tumblr meme culture is really just a form of neo dadaism
I’d like to clarify:
dada was a largely european art movement that took place after wwi. this time and place is not a coincidence. let me explain.
dada art made no sense. the artists who made dada lived in a world in which nothing made sense - in which conventional logic led to the senselessness of a world war. so, making art that made no sense, making - well, you can’t really call it art, so making ANTI-art that rejected the conventions that brought about that atrocity in the first place - it made total sense. (if that makes any sense.)
so the artists did weird things. new things! putting things that were already made together and calling it sculpture, cutting up bits of pictures and putting them together and calling that something to frame - this site has some nice examples.
but from my perspective - there’s serious intellectual continuity between the absurdity of attaching a bunch of tacks to the bottom of an iron, rendering it useless, and say…. bath bomb posts. Put a fucking macbook in a bath. it’s useless now. Nobody fucking cares anymore. you want something funny? you want a punchline? gun. that’s your punchline. Take it. I am laughing
in a way it could be a method of venting some of the frustration and hopelessness and dissatisfaction that tumblr’s userbase (largely, disenfranchised millennials) feels in the modern day. I can’t really speak for anyone else, but… at least from a US perspective, there’s plenty to be disillusioned about. growing up in a constant state of questionably justified war, income inequality, an economic recession caused by the actions of a handful of wealthy fucks who didn’t even get properly punished, growing awareness of police brutality, being called lazy and self-absorbed by the generations that gave us these problems in the first place… I can’t help but think that these factors (and more) could produce a similar mindset to the one that precipitated the first dada movement.
so of COURSE we make nonsense jokes. it’s a coping mechanism for a world which doesn’t make any sense.
related: this isn’t by tumblr but I have to plug UCLA’s atrocity of a virtual gallery once more. it really needs to be experienced, but… it’s definitely also millennial neo dada. from the presentation (like an unplayable video game) to the content (THE DOGS HAVE ARRIVED), it is exactly what I am talking about. it is a fucking shitpost. and it’s high art, too! I love this
tl;dr: my generation is fed up with this bullshit, and the best way that we can express that is by shitposting. alternatively, dada was an early precursor to modern shitposting and we should all thank duchamp for signing a fucking urinal
a dear friend has given a perfect update to some of my phrasing, courtesy of their word replace extension:
you see this? this is exactly what I’m fucking talking about. the thing that I’m talking about is:
omfg im laughing so hard i fell asleep on my keyboard last night and i just found this
PAGE 1 OF 184
One entire row of ‘f’s takes 10 seconds to type. There are 45 lines per page, so you take 450 seconds per page. You claim to have typed 184 pages, which would take a total of 82800 seconds, or exactly 23 hours. You are a liar
You forgot that she was holding down the key. This accelerates the rate at which the f’s appear; once the ‘f’s appear at a rapid rate, it’s about 3.4 seconds per line. Also, 45 lines per page is generous - I counted and given that the page is Times New Roman, 12pt font, it’s about 41 lines.
This means that it’s 139.4 seconds per page, times 184 is 25649.6 seconds, and that rounds out to about 7.1 hours, or 7 hours 7 minutes.
ok from what i can tell there have only been like 4 moderately widespread memes on this site in the past month or so (1. pokemon go meme 2. taylor swift copyright meme 3. “you gotta” 4. halsey lyrics on spongebob caps) which others have noted is a remarkably reduced rate of meme production for this trash site.
while i think the fact that the majority of tumblr’s user base has gone back to school definitely contributes to The Great Meme Depression of 2015 (TGMD 2k15), it cannot be the only explanation. if it was we would see the same Meme Stagnation every year around the same time, which has not been the case. september 2014 gave us unavoidable site-wide phenomena such as madden gifferator, “what’s better than this? guys being dudes,” the rebirth of loss.jpg, steal her look, what are we?, etc.
i propose that the rapid rate of meme production we grew accustomed to in 2014 and early 2015 deflated the staying power of individual memes. our hyper-awareness of memes and the fact that our metatextual analysis of said memes became a meme within itself (”memeology”) conditioned us into constant vigilance in our search for “the next meme.” i mean, for fuck’s sake, the first meme of 2014 was “what’s going to be the first meme of 2014?” and the last meme of 2014 was “is this the last meme of 2014?” with garbage pseudo-intellectual meta we sowed the seeds of our own destruction.
deflation of individual meme value led to an even more dramatic increase in meme production (for evidence, just look at how many memes the blog memedocumentation has explained. and of course, those are only 2015 memes. the fact that memedocumentation does not document pre-2015 memes is another fucking 2015 meme) this lead to an even heavier reliance on what could be referred to as Meme Credit–we were borrowing and resurrecting old memes like pepe and the aforementioned loss.jpg to satisfy the Meme Demand in the absence of concrete, original memes. we were destined to crash when that credit ran out and the vaults of the Meme Banks were emptied.
even now as i reflect on how meme hyper-vigilance and overproduction has destroyed the meme economy, i cannot help but wonder “but what will be the next meme?”
only some kind of……….new deal………a New Meme Deal, if u will, can save us from this Great Meme Depression. in its absence we shall continue to suffer.
potential breakup song by aly and aj > every single song the beatles have ever produced
fuck this post
- people who haven’t listened to the banger that is potential breakup song
ok but have you ever actually listened to The Beatles?
yes they’re boring and old meanwhile potential breakup song goes hard as hell
K BUT FUCK THIS POST
Wait people actually think aly and aj are better than the Beatles. That’s a thing? Every song by the Beatles? Really? Have you heard while my guitar gently weeps, I want you (she’s so heavy), help!, I want to hold your hand, blackbird, oh! darling, hey Jude, good night, can’t buy me love, paperback rider, Eleanor Rigby, ok I could go on forever…
that’s nice but potential breakup song is undeniably better than all of those songs
Seeing this post, as a person who loves music and has educated them self on many genres and eras, makes me want to cut off every person who likes potential breakup song arms and beat them with them. Beatles are the sole reason for that songs existence and were completely revolutionary to compare the two is like comparing skrillex to Bach. It’s just not okay
me, jamming out to potential breakup song: ok cool… anyways…
Clearly you’ve never listened to enough of the Beatles. You probably only know them because, guess what, they were one of the best bands of all time, arguably the very best. in a few years aly and aj will be desperate has-beens. The Beatles have and will endure because they had genuine skill, passion, and talent.
me: *violently shaking my ass to potential breakup song*
You understand that….you just look stupid right ?
me: *looks stupid while enjoying one of the most iconic songs in music history, potential breakup song*
