In it, he outlines how the community built around Youtube is falling apart now that certain people are treating it as serious business to, y’know, make a living out of what they love to do. The people to blame for the fall of the community, Ben says, are people like Nerimon and Charlieissocoollike and Blade376, all of whom are successful youtubers who are capitalising on their success and trying to squeeze more out of what they have by suggestively titling their videos and jumping on bandwagons.

The example he uses is ‘The Zone’, which he claims is “the new concept from Myles and Charlie”. If it were indeed a new concept for a show by Myles and Charlie, it would back his point up excellently, because it would serve to further themselves with no consideration for the lesser-subscribed members of the community. As it happens, it was Tom Bacon’s end-of-year university project for his course in television production, which both Charlie and Myles (and Alex and Ed and I, as it happens) gave their time for to help out. For free. Tom Bacon has under 1,000 subscribers.

It’s this ignorant, furious approach to trying to kill the cancer that is killing the community that makes nobody any friends and hurts the feelings of a shit-ton of people, myself included. I’m good friends with Alex, and I work with him a lot on his music projects. His new album is something we have both poured our hearts and souls into to make it as exciting, fresh and enjoyable as possible. Alex has put a whole lot of his own money into it too, and won’t see a profit from it for months. I don’t see why an insatiable urge to create and give is something that needs to be derided by people who do the same thing but on a smaller scale.

Nobody is killing the community. The community is shifting and evolving, and you’re angry at how you no longer share the aims that Alex and Charlie are reaching for. Here’s news for you – there was a community way before you even discovered youtube, and you’re as insignificant a speck in it as anyone is. Alex and Charlie are two people who love to communicate, create and entertain, regardless of the commercial success that comes their way. That’s how we all are. And now they’re entering into the real, big, scary world of content creation, they’re having to behave like adults. Does that scare you? Because it fucking should. You can piss around on YouTube making wacky little comedy videos all you want, but if communication and entertainment is your aim, making things that will appeal to a wide range of people and entertaining them successfully is the most admirable and sensible thing to do. Who are you to mock that?

YouTube and the community around it was a freak accident that worked beautifully for so many sweet months before it became bloated and putrid from the accelerated growth it received by people all wanting to cash in on this success. YouTube is a platform for art and creative content, and friendship is for friendship. The two mixed well at the start and friendships and collaborative partnerships have been formed through it in many amazing, successful ways, but the creative aspect outgrew the community a long time ago.

The fuss you kick up about ‘only being in it for the views’ is utterly nonsensical. What else IS there on YouTube? We have our friends, and we have our work, and we keep them separate, and if that offends you, I have no idea why the hell it should. It’s healthy to abandon twitter, it’s healthy to abandon facebook and formspring and tumblr and all the shit that’s out there, because all it does is serve to disseminate informal, poorly-constructed ideas that could be so much better if only you fucking worked on them for a bit. Go for it Ben, say you’re sick of twitter and then whore out your new private twitter account, let people boost your ego without you really doing anything, do your blogtv shows, post your blogs, because people will follow you and tell you you’re brilliant until your head is the size of Antarctica because they’re NICE PEOPLE. But to be a communicator, an entertainer and a proper content creator, some of us have realised that we have to leave all that sickening fake friendy-lovey bollocks behind and focus solely on making things that have some element of worth in the real world with our friends – our real, true friends – the ones we respect enough to collaborate professionally with and strive, through all the difficulties and hard work, to create something that is better than anything ever created before.

Now THAT is a community.

This is amazing. You have outlived seemingly immovable, impenetrable, omnipresent bedrocks of the society you were born into*. Admittedly, you cheated some. You haven’t been a constant feature in the timeline they inhabited, but even so, you were there when they were, and now you are here after they have fallen. This raises so many other questions. How did they fall? When? Where? What has replaced them? But you know none of these can be answered now. There will be plenty of time for research later, since your time machine seems to be a little on the dented side, and you have to get that fixed before you can return. For now, though, you have one more question. “Okay, how about this one?” you say.

“Jesus Christ. Ever heard of him?” There’s a pause, and the people turn to each other. They begin to smile. Then laugh. “Why?” One of them asks. “Who was he?”

“Do you know him then?” You ask**.

“We didn’t know he was a real person. It’s just something you say, isn’t it? Like; ‘Oh, Jesus Christ, not again’, right?”

You tell them you’ll explain later. For now, you’re rather dumbstruck by how interesting this all is. Gosh, it’s interesting.

==========

Time passes, once again at the now rather staid and tedious rate of sixty seconds per minute, and you fix your time machine in a matter of weeks. You learn a lot about this new society, and they learn a lot about you (”You grew up without the Internet? NO WAY.”). Eventually it is time to go home.

But you overshoot, don’t you? You silly little creature, you forgot to fix the dial, and it’s all wonky and you put the numbers in the wrong order, because while you were trying to fix it, a future-woman was telling you something simply fascinating about sentient dishcloths, and now you find yourself in the past, in a long-forgotten society before pens and paper, when the natives worship an omniscient being they call Gordon Bennett.

Tom

*and at this point I apologise to people who fall upward of my target 16-25 demographic, to whom this may not apply.

**I know putting direct speech into your mouth is a tad presumptuous, and not least a little bit insulting to your imagination, which I’m sure could do perfectly well on its own from herein, but… oh, just humour me.

There’s this terrifying perception that somehow in order to get onto this mile-high metaphorical pedestal, one has to contort oneself through a machine that exists in seventeen spatial dimensions. There is a physically human impossibility explained purely by the realm of theoretical science between most ordinary, struggling, desperate artists and the generally held consensus of ‘good art’. This is most prevalent in music (although every aspect of art is just as bloody reprehensible as the next) so forgive me if I seem a little unfairly audiocentric over the next few paragraphs. Here we go…

As a musician, I do a lot of things that a lot of very good musicians do. I listen to Neutral Milk Hotel and weep jealous tears. I read Pitchfork religiously, but at the same time hold a deep-set hatred for the subjectivity of the damn thing, not to mention a wracking fear that they’ll do to me what they did to Jet (namely link to a video of a chimp urinating into its own mouth in lieu of actually reviewing the album. Yeah.) I bash my fists in an impotent catharsis on my piano when I realise that none of the melodies I write are even remotely rememberable, and feel better afterwards. All this, not least Pitchfork’s utterly meaningless but almost obsessively geeky decimal ratings system, has led me to conclude that art is nothing more than a science.

Sure, it’s a lot more free than a lot of sciences out there, but there are artistic merits to mathematics, nobody doubts this. Why should there not be mathematical elements to art? In a way, sure, Xenakis could turn addled strings of numbers into sound, but in a much more mainstream everyman way, art is very scientific.

Way back when humans decided that just being alive and getting laid were tasks far too simple to justify existence, we started to question why we were alive. We soon began to consider the fact that perhaps we’d evolved into something that was beyond the constraints of what life intended and could provide, and so in order to further understand ourselves and create an exhaustive compendium of emotion and human transaction, we invented the most complex, distortive lens known to existence, and have fed ourselves through it ever since to produce paintings, records, books, drawings on walls, CDs, and data that will keep us alive well into the next millennium. Because of this long history and because of this ridiculous pedestal that is supported ever more by increasing numbers of people rushing to its base and lifting it above their heads in a massive pyramid of humanity, ever further towards the vanishing point in the sky, it’s very easy to believe that there’s a mystic, magical element to its creation that somehow is inaccessible to people. This is untrue. Every book ever written or translated into the english language is made of the same 26 letters. I know this is trite and oft-mentioned, but it’s worth considering again. Every popular song you have ever heard can be expressed as a wave. There is no song so magical and so astonishing that it does not conform to the physical motion of particles through air. Particles don’t care if Jeff Mangum has released a new compilation of early Synthetic Flying Machine demos. Particles will transfer those sounds to your ears just as they would a new collection of classical renderings of Andrew WK songs. We write this stuff, and the universe doesn’t give a single god-damn. We still have to conform to its regulations. We still have to do as it says.

We look upon the world that spawned us as sort of beneath us now, even though it’s, like, where we came from. We’re just a precocious kid disowning its parents, and the parents are just sitting back silently taking it because they love us. Look at a squirrel or a mushroom or an oak tree – they’re all perfectly in tune with themselves, to a level of harmony beyond what any human being could possibly achieve. We reject everything we know as inferior and yet here we are being unable to raise our children, being unable to even sustain our home, being unable to even finish our own god-damn lives to the extent where we will end it ourselves. We’ve managed to synthesise every other aspect of it apart from the animalistic part of our brain that controls crying and laughing and hitting our heads against walls while making weirdly quiet, deep little groaning noises. The intelligent part of our brains is there to try and make sense of – and create art out of – the impulses of that ancient slouching ape living inside our skulls. It’s an eternal struggle for mankind to be more than mankind can be, but the beauty of it lies in the fact that every single piece of it fails to do that, and simply becomes an expression of unique struggle instead. That horrible seventeen-dimensioned machine I mentioned earlier? That’s not what you need to go through to become an artist. It’s what art IS.

Art is occasionally, like Daniel Johnston’s recordings, or the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, beautiful because of the way it’s been created, because of the back-story to it, because of its context. Art is occasionally, like The Flaming Lips’ more mainstream albums, or the writings of David Foster Wallace, beautiful because of the very pleasure immersing yourself in them brings. But art is always beautiful because it is unerringly, indelibly, human. And so are you.

References:

“Pitchfork’s utterly meaningless but almost obsessively geeky decimal ratings system” adapted from “its utterly unscientific but geekily precise 10-point album-rating scale” – http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.09/pitchfork.html

“Look at a squirrel or a mushroom or an oak tree – they’re all perfectly in tune with themselves” http://pitchfork.com/features/interviews/5847-neutral-milk-hotel/

Yeah, that’ll do.

Verse seems timeless
Such is time lodged deep
Into its frame
Into its shape. But

There was that one
Time when somebody
Put pen to paper
Wrote the words; and

Thought to pause
Part-way across the paper.

Up on the pebble riviera,
Great stegosaurus stumbling crunches rare
But loud within the crashing of the sea,
Relentless, cool.
Hesitation and the pounding
Thumps, great thumps and froth again
Against the floor and floundered bed
Never alone.

Up on the pebble riviera
Where the future once was
Pebbles slowly turning in their graves
Are ground by waves
Into the sands of time.

To fuck a greasy axe-wound
Readily
And improbably certain,

He plays her
In the only way he knows,
Certain, ground and dusty;
Through her and overcompensating
In the dark of all-night

And when the lights shine on,
Objective,
White heat played raw to death,

To death! And to each,
His own drives on and on
Without a change in thought
Or practice.