Bring Back Artistic Mediocrity
While I was browsing YouTube slop (as one does while revenge bedtime procrastinating on a Tuesday night), I stumbled upon a viral video from 2009 of some bright-eyed young’uns playing music and aimlessly drifting around a park that somewhat resembled the Great Lawn. By the time two-and-a-half minutes had passed, I was mesmerized. One acoustic guitar, one well-worn cello, a chorus of voices singing Holland 1945 by Neutral Milk Hotel, and it soon joined “Leek Dance Farm Girl but in Higher Quality” on my list of all-time personal favorite videos. I couldn’t tell whether this was because of its nostalgic aesthetics or candid atmosphere; the video opens with the lead singer muttering “what the fuck am I talking about?” Everyone looks like they’re dressed for different occasions. There’s a random couple kissing in the background. The girl on the left is wearing a maroon infinity scarf completing an outfit that my chronically-on-Tumblr self would have reblogged at least three times in 2015. Overall, the vibe is undoubtedly “twee” — the shortened version of the word “sweet,” a term that originated in the 1910s, but became increasingly associated with a nostalgic innocence of sorts. But wait! If you’re anything like me, you were six and definitely not white enough to be in this friend group when this video was taken (I’m not counting the two Latino dudes who appear out of nowhere around two minutes in before promptly moving out of frame). That feeling, my friends, is vicarious nostalgia. The wistfulness you might have upon experiencing a time you never lived through through the lens of someone who did.
A few more minutes of browsing (both vicariously and nostalgically) led me to a host of clips of teenagers in scenic locations belting 2000s anthems like All Star and Hey Ya.
There’s a certain je ne sais quoi contained within these snapshots, a countercultural zeitgeist of sorts that describes a time period before we worried about someone filming our open mic night screwup and haunting us on the internet forever. A time before we all shamefully watched that clip of the seven-year old Japanese sisters shredding Raining Blood by Slayer better than we ever will. And as much as I love my fellow Asians for competing to see how wrong we can prove Piaget’s theory of development, I can’t help but wonder: who are these nerdy, candid, joyous, free adolescents, clearly bereft of the existential dread that I see on the faces of my fellow Reedies?
The YouTube channel responsible bears a faceless letter profile picture and is named Mojojojo jax (@weamdebest) which feels apt given the video’s oh-so-random chic. They appear to have posted some similar covers as well as a concerning amount of songs by AJJ before they were popular (concerning, despite the fact that they no longer go by Andrew Jackson Jihad).
In reality, the group was a fairly normal garage band from Riverside, California named Curdle Motif, as established in the video description (they disbanded around 2010). Before that, Hassan Saouli, the lead vocalist and guitarist, and Rosie Danelski, the cellist, went on to obtain a cult following, undoubtedly assisted by the video’s half million views. I admit, I can’t help but appreciate the messiness of it all: the guitar has a badly strung high E, poor Rosie bears a bruise on her chin from apparently falling at school, and a lengthy comment by Mojojojo jax notes that the song’s drummer was his “buddy” Armando. Not only was Armando not a member of the band, he had never even played drums before!
Indeed, the performance is objectively bad: their voices are out-of-sync, the cameraman seems like he took a few too many stimulants, and 35 seconds in, the cellist grins and audibly utters an apology for making a mistake my untrained ears cannot hear. But, if almost forty thousand people found this charming enough to press thumbs-up on some schoolkids’s bored shenanigans, there must be something of merit here. Whether this was a friend group or not is unclear, but this gathering was clearly a repeated occurrence. It’s not their nonchalance — the lead singer literally looks like he’s about to explode — and it’s not the fact that they seem like particularly good friends. The point of my article is that this could be us. I have spoken to hordes of amateur musicians at this school, and even more weirdly large freshman friend groups that never take advantage of the fact that it’s really hard to look stupid in a group.
Also, I want to reiterate the importance of that couple in the background flirting away with no regard to the performers. It's important that we recognize how the recording of this video allows us to impose our nostalgic lens onto the real lives of people who were once teenagers hanging out at a park for whom internet fame was an unimaginable future. In HUM 411 seminar last semester (which everyone should sign up for immediately), we discussed a book called The Right To Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life. Such blatant ignorance of the camera and performers perfectly captures the irretrievable confidence in our oblivion that we lost with the advent of technological surveillance. The author introduces the right to be forgotten with a quote from Joshua Rothman’s writings on Virginia Woolf, who saw privacy as having “something to do with preserving life’s mystery; with leaving certain things undescribed, unspecified, and unknown. It depends on an intensified sense of life’s preciousness and fragility, and on a Heisenberg-like notion that, when it comes to our most abstract and spiritual intuitions, looking too closely changes what we feel… Call it an artist’s sense of privacy.”
If you are like me in that you have tried to learn an instrument through online instruction, you have probably come across countless intrusive ads with video testimonies from some famous artist that promises you excellence. If Jimi Hendrix was alive today, he would probably be in a Skillshare video. I didn’t even know virtuoso music was a legitimate genre until I started learning guitar (Tim Henson from Polyphia, my beloved). On the flip side, I have come across many a belligerent blog post by a middle-aged man lamenting the internet’s democratization of art, with the argument that it normalizes mediocrity. Regardless of which side you fall on–personally, I choose a secret third option that exists off the internet called having a nuanced take– I think we can agree on two things. Making art is fun, and perfectionism sucks. Let this be my call to my fellow Reedies. I want to see bad music in Commons. I want to see stick figure graffiti on the walls of campus (in Minecraft, should Karnell happen to be reading this). Hell, I’d even appreciate some “thinkpiece slop” Quest submissions like this one. Credit to Vincent for that term, although I prefer to call them “slop-eds” myself. As a parting note, I’ll leave you with a quote from Woolf herself from A Room of One’s Own:
"All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures."