% en made by prosumers without advanced skills, cross-mediality is not the most empha- sized of techniques. But I’d argue it may be the wave of the future. “Barack O’bollywood” and the opening of LL Cool J’s video “Mr. President (% . Wyclef Jean)” showcase this style. (1

Mashups form a subset of the new intermediality. ! ey may not be as for- mally rich as the above examples but they have their own delights. O% en based on pure alternation or swapping in and out with some regularity, and only working the indices of sound and picture, in a mashup the edited shots and sounds of a performer can hang as fragments. As materials sweep past, the mu- sical hook or image lingers like a pungent smell. If you needed to pare down and carry forward a reduced- or animal-like presence of your beloved performer, this would be it. O% en one medium retains its liveliness"a song lyric, the body moving, a musical hook, and the other freezes in mechanical repetitions. ! e live bit pulls apart from a wash of other material pressing through. Any moment can teeter toward something revelatory or lost. (2 A mashup can be unpredict- able. On YouTube there are thousands of such swaps including ones for the pop songs of the year as well as for the 2008 campaign.

In some cases the aesthetics of reiterative clips achieves a kind of striation. “Barack O’bollywood” presents a fast reiterative pulse. It also possesses a number of “audiovisual hooks” that appear with regularity. ,3 Each recurrence of an audiovisual hook connects with previous occurrences. Against the reiter- ative pulse, these hooks can be experienced as chains"points linked together as they fall into predictable pa$ erns. In “Barack O’bollywood,” whenever an elephant or a bulky silhoue$ e of a ) gure appears, we hear a low trumpeting sound. (! e frame empties out, the visual material sits low in the frame, and the aural tessitura is low too.) Every time we see an animated cutout of a belly

Figure 7.4 ! e Spirit trailer: mobile, a& ective + ashpoints.

146 YouTube

dancer, we hear a high-pitched “ch-ch-ch.” When we see Obama’s head, we might hear a voice in the middle register calling out “acha-acha-acha” as Obama’s mouth opens and closes. When watching “Barack O’bollywood” we may start looking toward parts of the frame at certain instances in search of objects accompanied by sounds. We experience our a$ ention as striated, moving horizontally across a video that has established a rapid beat.

PA R O DY A N D T H E S A R D O N I C R E S P O N S E

A key feature of YouTube is the sardonic response. Any overly gushy work is ripe for a remix"from Bruno Ganz acting out Hitler’s breakdown over the loss of his Xbox game to “Eric Clapton Shreds.” Moulin Rouge! ’s sped-up goofy scenes could be seen as a response to such YouTubelicious moments. ! e scenes are so aware of their own da4 ness that one could never take a swing at them. ! e truly sentimental-bashing prescient was Mystery Science ! eater 3000 . Who would have known that the li$ le puppets would usher in a stylistic revolution?

Parody and the sardonic response occur partly because technology makes it possible; adding a second layer that circumvents, undercuts, or makes ridiculous the original object is one of the easiest things to do. In the anonymity of the web, YouTube makers are in search of a ground"your sarcastic take immediately places you in relation to a select group of viewers as well as the producers and fans of the original material. Your parody, now tied to original content, piggy- backs on an already accrued a$ ention. ,# Sarcasm also pierces us. Anything that pushes against social norms tends to grab a$ ention. Some of YouTube’s new, peculiar forms of brute-comedic aesthetics are surely generational. My students describe some things that they ) nd extremely funny"absurdist, hostile"that leave me ba* ed. ,' Some of the more aggressive forms of YouTube sexuality I ) nd a bit hard to take, but it’s easy to see how they work within a larger cultural and economic milieu. With contemporary subjectivities now fractured rather than whole, it seems my students can adopt the alienated roles needed to partic- ipate in these rough-and-tumble practices, and then switch back into more tradi- tional, humanistic-based stances.

II

Before I describe some forms of engagement with YouTube, let me provide a close description of several clips that exhibit some of the aesthetic features I’ve just detailed. ! ese clips are well designed for YouTube"they would work poorly on television or in the cinema.

YouTube Aesthetics 147

In “Haha Baby” the father’s provocations to laugh sound like ringing chimes, conjuring associations with toys like a rolling plastic ball on a stick and a toy xylophone. ! e child’s uproarious laughter has an uncanny quality: full-throated, both animal- and adult-like. Perhaps there’s a man inside that baby suit. Every parental call elicits rapt a$ ention, and then we can see, emerging in real time, the full-+ edged rejoinder. Yet at the same time, there is a lingering shadow. Is the child laughing for and by himself? Even more unse$ ling: is the laugh mechan- ical? He’s the dream Tickle Me Elmo doll"wait and it goes. Or is it that the child and father aim for the perfect duet? ! e baby is so round he resembles a china doll. (What will he be like when he gets older?) ! ere’s a patch of blue in the back, some on his shirt, plus his round blue eyes, so at least the color scheme is uni) ed; the lighting has the morality of one of Vermeer’s domestic interiors. ! e circle on his shirt suggests the bu$ on that triggers his laugh. Best though is the call-and-response itself. Listen to the clip without picture"the two, together, make one enchained melody (see ) gure 7.5 ).

YouTube’s top clips include pratfalls, parodies, skits, recent music videos, and odd assortments of things. Curiously, one old music video was on the all-time popular list for a large part of spring 2009: “Barbie Girl” by Aqua. A beloved tape when it came out in 1997, it didn’t crack MTV’s annual top ten. ,( Why did “Bar- bie Girl” become popular again? Was it that Barbie turned 50 and the public experienced an overwhelming wave of nostalgia for her? Or was its popularity driven by a Ma$ el promotional scheme in which employees have been asked to perform as YouTube drones and click the Barbie link over and over, just as Warner Bros. spurred prepubescent girls to become viral Avril Lavigne–bots and watch her video “Girlfriend,” while they instant messaged, talked on cell phones, did their homework, and surfed the web? But I’d argue that the “Barbie Girl” clip has something special in its own right (unlike “Girlfriend” with its trashy pre- mise of girls who undermine one another over a boy). ! e clip’s small format and highly compressed digital transfer suddenly make Aqua’s real ) gures doll- like (as if these hybrid phantasms can truly achieve the dreams of today’s CGI). ,, Aqua’s video has a double edge"it’s infused with the same nostalgia you’d pro- ject onto your old toys, but it’s also a threatening other. ! e music, gestures, out) ts, and sets are all slightly out of joint; we no longer know how to read them.

It’s odd that “! e Evolution of Dance” became a hit. I wonder if viewers respond to it as a toy one perches on a desk or window sill at work, those jiggling

Figure 7.5 “Haha Baby”: a Vermeer-like pictorialism.

148 YouTube

dolls with a trace of the uncanny. Perhaps it’s like the grinder’s monkey at the Mardi Gras"a quick, glancing amusement for passersby. ! inking about the video’s image for a moment reveals how unlikely it is. Contrary to everything we’ve learned about dance from Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, you can’t see the dancer’s feet . ! ere’s some degree of visual interest even before the dance starts. ! e stage cants both up and down. Crescents + ow up and down from the ceiling (evoking half-moon light); the dancer’s ring of balding hair triples the semicir- cles. ! e white stripes on the faded jeans and the T-shirt’s red logo “Crush” help telegraph the ) gure; even if the body were to be erased we might interpret these graphic marks as a body moving in space. ! e dancer’s objects"water bo$ le and hat"perched invitingly on a stool, seem to call for his a$ ention. ! e dancer’s opening move, an Elvis Presley imitation, does li$ le to impress us: only in the transition to the next pop allusion is there a jolt. ! e dancer is a chameleon" ) rst tubby around the belly, middle-aged and balding; suddenly hip and suavely masculinist; young; gay; female; black or whatever. He’s willing to take on any identity. He performs “Baby Got Back,” Sir Mixalot’s ode to big bu$ s, with equa- nimous relish, shaking his posterior as if he were part of a chorine’s lineup. He can also be Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”"cool and remote; he can do conser- vative country square dancing, embracing a dumbfounded silliness, and then circle back again to the dorky Bangles “Walk Like an Egyptian.” Some of his moves are sloppy and bungled (for kung-fu ) ghting he teeters back and forth), but for “Staying Alive” and “Billie Jean” it’s pure YouTube aesthetics"e& ortless, seamless, stripped to bare essentials, pure gesture and thought. Have these pro- fessional and awkwardly amateur stretches been planned, or do they emerge in real time? ! e movement through the joins among dance numbers is expressive and canny, but it seems to emerge spontaneously. Part of the pleasure is guessing what the next song will be, what kind of gestures he will make, and how he will move to them. Is he quicker than us? (See ) gure 7.6 .)

Some clips achieve a kind of intense beauty. A colleague sent me a clip of an Israeli animation titled “Pop Goes the Weasel.” ,- ! e theme is cloyingly sentimen- tal: in an empty apartment, among the last set of moving boxes stacked up in the center of the + oor, one package sprints free and, in the strange world of animation, decides to unwrap itself. Out wiggles a music box that presents someone’s history through photos, le$ ers, and such. ! ese scraps of paper and tchotchkes break loose and reanimate the house before returning to their intended places as packed

Figure 7.6 “Evolution of Dance”: Judson Laipply strikes a pose.

YouTube Aesthetics 149

contents. Beneath the clip’s trajectory, the materials the music box provide describe mankind’s historical progression through media. ,. ! e childhood draw- ings resemble cave paintings; the ) rst text, the printing press; music clips remind us of bootleg casse$ es; images are thrown up on the walls and then cluster to form continents, the Internet. One person’s childhood memories become encapsu- lated within the history of communication. ! is makes sense, because for now there’s a developmental homology: we’re used to working ) rst with rudimentary materials"crayon drawings, print"and then the computer, though this, of course, is changing fast. (Children now start out on the computer and adults draw with crayons in restaurants.)

III

YouTube is a polysemic, heterogeneous phenomenon. It speaks di& erently depending on how and with whom you experience it. In what streams of social networks bearing clips do you belong? How are you using a clip at work and for leisure? In this section I’ll describe what it might feel like to participate in a network (like Facebook) as a prosumer, as a lone individual, and as a scholar.

K I N S H I P N ET W O R K I N G

On the one hand, YouTube provides intense media experiences. Several friends say they need never go to the cinema. Sometimes a clip sent by a friend or col- league produces a moment of intimacy, as if we were in a conversation and one of us had suddenly turned the wi$ y phrase that concretized gathering experi- ence. ! e three-minute clip swells in the light of our shared feeling. ! e clip’s cleverness helps it merge into our paths of dialogue and mutuality.

YouTube also provides an extremely satisfying experience for me as a teacher. Students post YouTube videos on BlackBoard. I watch and distribute them to colleagues worldwide. Associates and friends email back, and I report on this correspondence to my students, who sometimes give me clips to send back. Never before has information + owed so + uidly among students and scholars. My course is no longer point to mass, it’s peer to peer.

P R O S U M E R

! e quality of my students’ video work shocks me. It’s o% en as good as what professionals produce, but on greatly reduced budgets. My students have grown up making things and they’ve already logged the hundreds of hours of practice needed to do good video production"and not only that, they’ve done

150 YouTube

it o% en through ad-hoc means, such as shooting on cell-phone cameras, boot- legging rock concerts, and playing around with the free so% ware like Garage Band and iMovie that comes bundled with their computers. My guess is that with so many skilled young media-makers and so much distributed content, it will be near impossible to make a living directing, shooting, or editing.

YouTube can possess a communal, egalitarian feel. Is it di& erent from ham radio, DIY podcasts, or self-published blogs? Video clips can sometimes create a sense of a false polis (because we never do link up and engage in an extended dialogue). But YouTube experiences also are saturated with associations I have with the people who sent them to me. And why not analyze my students’ work as much as any other clip on YouTube? ! eir clips receive a signi) cant number of hits"1,000-plus for a remix of a Da% Punk song"and they seem as much a part of the zeitgeist as anything.

T H E I N D I V I D UA L V I E W E R

But as a solitary viewer, apart from friends and colleagues, my experiences di& er. Here YouTube o& ers me the experience of the # aneur wandering through low-rent districts, shadowy drug dens, and public urinals. How can it be that 1,257,000 have seen this clip, but now, while I’m with it, I feel I’m engaged in my own private peepshow? I assume no one else is here. Only the ghostly mark- ings of the Kilroys, the weird gra4 ti ravings below the audiovisual clip, unraveling at their own pace. Mine is the inverse projected fantasy of television: with a TV experience, almost everyone wants a communal simultaneity. On YouTube I imagine a game of telephone. Someone whispers into my ear, then another. I speak in hushed terms into the next. It’s almost as if I were si$ ing in a seat, just warmed, that I pass over to the next viewer. Since the gra4 ti responses share no quarter with me, with only a trace (a cookie, some web-spying memory), I take my leave.

And I wonder, who are the people who post on YouTube and what are their archives like? YouTube resembles the budget hunter’s dress shop Filene’s Basement. People go through, ransack, and move sales items in and out. Lots of “30 to 60 percent o& ” signs. In the corners things get raggedy. And there is no map to do archaeological work on YouTube. ! e top-10and top-100 lists I ) nd through Google searches are crap. ! rough Pitchfork music video I ) nd something I like through a + uke. How to start an archive? I imagine mini- networks of viewers unknown to us in the YouTube universe; these link as an underground system. No one sees it and suddenly it goes viral, erupting into the whole system.

Virginia He& ernan notes that everything is muddy, torn, underwater on YouTube, a lost Atlantis. ,0 All of that empty data that no one watches makes

YouTube Aesthetics 151

me anxious. It doesn’t bother me that blogged data + oat around never to be read. But those orphaned audiovisual clips haunt me. Is it because they’re mini-homunculuses in need of a$ ention? I imagine all of the web clips turning around in their cells like tadpoles in small paper cups. ,1 And is all of that data, which must be stored on chips, poisonous in its mercury? When reactivated, do the links themselves demand additional energy? ! at all of these clips sup- posedly sit in an anonymous warehouse, football ) eld in size, cooled in li$ le boxes, seems incomprehensible.

YouTube also causes me trepidation. I dream I return and YouTube’s nearly wiped clean"the site’s a mini-apocalypse. Fans have moved on to the new and be$ er"YouTube becomes an abandoned city. Where’s Gizmo the + ushing cat now? ,2 Even if I were to have downloaded these clips, they can’t be shared that easily. ! ere may be a YouTube underground but how would I lead my less tech-savvy and more law-abiding colleagues and readers to it? A new era: how many times have the American public hungered a% er and peddled contra- band"liquor, pornography, prostitution, illicit drugs, ) recrackers, bootleg concert recordings, pirated DVDs"but YouTube clips? -3 ! e anxiety I experi- ence with YouTube is not so di& erent from many other modern fears and irri- tants. Will I keep my job? Am I up for a ) ght with Comcast? Has Diebold rigged the election?

Sometimes I also experience agitation. Scholars tend to experience a liveli- ness when they engage with a world, regardless of its content—wrestlers, prostitutes"partly because of the pleasures of asking questions and building a topography. But I’ve already steeped myself in the middle- to lowbrow. As a music video scholar I’ve watched my share of clips that le% li$ le mark on me, from Bobby Brown to Bon Jovi. If I extend my world to hamsters with pop- corn, I’ll fry some brain synapses. -# Will spending time here yield clarity or answers? Most of the materials I look at are sophomoric, literally "without a way to drill down into YouTube (there are few guides beyond the top 50) I channel my students’ tastes. When I ask my students where they found their links they look at me ba* ed. “From friends.” “Where did they ) nd it?” And the trail goes cold. In addition, there are not yet funding streams for YouTube studies nor much of a community of scholars for me to collaborate with.

Here’s an example of odd scholarship. While wandering around YouTube I came across a clip called “I Sit on You.” A few days later it struck me as impor- tant. ! e video’s conceit is simple and perhaps sadly endearingly: a mid- dle-aged man sits on peoples’ laps who, from what we can tell, didn’t ask him to be there. It might be the most inane of ideas, but one wants to give permission to a paunchy middle-aged man to participate. I’d like to go back and watch the clip again but what are the search terms? “I Sit on You?” ! ere’s no sensible method here. -'

152 YouTube

As a scholar I’ve also developed strange skills, such as practicing the art of the 40-second watch. With a ) lm, I might devote 15 minutes of a$ entive watching before I turn away to do something else"but 40 seconds?

YouTube and Google have not been helpful here. I’ve wri$ en to them, intro- ducing myself as a professor who teaches YouTube aesthetics, but no response. Without answers, I’ve been le% to my own stories and imaginative devices. Some grouchy sta& person must have decided that viewers only get to see the top 50 clips of all time and then buried the search function to the next ones in the series. Is YouTube the world’s largest archive without a librarian? And does Google have the right to keep information about the archive private? -( Why can’t we sometimes be free of the advertising? YouTube is very pro) table now. I remember when there was no advertising and the site felt owned by users.

YouTube may have vast social e& ects, but how will we grasp them when its content is elusive and so many other media impinge on our lives? An example: YouTube’s practice of placing an ad at the bo$ om of the clip and at the right- hand corner of a page is worrisome. It’s a higher rate of advertisement than one might see on television and there’s almost no border between ad and content. Will my eye develop the Benjaminian carapace? I’ve trained myself not to dri% below the frame and to avoid the right-hand side as well, to unsee. (Especially the markings below seem treacherous"a gra4 ti-) lled danger-zone, a cess- pool to drop into.) Will these blo$ ed-out areas in+ uence actions in other aspects of my life"a delayed response to cars coming at me from behind or in the right-hand lane? Have young people learned restricted saccadic rhythms? Restricted eye traces compounded with other practices of narrowed, focused, and distracted a$ ention involving new media"speaking on cell phones, text messaging"could be risky. Highway travel becomes perilous to one’s health. Is YouTube encouraging drive-by living?

IV P E R S O N A L E X P E R I E N C E S — C L O S E R E A D I N G S

! e YouTube clips that have remained with me are o% en tied to guilty pleasures. More o% en than not, the bu$ of the joke is on humans or animals who refuse to play their proper parts. I’m not sure I’m responding with empathy. Some of its pleasure come from embarrassment and fear. I’m teaching a large Intro to New Media class. A student in the back + ashes a cell phone. I’m sure someone on the web has turned me into a squirrel. “I Am ! at Name” and “! eremin Ki$ y” are two of my most favorite tapes. I try to get my students excited about them. ! ey don’t really. I feel crushed. Since YouTube is partly about personal responses to other clips and communities, let me share a few of my own.

YouTube Aesthetics 153

In the spring of 2008 I was new to YouTube. A colleague had directed me to Morning Masume, a manufactured girl group from Japan. I hunted down the group and found a mashup of one of their music videos recut to Earth, Wind and Fire’s “September.” Tears started welling up. ! e Japanese girls, dressed in Catholic-school-like uniforms, stru$ ing down the catwalk together as an empowered ensemble, alongside Earth, Wind and Fire’s lush ’70s soul song, spoke about bliss and lost moments. ! e music hinted at some time that was right, a moment of ecstasy close by in the past (one season), and the girls with their gestures were unquestionably it, but they were also inaccessible to me because they were preserved in a new context"a mashup. It reminded me of my own not-fully-appreciated youth. ! is for me was a rare ) nd"precious. ! en I noticed that the commentary was o& "punky guys aggressively mouth- ing o& about girls as jailbait, worth serving real time for. A day or two later when I went back to watch it, it was gone. Would some reader ) nd it for me?

One of my most intense YouTube experiences: I’m reading a Virginia Hef- fernan article on YouTube. She’s enlisted experimental ) lm and video artists to comment on their favorite clips. I’m reading the prose and following the links. I come across one that takes me to a frame ) lled with black and white quadrants. ! ere’s a woman’s voiceover (probably viewing the security footage) hysterically responding to a parent. On the grainy black-and-white video screens, I can see, in long shot, two men throwing into the air what looks like a small, black square, back and forth, and explosive ) re going o& . Every time there’s ) re, kids break and bolt under the tables. Actually, partly because of the quadrants, it’s kind of elegant. I’m watching it in a half-sleepy, half- heightened fashion. ! en I realize it’s the Columbine shootings: the actual footage. I try to tell friends about my viewing experience, but no one will go and view the link. I feel marked. A few months later a student in my large lec- ture course of 150 students rather ma$ er-of-factly posts on Blackboard that she has seen the link, but I’m sure the others don’t know what she’s writing about. ! ere doesn’t seem to be an appropriate way to respond. ! e student’s and my path never cross.

An odd experience: I screened an excerpt from Jack Smith’s “Flaming Crea- tures” to my upper division class and I feel great about it. ! ere’s an opportu- nity and I screen it again for an introductory large lecture-based class with 150 students, and my jaw drops. In the upper-le% -hand corner is a man holding his penis and shaking it vigorously back and forth. I suck in my breath. A student calls out “Jesus.” I don’t have tenure. I teach at a conservative university in a red state and it’s the day we’re doing student evaluations. ! en I realize I’m okay. Students can’t determine whether the main protagonist, dressed in a wedding gown, is a boy or a girl; blindsided, they never get much past the center of the frame. ! ank goodness for fuzzy, degraded, ultracompressed footage. I never

154 YouTube

could have seen this on the postage-stamp-sized YouTube viewspace on my computer screen. -,

I wonder if the live, anonymous, participatory, relatively unregulated nature of YouTube provides its thrill. Perhaps I will see something that, for be$ er or worse, will mark me.

P O S S I B L E F U T U R E S

Jacques Atalli argues that music forecasts coming future trends. Minimalism (like Philip Glass and John Ashley) and hip-hop (from Public Enemy to Kanye West), with their driving propulsive rhythms and rhyming schemes, might have foreshadowed YouTube’s embrace of ) nite moments of now, each tantalizingly suggestive of the observable, each carrying a germ potential to break loose. I’m curious about the history of styles on YouTube. What will happen to the prac- tices of repetition in the future? Will they become faster and more furious? What will people make parodies and collages of?

! ere’s no way to know because YouTube provides no access to YouTube. ! eir own curatorial materials (clips being watched today, recommended clips) become unsearchable a% er that day has passed. I have no sense of how quickly YouTube is changing and in what ways. I can report one thing. It happened right before my eyes. ! e ) rst YouTube clips I saw projected an awkward vulnerability. ! e “Asian Backstreet Boys” is one of the most intimate and celebratory You- Tube clips. -- In the spring of 2008, people developed a hardened mask"the showman, the huckster, the shyster. By the spring of 2009, prosumer clips had reached a level of professionalism"almost glossy and perfectly tuned to the constraints of YouTube. Where will it go from here? It would be wonderful if scholars could chart a history of YouTube clips"what stylistic trends and ways of pu$ ing material together have there been?

I think we’re back to where we began. We can’t see the edges of YouTube; the site is in a continual state of + ux. My description here mainly illuminates own my path. William Rothman asks us to acknowledge that some of our best mo- ments happen at the cinema. -. I can’t say that about YouTube"more I would say that what I’ve experienced I remember as peaks or intensities. I wonder if others feel it similarly.