“Honey, what’s good on YouTube tonight?” The dancing, for starters.
I’ve seen bootie dancing (var. sp. of “booty dancing”: belly dancing displaced). I’ve seen breakdancing. I’ve seen birds dancing (the best known a sulphur-crested cockatoo high-stepping to the Backstreet Boys). I’m not a particular aficionado of dance; this just happens to be where things lead. You go to America’s most popular non-pornographic video-uploading website and click through the rat-maze portals meant to guide your itinerary—Videos being watched right now, Most popular, Featured videos—and what you see, after hours of what my friend calls “click trance,” is endless music and dancing. Six-year-olds dancing to hardstep. Elementary school children performing incredible sequences to “Dance Dance Revolution” in their living rooms. Then more adults: people dancing at pool parties; dancing at slip-n-slide parties; dancing at New Year’s Eve parties. Of course I’ve also seen YouTube’s most popular clip, “The Evolution of Dance.” This longtime holder of the title has been screened eighty-eight million times, at this writing. I can’t personally account for more than ten of those viewings, I’m sure. But I do find my way back to it, often.
The utterly amateur “Evolution of Dance” has been made the single most-viewed clip of all time because it expresses the essence of most of the other fundamentally amateur content on YouTube—it incarnates the deep character of what, at least so far, viewers and especially the uploaders of videos look to YouTube to provide. I’m sure you’ve seen it already, but let me describe “The Evolution of Dance” for the edification of future generations. The onstage amateur being filmed is a man named Judson Laipply, who bills himself as an inspirational comedian. He is in a setting that can only be described as “talent show minimal.” He stands on a cheap-looking black stage and is filmed from far away, presumably from a seat in the audience on the floor. This is not the simulation of crappy talent show filming: the most popular YouTube clip of all time is, in fact, a crappily made talent video. He has a stool, as comedians do, to one side, and a microphone also to the side. You can hear the laughter and cheers of the crowd throughout the routine along with the tinny musical soundtrack coming over the room’s PA. Judson wears an “Orange Crush” t-shirt, jeans, and is a white guy with hair receding—perfectly ordinary, to all appearances, at the start. He’s in a spotlight which later follows him with a slight nervous or incompetent delay when he dances to the left. Because he is about to dance, to do the “Evolution of Dance”: what I expected when I first read the title was cavemen to Balanchine, but what transpires—from the beginning strains of a medley of music that runs from Elvis Presley and Chubby Checker to Eminem and Jay-Z—is that with super-elasticity, to every single snippet of these songs, in good synchrony and with a seamlessly choreographed transition from one posture into the next, inspirational comedian Judson, like a mannequin burst into motion, springs into a dance that perfectly fits. The incredible joy of the thing is manifold: first, seeing his Gumbylike ability to do so many different styles, to become anything and anyone; second, the ingenuity and athleticism with which such a kinetic medley was invented by which he would transform himself, recognizably to us, into everyone else; and third, shading into this, the fact of recognition that we just as instantly know each of the songs and each one of the dance moves that goes with it. For the defining feature of the music and its dances is that they cover “evolution” only through a period exactly coterminous with television, therefore with dances known from screens like the one we are watching. These are not folk dances. This is not the reel or the quadrille leading to the waltz. We know how to Elvis-dance because of Ed Sullivan, and the unseen pelvis, and all of those movies, from Jailhouse Rock to Blue Hawaii; we know the Twist from crowd footage of that mania. Then when Judson does John Travolta’s “I’ve got a finger in my pocket, I’d better point it” move to the Bee Gees; when he transitions to “Y.M.C.A.,” as taught by the Village People on Solid Gold and 70s TV, the letters carved with his body, we are seeing dances that we have also converted from television into our own dances at weddings and bar mitzvahs—and when he drops down and does “the Worm,” it is the same effect; and again when he does “the Robot” to Styx (“Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto!”); and when he does the “Running Man,” and MC Hammer’s “Hammer Dance”—to when he definitively enters the last twenty years, getting huge laughs and cheers from the audience because the recognitions become more and more surprising, you see how much of all of our dancing is known to us now only from televised choreography, from music videos, from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” and from the marionette moves of ’N Sync.
There are many great clips on YouTube, but this is the greatest because it perfects the fusion of the two major reference points of YouTube video as it exists right now (perhaps everything will be different in a year): the talent show—the performance and display of individual talents of the most traditional kind—and bits of television pulled from elsewhere, especially that bastard form, the music video, the three-minute montage set to a song that even MTV abandoned in the 1990s. That’s not to say that these two things, amateur talents and stolen professional TV, are all there is on YouTube; you could never say all there is on YouTube, because there is always more. Someone will always be there to say to you the words “dogs pooping,” and indeed on plugging that phrase into the search box there will be footage of dogs pooping: on ice, on the sidewalk, in the park. Yet the things one comes to “naturally” on YouTube, by clicking through, are heavily weighted to the following options: dancing, singing, and instrumentals (expert and inexpert), skateboarding, bike tricks, car and motorcycle accidents (caught on tape by traffic cameras), momentary “America’s Funniest Home Video” miscues and bloopers, and, finally, short bits of talking to the camera.
The strangest and most effective genre of clips—the form of video satisfying to the maximum number of people for the minimum amount of effort—may be simply this: footage of absolutely anything whatsoever, silenced and set to a soundtrack. For example, a car show: engine after chrome engine of open-hooded Mustangs, set to heavy metal. With a tremendous power of darkness, the music sets the mood of these V8s, so you can ignore the daytime—the happy people sitting on lawn chairs at the side, the beach balls, the barbecuing—and fully take in the automotive rock ‘n’ roll dread.
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So, some initial theorems would be: talent = YouTube; talent + music = YouTube; practically anything + music = YouTube. All of the results are interesting and watchable. Yet here is another way to frame the new medium in an equation: internet video – pornography = YouTube.
YouTube is in some sense created by the primary exclusion of porn. Rigorous and even ruthless policing seems to be what allows the new medium to exist at all. Pornography is a subsidiary genre in most media—the film, the novel, even photography—but somehow the internet had to be completely saturated with porn, swimming, really, in pornographic videos, before something like YouTube could come to join it. In the very short time since the internet’s invention, internet video by amateurs has been almost entirely, ubiquitously, of people having sex.
See if you can retrieve, in your non-computer memory, this image: a small window on the old CRT screen of “amateur” people grainily humping. The first time you waited patiently for the upload and saw such a thing, at the end of the twentieth century, you couldn’t have known you were looking at a major new video form. Especially when this crude image at first looked so much like old pornographic nickelodeons and stag films; and where it was confusingly mixed in with professional porn, broadcast through other websites. But on the internet, the amateur, apparently self-produced, self-uploaded form turned out to be the fundamental genre, even when creepy professional exploiters entered to film or disseminate “amateurs” (as the lines blurred) after the huge underground pool of self-exposers was struck like a gusher of oil just beneath decorum’s crust.
The classic explanation of porn’s success on the internet was that it furnished a new private medium—solitary, visual, and intimately sized—creating a special opportunity for arousal for those who could use it for a solitary and intimate activity, masturbation. There was an odd kind of isomorphism where, typing and clicking on your keyboard, especially on a laptop, it seemed the object of desire itself was put into your hands (or lap). Nakedness and humping were easy to find, access, hide, and revisit. “Sex” seemed the basic abstraction in all of this. One was viewing “sex.” Yet with the amateurs, one begins to see that sex was not the only appeal, otherwise the internet would have been completely conquered by the professionals. Something else was going on. What YouTube tells us, hit after millionth hit, is that we like watching amateurs. We don’t necessarily just want to see them standing around, either (the 24-hour non-pornographic webcams like JennyCam seem to have gone out of fashion some years ago). No, we like to see them perform, whatever the performance may be.
Amateur pornography swept the internet not only because it was the most immediately arousing of instant genres, but because it was the performance par excellence which requires no talent. One only needs the willingness to be seen, or shown: one doesn’t have to be especially good at humping (though of course in a wide enough selection people will make judgments on the quality of anything, and the comment-and-rating interfaces of some post-your-own porn websites allowed viewers to act as judges of every show).
The pornlessness of YouTube, meanwhile, is paradoxically accentuated by its ruses and teases used to lead you off-site, to where real porn exists, just a mouse-click away. There seem to be countless triple-X promises made by women (well-covered in underwear) with web addresses begging you to visit them someplace else; these videos, too, seem to exist only till they’re caught, like animals loose in the zoo, and tranquilized and taken down by YouTube’s vigilant monitors—professionals tasked with this work of culling, following the allegedly huge citizen-army of YouTube viewers deciding what isn’t okay (if the inappropriate content is flagged for review). People still do search for nudity in this one place where you are guaranteed not to find it—I know I’ve looked—where even a video labeled “Britney Spears topless photos” does not show Britney Spears “topless” but an endlessly repeated zoom of her bare shoulders and neck. (That one has twenty-three and a half million hits.)
Remove the sex act from self-display and real old-fashioned talents return to the fore—my beloved dancing and singing, for example. But the traditional talents are, I’ve noticed, now mainly mediated talents: very few people break through on YouTube with songs they have written themselves, but very many garner clicks with performances of famous songs from other people. No one makes it very far with an improvised guitar solo, but there are vast webs of appreciation for people who can play (only their hands and guitar neck showing) a breakdown from Jimi Hendrix or Jimmy Page.
Sadly, the talent which has not yet emerged to my satisfaction is one of my favorites, that of talking. YouTube is full of things called v-logs, or vlogs, short for video logs, but connected in spirit to the early text blogs. They are, by and large, awful. I think they are so bad because they’re monologues addressed to an audience which cannot give immediate feedback and force adjustments. Even the low-end talk shows one finds on community access television or college radio have guests and interlocutors to keep things moving, whereas vlogs usually only have a mute and infinitely patient screen-mounted webcam. The highest talent these vloggers could rise to, drawn from the non-internet world, would seem to be stand-up comedy, and most vlogs are meant to be comic (or ranting, in the manner of talk show ranters and talk radio ranters). But good ranting is hard to find performed by people who are utterly alone. Talking on the web is best when it’s done in passion to someone, and taped surreptitiously or by paparazzi (as we know from TMZ.com); talking into a webcam at the top of a home monitor does not bring out the same genius performance principle that even solitary dancing or playing the guitar or stripping does. This, then, is another reason for the preponderance of music on YouTube: like at parties, it substitutes for anyone having to talk.
In fact, the talkers are at their best when they are writing satirical lyrics for the music video parodies which are one of the newly emerging YouTube genres (professional record-company music videos have found a second life on YouTube anyway). The music already exists, ripe for parody; the three minute format of a pop song seems to be about the length that can be managed with home editing equipment, and it conveniently matches the attention span of the viewer forced to listen to words. Indeed, the most talky songs are the most ripe for parody, which suggests that there may be ways to rehabilitate talking-performance after all.
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The biggest mistake you could make about YouTube would be accepting the idea that it allows individuals to make television. Television remains a capital-intensive and employee-intensive medium. It has ceded no ground. The videos on YouTube have very little to do with situation comedy or teleplay drama, and they even have surprisingly little to do with experimental or personal cinema—a form that individuals with less capital have found ways to use in the past. In fact, the single strongest intersection of YouTube with television is when people post things recorded from television. You can see the best soccer goals of the week, and gaffes in interviews, and bits of Japanese, Spanish, and Lebanese television (including Lebanese bellydancing); just as you can find Adorno from German television and assorted intellectuals debating on French talk shows and, indeed, assorted clips from talk shows and sports and game shows all over the world.
This fact points to an immense capability of YouTube: that it could become a comprehensive archive for television, the medium which has never had a publicly accessible archive. People post old commercials and theme songs and scenes from their favorite shows—I have no idea how they already possess them—and, again, musical performances by the great and gone, and we finally have contact with what has been lost and invisible to us except in fugitive memory. (I spent an evening watching ads from my childhood and have once again seen the Honeycomb Cereal commercial where André the Giant appears: memory confirmed; the great and gone revived; plus that catchy jingle!)
If YouTube begins the job of archiving television, it unfortunately also replicates the mistake of television, its memorylessness, by lacking a usable archive of its own content. Items come and go, and though it’s possible to see what’s Most Popular (Today), Last Week, and Last Month, one cannot go back to a single day or week or month of traffic specifically to see what was popular then. So YouTube becomes another of these media without a recorded history—never mind that long-gone historical television clips disappear for copyright reasons as soon as the capital-rich media conglomerates discover them—never mind that there are ever more third-party companies devoted to discovering and rooting out this copyrighted material. And that is why, despite its fathomless reservoir of our talents, foibles and entertainments, YouTube is not truly ours. YouTube will never be an accurate representation of “us” until it allows us to juxtapose in one space all copyrighted visual specimens made by Hollywood alongside a chronological archive of all the singing, satire, accident, and, yes, bootie dancing, done in response to Hollywood—as homage, parody, or substitution—in our millions of amateur bedrooms.
