Meme Report 8/6
8 more days of Sydney Sweeney Discourse
Sydney Sweeney is a Registered Republican
The smoking gun of the American Eagle Ad is a Republican Florida Voter Registration. People love to trot out these voter registrations like they are definitive proof of anything, and that they give us next steps for how to behave. If they couldn’t nail Lucille Ball with it in 1953, it’s not going to work for Sydney Sweeney. We want voter registration to matter so much, but there is no single way to put someone through the politics purity test. So, Sydney Sweeney is a republican. I don’t like that about her, but I don’t find myself in a position to engage with her art (or dude wipes ads) any differently. I was shocked that she was even registered to vote at all. My main takeaway from this is that she is still not making the right career moves. She has a movie coming out this month, and no one knows what it's even called. The work is not speaking for itself.
With Mama
This meme originated on Tumblr and has since moved to Twitter, where it’s being posted as a collected work. It’s a sweet meme that thrives on Tumblr, but something about the movement to Twitter makes me upset. This is the natural language of Tumblr. An easy cutesyness that doesn’t translate as soon as it leaves the site. The move to Twitter makes this something to gawk at and incorporate into one’s vocabulary by force. This meme is specific and requires baby animals and their mothers to be doing an activity, but I know these people for whom Tumblr is not enough anymore, and need the validation of their Twitter following, will find a way to incorporate it into their bad fan art. They can’t just let something be and grow where it’s planted. It all has to translate into likes and an electronic sketch of Harry Potter characters doing God knows what. Let’s leave things alone with Mama.
4 Major Cities
I want to work at the think tank where they come up with these questions that are meant to keep people occupied for WEEKS. 4 major cities in the US is SO GOOD. It is a favorite pastime of Americans on Twitter to argue about cities, as I assume it has been a favorite pastime of Americans since there have been cities. New York is obviously #1 and Los Angeles #2, Chicago has taken its place at number #3 to little debate (but not undisputed). Number 4 is the dealer’s choice, and the dealer could choose truly anything. Many decided that Houston was the 4th city. In what world are you saying Houston before Dallas when naming cities in Texas, let alone cities in America? If we’re going by Airports, Atlanta gets a spot. As a New England girl, I have to give Boston a chance. D.C. would be put forth if Obama were still president, but people don’t want to think about D.C. right now. It’s a fun debate because there is no right answer, because there is no such thing as the 4th most important city. It’s not a designated survivor situation.
TikTok
Punkrocker
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
It’s kind of crazy to me that culture still works in the old way. A song from a little bit ago can be used in a superhero movie and be exposed to a new audience, and the people will like it, taking it into their own lives to use as they see fit. TikTok cements this love and spreads it to even more people. The good thing about our culture as it stands now is that things can be recycled as needed. If a song wasn’t mega popular the first time around, there’s room for it on TikTok. We have a whole back catalogue of culture that never got to mainstream. A song can still be dredged up, and people will still like it. Now, of course, that means it’s the background of every video about anything, but c’est la vie. The price we pay for virality is background music.
New Editing Style
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
I went into the film school annals for this one. “MTV editing” rose in popularity with the introduction of music videos to popular culture. The more cuts to different angles there were, the easier it was for the audience to stay engaged. This style took over as the norm in modern film editing. The tiktok generation does not remember long shots and must reinvent MTV editing into their own filmic vocabulary. They require even quicker and even more obvious editing than they are used to. Something has to be changing every second to keep this audience engaged. I’m surprised it took us this long for the population of fame-hungry and adept editors to implement sound effects to stay dynamic. We still and always will have the now old-fashioned 2-minute monologues straight into the camera and the even longer meandering storytimes that fall to get even close to a point, but if a creator wants to stay hip and current, they better add flashing lights and .5x speed to their video.
Rush Tok
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
It’s here. Another trip around the sun and we’ve arrived in August, while the sororities prepare for the PNMs to arrive, they are doing their best to appear attractive, cool, and fun. I do not care to follow along with Rush this year, mostly because I’ve followed along the previous years and know that there’s been a TikTok crackdown, so anyone who posts is NOT going to become a Zeta at ‘Bama because posting is no longer a value of that sisterhood. What is interesting to me about this new form of RUSHTOK is that the sororities are all in competition with each other at a national level. It’s no longer about being best on the row; it’s about being best in the round-up of best of RushTok.
The tension of college is that all of it will stop mattering once you are in the outside world, but it matters a lot in the present. A problem arises when we elevate campus activities to a national stage and lose perspective. It’s fun for us to see the differences between various Greek letter organizations at SEC schools, but it matters so much more to them than it does to us. Yet it’s become for us, the spectators, who will never step foot on campus. It's for publicity, really, but what is the point of all that publicity? So people will keep joining sororities, and the point of the sorority is that next year, you can participate in the video that made you join in the first place. There’s some girl out there crying because she can’t get the steps right for the recruitment TikTok, and it’s affecting her standing in the house. Not only will it not matter when it’s over. It doesn’t matter right now. The girls who will join that sorority knew about it before the video, and the girls who learned about it from the video probably won’t get in. Yet they soldier on, because they believe that all of this will add up to something and the hard work will pay off.
Hamilton
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
It’s summer, so you know what that means: young women are dressed up as Hamilton from the Broadway musical Hamilton. Hamilton enjoys the cultural position of being so cringe that to even bring it up sends its fans to a no man’s land of cringe. There’s no such thing as a casual Hamilton fan. You’re either diving into the waters of cringe or looking down on the situation altogether. If it’s already cringe, why not draw on the goatee with a little eyeliner? Why not post your interpretation of Hamilton where he hates his wife? They’re already going to think you’re cringe. Once that threshold is crossed, there’s nothing to stop you.