Fashion can be a pretty confusing thing at times. Mostly it's a matter of judging whether a person actually strove to achieve the look they are presenting or whether covering their bodies was a matter of haphazardly reaching into a drawer hungover on a Wednesday morning to throw on whatever they first come across to meet the societal standard of not walking around nude. Whatever a person's motive of dressing, there is a mechanism in our brain that has to decide whether what they're wearing is appropriate, and even that can be confusing. Our culture has Lady Gaga, and with that example I probably don't need to delve any further into that.
However, there is one ubiquitous piece of clothing where there is a culturally wide understood rubric for wearing. That, my friends, is the Three Wolf Moon shirt:
Yes. Let me break down the general interpretation our society has for a male wearing this shirt, based on age:
0-12 yrs: You have very cruel parents. 13-27: You are a hipster. 28-52: You are a virgin. 53-100: You either forgot how to do laundry or just don't give a fuck anymore. 101+: You are God.
If you are a female, the breakdown remains the same, but in addition you are a furry and you probably enjoy watching annoying anime.
My question is: what if I run across a normal looking guy/girl walking down the street, perhaps on their way to pick up prescriptions from the drug store or getting a Jamba Juice, wearing this shirt? Could it be that they don't know? Should I go up to them and tell them? Warn them of the dangers associated with wearing a Three Wolf Moon t-shirt? I know with certainty that everyone else around would be silently judging them, thinking they are a hipster virgin with parent issues. Would I be just as cruel as the silent judgers for not giving this single victim enlightenment?is
Nah, what am I talking about, I'd be laughing my ass off on the inside.
The Gregory Brothers, masterminds behind the "Autotune the News" phenomenon that has swept the internetz for the past few months, released a new video today in which they use the same gag to contextualize the most recent Christine O'Donnell ad.
Clever? Funny? meh, how about predictable?
These guys have essentially been running off of the same fuel that pop culture has fed them for over a year, a movement which dates back to mid-2009 when everyone unanimously confirmed that autotune actually sucks (you know when Jay-Z titles a single "Death of Autone," that shit is dead). The joke of autotune, which The Lonely Island perfectly encapsulated last year with "I'm On a Boat," is that every song produced like this sounds exactly the same and that it takes virtually no talent to make a song melodized by autotune. This is a joke that the world apparently missed, as the "I'm On a Boat" legitimately features T-Pain (who, in the video, doesn't appear to realize it's meant to be funny) and the song was nominated for a Grammy. Yep, a Grammy - that thing that all musicians strive for. Around this same time, The Gregory Brothers started also making videos parodying autotune pop songs, this time by autotuning news anchors during reports, a typical youtube-esque farce that was sure to garner a couple hundred thousand views. However, they made their big breakthrough when they leeched the meme bandwagon and autotuned the infamous "Double Rainbow" video this summer and then proceeded to do the same thing for Antoine Dodson's "Bed Intruder Rant."
Oddly enough, these remakes of established humor videos have ended up getting more attention and views than the originals themselves (together they have almost amassed 50,000,000 views). The strange part to me is that these 'parodies' add essentially nothing to the existing humor: the relevance of the autotune jokes has already long passed and there is otherwise no insightful commentary to make them worthy parodies. So why are they still getting so much attention?? I guess there's no point in me griping about the quality of youtube - it's a world where the popularity of the absurdly annoying Fred is enough to get him his very own distributor for a full-length movie, and Justin Bieber's music video for "Baby" is the most watched video of all time. Still, these guys are well aware of what they are doing: they rob viral videos for views and attention. It's a cheap and effective strategy that has probably gotten them plenty of online sales (their autotune songs are available on iTunes, and if anything happens on the internet, there is merchandise for you to buy referencing it.) Remember, these guys are just using a technique that they have already established takes virtually no effort to employ and rehashing stolen jokes out with them. For me it's just disappointing to see a group of people who apparently boast great talent demean themselves to such cheap tricks, and watch the undiscerning world of the internet gobble it up. By saying "great talent," I mean that they are all established musicians who have a legitimate EP out, which supposedly embraces their true musical nature. Whether or not it's good will inevitably be irrelevant, though - to the internet they will always be known as the "Autotune the News" guys and nothing else. God damn the power of infectious melodies.
