Lurking at stars

Everyone will have their 15 megabytes of fame. Not in the future, but right now, in the g-force-free zone that is the Internet. Bypassing traditional obstacles like education, money, or talent, on the Net, it’s not the industry connections you have that count, but the hyperlinks you accumulate. The Warhol truism has been shifted to DSL dimensions where broadbandits roam free and wild. Until the next revolution, cheap-fame chasers, pack up your bags and head south to the valleys of ether – if you haven’t already.

A few years ago in college, my Cybersociety professor with a really bad beard style (he shaved just above his jaw line to give the impression, however failed, of skinnier jowls) asked the strange question, "But is it possible to be famous on the Internet?" While this existential dilemma seems evidentially moot now, back then my bearded prof sounded like a riddling Zen koan. Is it possible to be famous just on the Internet, without already being a pop star, porn star or any kind of entity with cachet in "older" media? E-mail pranksters aside, we couldn’t name anyone who has risen from rag html-tags to superstardomain from the sheer fact of just being on the Internet.

Older, wiser, and more duplicitous now. The truth about achieving Internet infamy is that it does not lie in how much relevance you have in the outside world, because it exists purely within its own realm. Those who have managed to gain a rabid cult following without lifting a finger to work, but just by being their bitchy and intelligent selves, are those who blog – but blog with style, aplomb, and a modicum of proper grammar. Even highly personal, driveling blogs can aspire to greatness, and the Internet has proven to be the shortest cut to achieving low-rent popularity.

Blogomania

Now whoever hasn’t googled their name at least once in their life is a liar, or lives in the buttcrack of technology. One rueful afternoon some bored and slightly vain friends of mine, who also happened to be writers, stumbled across their names in someone’s own candid and well-written blog. There were praises and there were criticisms, and it was a strange new feeling to be confronted so completely in this indirect manner. Alas, the wall had been irretrievably broken between anonymous private readership and authorial authority. My friends decided to post comments on the girl’s blog, either thanking her or launching into defensive harangues.

The girl, who had previously – and perhaps obliviously – been writing along to her heart’s content about everything, from what she had for breakfast to cosmic ruminations, now faced the possibility of reprisal, and felt the disturbing need to censure herself in the future. While bloggers often form online relationships with readers and fans, a certain weirdness unfolds when bloglife crosses over into waking reality, and the cloak of invisibility that blogging affords is suddenly pulled off, Harry Potter-like. The imaginary returns, again, to the frighteningly and mundanely real. Unable to bear the sudden outside attention her little world was getting, the girl closed down her blog and moved it elsewhere.

Of course, the very nature of blogging is private exposure. If you didn’t want people to read and adore, you’d chain your tormented thoughts to your diary. Another friend of mine, who requests anonymity, decided to test these parameters. He, or rather his unapologetically delusional alter ego, created a blog with the plume de guerre "Queen of the Universe." He bitched wittily, ranted profanely and insulted thoroughly, creating an entire system of royal decrees, bylaws and commandments, just to see how narcissistic and offensive he could get without being distastefully obscene.

Readers, God bless them, lapped it all up. They worshipped obediently and demanded souvenir T-shirts, which he gladly made and gave away. He had a readership of more than 300, not counting lurkers, here and abroad. He once entered a bar and people spontaneously rose up, chanting his name. He realized it was getting too much when passers-by started curtsying to him on the street. Not wanting a conflation of his public identity and his online persona, which really started as an experiment in sociological warfare, he shut down his blog, and stuck to writing for a magazine. Long live the queen!

To blog or not to blog? As someone once said, "Why blog when you have a column."

Self-obsessed diaryism aside, many blogs out there do fill in the gaps that journalism often leave behind in its trad-media mission. Vanity Fair’s James Wolcott claims, in his article "The Laptop Brigade," that far from drowning in B-list blogorrhea, we are seeing the best thing to hit journalism since the rise of the political pamphlet, referring to the numerous political blogs penned by independent professionals who are challenging mainstream media. Indeed the opinion-makers to watch out for will be coming from a bedroom dot com and not CNN or the New Yorker, and some are taking it a step further by uploading video clips of little news items they documented (no, not the Paris Hilton kind), known as vlogging. Personally, I like to keep track of celebrity gossip at blog-zines like Gawker (lightning-quick journalism at its juiciest) and bogus headlines at The Onion (cultural reporting at its most revealing), and leave what one had for breakfast committed only to toilet paper.

Of Mice And Music

A few weeks ago I rather belatedly caught the Net buzz about a certain DJ Danger Mouse. He did something not so unusual to po-pomo con-fusionists, that is, weld together two seemingly incongruous cultural artifacts to make something new without really making anything new. In the spirit of the mash-up, which takes the vocals from one track and lays them over the beats of another track, Danger Mouse forcibly married Jay-Z’s "The Black Album" to The Beatles’ "The White Album," whose mulatto offspring is naturally, "The Grey Album." Reviews hailed it as brilliant and the cleverest thing to recently come out of the illegal underground, so I downloaded the whole album expecting to be amazed. What I heard was a straightforward rendition of Jay-Z blisteringly rap over a few noodles of Beatlesque riffs, nothing particularly ingenious, in fact mostly annoying, proving that mash-ups are merely cheap tricks of the musically uncreative. The only song that really works is Change Clothes, which was jauntily tuned to the equally quirky Piggies. Who really wants to hear Britney vs. Nirvana, Eminem mixed with Earth Wind and Fire? If it ain’t broke, don’t break it.

What’s significant about "The Grey Album" is its place in the ongoing bullpen of copyright law and the pirate seas of cyberspace. The record label that owned the rights to The Beatles’ album raised helter, and demanded that all copies of Danger Mouse’s bedroom banger be pulled off the shelves, figuratively, because it was only available online or circulated on burnt CDs. Jay-Z, on the other hand, totally dug it and wanted a copy. Of course he did – "The Black Album" was released in a vocals-only version for these very viral purposes. Open source advocates rose up mouse in arms, and rebutted with "Grey Tuesday" a symbolic day of online protest against greedy rec execs, censorship, and for the freedom of, er, creative musical expression. On Danger Mouse’s tail comes DJ En-Wee, who also not for profit but obviously boredom slapped together "The Black Album" and Pavement’s already perfect "Slanted and Enchanted" to come up with "The Slack Album," proving that titles are the mother of invention. Because these mash-ups can only be obtained via file-sharing networks, and news of its existence is spread word-of-mouth, or rather, word-of-blog, we could say that DJ Danger Mouse is something approximating one of the first Internet superstars.

But only for all of 15 megabytes of your memory.

Give <3 to audreycarpio@yahoo.com