Hello again,
And welcome to some thoughts on fame, earnestness and (bear with me) TikTok, loosely based around the documentary Meet Me in the Bathroom, which I mentioned in a previous missive.
I really loved this film. It was about the band scene in New York in the late 90s and early 2000s. Mostly about The Strokes, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Interpol. I love this as a subject but I often find documentaries boring. And I think this one in particular had the potential to be extremely bad because it tracked so many different characters, who often didn’t actually know each other, themes, and even historical events (it treated 9/11 in a really fresh way which is very hard to do at this point).
It could easily have been a big mess of disparate information and dry testimonials with a voice over to keep track of a chaotic timeline of exactly when bands got together and fell out. But instead it treated each band almost as its own character with its own very particular relationship to success and New York.
Their different routes to fame created not only a narrative, but narrative tension, really successfully. The Strokes were on this meteoric rise to global stardom while Interpol were self-funding a disastrous tour around grotty pubs in England, on which people kept drunkenly asking if they’d ever met The Strokes, since they all happened to be from New York. It made all the bands seem linked together like sparring characters.
I also loved the way this film treated fame, or maybe what I mean is more that it portrayed a kind of fame which feels distant, innocent, softer and more pure than fame is now. Our culture feels polished and there was a refreshing grottiness to this scene, which I did know about, or expect. But the film also captured an earnestness which I found striking. I don’t know if this is true, or just nostalgic, or even if this will make any sense. But it felt like everyone in Meet Me in the Bathroom wanted to make something more than they wanted to be seen to have made something. And I feel like this has broadly changed since that time.
What is the difference between doing something to do it, and doing something to be seen to have done it? Well there might not be one. And every band did want to be famous, and so seen in that way. But while I was watching Meet Me in the Bathroom I found myself thinking of the way a lot of young (by which I mean younger than me) people use TikTok now.
The people who are attempting to use TikTok to accrue a large following (rather than just for passive entertainment) are much more shrewd and savvy about virality and attention than reporting on this platform tends to give them credit for.
Trends on TikTok tend to be treated as an authentic expression of self, in the sense that a feature about an explosion of content in which young people are talking about wanting to live on a farm and go back to nature might say that this is their reaction to a post-industrialised job market, or a response to being cooped up in lockdown. But the reality (and it was Leia Jospé, the curator of the wonderful FaveTikToks420 instagram account, who first articulated this succinctly to me) is that joining in with a trend on TikTok is simply a way to more easily attract attention to a particular piece of content, or potentially go viral. An explosion of content on TikTok based around a particular theme can be more random than it appears at first glance. One viral video can spur another and then a slew and suddenly a trend, and the trend seems to mean more than it does.
The more interesting thing, I think, than analysing particular trends, is the broader way in which TikTokers use and seek virality, and why. There is a young man I know who I have been speaking to for something I am working on recently. He is incredibly canny about TikTok. He uses viral funny videos to grow an audience, and from that he plans to launch a music career.
He is a musician already, and he also does live shows. But it is very hard to get anyone to pay attention to new music, and to come to a performance by someone they have never heard of. It is much easier to interest people in a short, suggested video that pops up on their phone.
You could call this cynical. But he is a smart young man and this is the way the world is now. He’s smart enough (and I guess earnest enough) to question this too. We spoke about this recently, and he explained he is trying to think carefully about the difference between different kinds of attention. (Which might suggest that, although we are more incentivised to be seen to do something now, it is the doing that many still crave and simply find harder to put into practise. I think I’ll be writing more on this here.)
After our conversation I thought again about Meet Me in the Bathroom and the difference between wanting to do something and to be seen to do it. I suppose the difference now is that attention exists as its own commodity. And a person can generate it almost like money, and then try to apply it to the thing they want to attract attention to (in his case his music). Having to operate in this way is inherently less earnest, less innocent even. I wouldn’t say it’s a bad thing to do (I can’t see the harm it causes to anyone else) but I do think it’s a sad system that people like this smart young man have to participate in. Although maybe that’s just nostalgia too.
I was at a talk recently by Nicole Flattery and Claire-Louise Bennett (who wrote Checkout 19 and Pond) about Nicole’s new book, Nothing Special, which discusses fame in an interesting way. Something Claire-Louise said about social media stayed with me after. She said (and this is paraphrasing) that nobody really has secrets or a private self anymore because everyone shares so much on social media.
I thought this was such an interesting point. I’ve thought about it a lot since. And I wonder for young people if perhaps the opposite is true. I think the things they share on a platform like TikTok are so curated and deliberate that their “self” on that space is essentially a persona they manage, almost totally separate from them as a person. I wonder if it’s more the case that, in the way that attention is its own commodity, the private and public self are becoming separate entities too.
Till next time xxxx
Here are some pre-order links for Lazy City if you are minded to order, for the UK and the US. Pre-orders tell shops that people are interested in and excited about the book which helps the book a lot.
Some Things I Liked Recently:
This interview with Avalon Emerson, in which she talks about the interaction between virality and music too.
Sarah Miller’s essay about her horrible bathroom.
This piece on why everyone is reading Mating by Norman Rush.