here we are now, entertain us
Perhaps now is as good of a time as any to reflect on what it is like to feel stupid and contagious.
This week was the twenty-sixth anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death. On April 8, 1994 A VECA employee found Cobain’s body when he arrived to install security lighting. The coroner concluded that Cobain died on April 5 from a gunshot wound. On April 10 fans held a memorial at Seattle Center vigil where a recording played of Courtney Love reading a portion of the suicide note aloud. Kurt opened the letter with a salutation to Boddah, his childhood imaginary friend. He closed it with a Neil Young lyric, “it’s better to burn out than fade away” which Love resolutely warned her listeners to not adhere to because , as she put it, “it’s a fucking lie.”
What is there to say about Kurt Cobain's death that 26 years of revision has not already uttered? Well, last week Pearl Jam released their newest album Gigaton. And when Cobain’s contemporaries are still making work it's hard not to wonder what he'd be making today. Eddie Vedder's voice always draws me back to my adolescence.
Joan Didion recommends that we stay on nodding terms with our former selves, lest they show up unannounced one day strapped with a bomb on their vest and a list of demands. I can picture my former self, maybe 13, holding in my hands finally the album TEN. There's a slight crack on the jewel case. I nod to him often.
In those days the luxury of a Compact Disc was in the ease of skipping songs. And though we didn’t know it, the CD was the last audio medium to truly give meaning to the term album and the pairing of artwork and music like a cut of medium-rare Kobe with a young Tempranillo. The concept of album is now only a concept. Listening to an album from start to finish is not just a pastime of our youth, it is a pastime entirely foreign to newer generations. We once only listened to the music we could buy or else borrow. We’d listen to even the forgettable songs that we have not thought of in years. I think back to that boy in his wallpapered room— he hasn't thrown out his Legos yet, nor developed a taste for coffee, but here he was listening to “Jeremy” the album’s sixth track, about a young boy who shows up at school with a gun and shoots himself in front of the class as a response to being bullied. It's morbid nostalgia to think that a school shooting once only involved a suicide and not a murderous rampage first. Today Eddie Vedder would have to pen a different song about Jeremy where the business end of the gun was first turned on the world.
And this brings me to TikTok—Generation Z's answer to escaping existential malaise. In this quarantine- and yes “this” because I fear there will be several more installments of quarantine— I decided out of two-parts curiosity, one-part boredom, and one heaping dose of procrastination, to download the latest sensation application. I expected to be befuddled and confused as I was when I ran a similar experiment with Snapchat a year ago. Instead, on my first tour through the app, I found no barriers to entry as long as I knew how to swipe my thumb. I passed enough time for a full PT Anderson film to barrel through one wall of my apartment and out the other.
TikTok is an impossible conflagration of sex and cleverness driven mainly by Generation Z and I found myself unable to look away. Upon arrival I was summarily served to a thirty second video of a teenage girl sitting shotgun in a parked car while her mother was in the driver’s seat, aloof to the prank about to be pulled: The girl began lip syncing to Mulatto’s verse on the song Nasty Nasty— “I like em nasty, suck on that di%k without asking…” The mother in the video reacts, horrified, and tries to grab the phone to shut it off, the teenage girl laughs and continues the lyrics, “He put his thumb in…” and then the video starts over. It’s possible that the video was staged, but it is tempting to believe it is real. I find myself in the mother’s shoes, watching her daughter make innuendo for a broad audience of strangers on the internet, trying to stop her from doing it. But staged or not, the teenage girl was doing something right, at least in the currency of social media, if such a thing exists. The video has over one million likes. To issue a like all you have to do is touch the heart with your thumb. To move on, you merely have to swipe up.
I spent half the length of Boogie Nights swiping up.
As I scrolled, I began to understand the pattern at work: See Something, Do Something. I found a series of 15 second videos which promised to teach me four simple moves in order to learn an optical illusion shuffle dance to a mesmerizing beat. It looked simple enough, even my two left feet could handle it. Of course, what the fifteen second tutorial omits is that it is really helpful to have years of dance experience to execute the steps.
Then I found another popular series where a girl smiles at the camera for about ten seconds as a rave song plays in the background, and at the ninth second the lyrics moan an ecstatic “mmmyeah” which the girl lip syncs to while grabbing her hair and rolling her eyes in the back of her head, feigning orgasmic pleasure. The video ends and instantly begins again.
The videos were not all sexual, many were impossibly clever. A teen would tape their iPhone to a drill to create a spinning effect, or else tape their iPhone to the inside of a dryer, or they might pull a prank on their parents. The video that recurs the most is of a girl walking into the frame wearing a robe or sweatpants, hair in a bun, and when the beat of the music drops, she jumps. When she lands she is now fully dressed, hair done, and make-up applied. It’s a clever way of showing the costumes we put on to express ourselves.
TikTok quickly learned that I spend a lot of time on the dog videos, and so gave me more of what I craved. A dog staring at the camera, jowls all adroop, with the FaceTime tone ringing and a caption explaining to whom and for what purpose the pup is making the call— “calling dad because my tennis ball is under the couch” or “calling mom because dad flipped my ears back and won’t put them back.” These, I could watch all day. And if not careful, I might.
Finally I found videos of a ping-pong ball traveling through a maze of dominoes and hairdryers traversing a two story house and ending up miraculously on the billiard table sinking an eight ball.
It is all pornography. No, not pornography. It’s a pornography compilation with the burdensome foreplay and pillow talk trimmed on the cutting room floor. Videos that take David Mamet’s maxim taken to the last possible degree: get in at the last possible moment, get out faster.
I’m still amazed how quickly time passes on these applications. Undeniably, it is a drug, and one that is quite powerful. And like any powerful drug, while under its spell I feel a temporary lift on the ban of immortality. In those moments I cease to age. I can pretend I still have time ahead of me and anything is possible. I can become beautiful in a single leap. Somewhere in the dim recesses of mind, I know I cannot, but that “cannot” is not so loud anymore, not so present.
Visiting Instagram an hour later felt like visiting MySpace in 2010. The images did not move, nor tantalize, nor reveal or impress. It felt like AM radio after a concert. A cup of decaf at seven in the morning. It felt much like what it feels to hold a cracked jewel case of Pearl Jam’s TEN and think, “without a CD player, do I still have use for this?” The answer might be yes, but why then does the compact disc remain in a plastic bin in my closet?
The easiest thing in the world for me to do would be to pass critical judgment on this new phenomenon. I can toss a stone and hit a dozen studies that show that social media use is crippling the mental health of young people. I imagine TikTok, which is Instagram on amphetamines, will only increase or amplify these findings. The harder thing for me to do would to become curious, to ask why this application is taking off with the new generation.
When authorities first announced the quarantines, they advised us using the terminology, “Shelter In Place.” This, understandably, caused some trauma for Generation Z who has been practicing “Shelter In Place” exercises for years in the event of a “Jeremy” at their school. This was quickly re-branded to“Shelter-At-Home.” And for a Generation to be told they are no longer safe at school and now no longer safe outside their homes, I understand their resistance to foreplay. Time is short. Get to the point.
Or maybe things haven’t changed as much as we think. The 13 year old in the wallpapered room also holds a tape cassette purchased at a Walmart outside of Little Rock. No crack in the plastic. On the cover is a smiling baby floating in a pool, unaware that he will drown in the coming minutes if not for help from without. Cobain paints the picture on Side A in the opening stanza of the anthem of my generation:
Load up on guns, bring your friends
It's fun to lose and to pretend
She's over-bored and self-assured
Oh no, I know a dirty word.