Meme Report 4/24
The white boy of the month is…. Mark Zuckerberg???
~Tortured Poets Department~
I’ll talk more about the behemoth of an album in some kind of ~premium~ post later this week, sparing the rest of you. For now, I will say neither of these memes are good. Neither adds to the greater discussion of Taylor Swift or life in general. The first one is a cheap nostalgia play with your classic doll houses and closed bars. The second one is a kind of competition and the winner is whomever can say JoJo Siwa fastest. We’ve done this before and it was unstimulating then. On the tail of an album that is generating a lot of content, we didn’t need these.
Sorry No
This is less a cultural reset and more a cultural check-in. We’re doing our biannual review of what’s cool and what is insufferable. We’re reviewing which subcultures need more time to develop before they become cool and which subcultures will never be cool despite their underground or indie cred. This meme is meaner than the others about fandoms but mean in a way that’s necessary. In the same way it’s mean to cut healthy branches to make a topiary. Unkind but necessary for shaping the world into something beautiful.
This Generation Really Needs To Watch
Unfortunately, it falls under a funny every-time joke to me. It doesn’t take much effort but it is an old-school good versus evil debate that we need to keep having. Anytime the Christians start to talk about good movies, or people my age or younger start to talk about “this generation” it’s worth it to do some counter-messaging, even if it’s obvious. We’re in an age of self-censorship and overwrought conversations about appropriateness. It’s an easy win to take this girl out of context and make it seem like she’s recommending The Piano Teacher instead of Nights in Rodanthe or whatever nonsense she was talking about.
Hot Zuckerberg
You people are so easy to trick. A chain and some curl cream and suddenly stealing all of our data isn’t so bad. He’s not even that hot. The sexiest movie of the summer, Challengers comes out this week. Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist are being served to us on a platter and instead, everyone is thirsting after Mark Zuckerberg. He can’t even play Tennis. Please get it together.
TikTok
Normand Marineau
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
I have surreptitiously snuck across the border into Canada. I have landed on the Pour Vous page to see a trend that has captured the hearts and minds of the Quebecois. The CBC posted a video from the Radio Canada archives interviewing Pee Wee hockey players in 1963 and the residents of La Belle Provence can’t get enough of their little accents. It’s silly and fun and easy to understand from an outsider's perspective. These local trends are always fun. It’s half cultural exchange and half mystery. It helps round out the app that something posted by a news organization can go viral among its populace and everyone can have lighthearted fun. It’s what social studies teachers want from TikTok. I love being able to peer in the windows of a culture and piecing together what they’re laughing at and why it’s funny. Especially, one as illusive and mysterious as French Canadians.
In A Country Full Of Neanderthals
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
The kids love Death to Smoochy!! The almost entirely forgotten film directed by Danny Devito is enjoying a second life on TikTok. It’s your classic trauma dump, I’m better than everyone, Oldest daughter crap that every sound is used for but this one is from an underseen little discussed film. I would be shocked if anyone using this sound could say what it is they were quoting. Another point on the board for context not mattering at all. No one cares about where anything came from or what it means. No one is going to watch Death to Smoochy now. It’s probably not even going to see a spike in Google searches.
That's Common Sense I Fear
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
I am a person who believes that we as a nation are getting dumber. Octopusslover8 should have known that every marathon is the same length. They are all famously 26.2 miles. However, I don’t think it’s common sense. That’s something someone should teach you and you should know by the time you are 12, but I don’t necessarily think it’s something you should be able to figure out on your own. The reason I feel so confident in this statement is that none of the videos under this sound make any sense. The questions asked by each individual do not match the level of stupid the original question is and the answer is rarely common sense. It’s common knowledge but it’s not common sense. There are things we don’t know because we are hard-wired too dumb to figure them out and there are things we don’t know because we are incurious about the world around us. An important distinction we should make going forward if we all want to get smarter. It’d be a shame to beat yourself up for the wrong reasons.
Ohhh im so excited to see Normand Marineau made the cut! And I hope you get to see “Sébastiiiiien” too!