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“ONE FINDS CONTENT’S WORTH LESS
-TENT’S WORTH LESS
-TENT’S WORTH LESS
ATTITUDE IS WORTH SO MUCH
MORE
IT’S ME, BALDASSARE”
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I.
Watch these two videos. It’s important, I promise.II.
I’ll be honest: there’s not really a point to this blog. I don’t mean this post specifically, I mean this entire blog is just going to be whatever I feel like shitposting about at the time. There’s no overarching theme, no big endgoal, no important questions I’m trying to answer. I’m just an overconfident university student doing what we in the Deep South (of London) refer to as “chatting breeze”. However, if there’s one well that I’ll tend to draw from again and again, it will be the changing face of the Internet over the years. In my view, understanding the history of the culture of the Internet, not just events that happened on, or because of, the Internet, is the key to understanding modern life.“Okay then, random shit,” I hear you sigh. “So why have you given the blog that fancy Italian name?” Well, my impatient one, subverting expectations is fun, for starters. I like to imagine the reaction of someone clicking on a link expecting tasteful discussion of the Renaissance or Tuscan food or something, and then being bombarded with videos about chicken shops and links to Urban Dictionary and obscurantist philosopher-bloggers. Secondly, what sprezzatura means is “studied carelessness,” - it translates into my beloved Multicultural London English as “slyly deeping it” - and this, to me at least, means everything.
III.
I’ll elaborate. Once you have the idea pointed out to you, you’ll see it everywhere, and not just because of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. It’s one of those intuitive concepts that you’ve probably thought of before, you just didn’t realise it had a name, or at least a fancy Italian name. You can see it in the purposeful adoption of 'rustic' techniques like not actually peeling potatoes properly for more authenticity. You can see it in the idea of pre-ripped jeans. You can see it in the fact that one of the biggest insults you can get in certain circles is ‘tryhard’. You can see it in the indie boy that spent 30 minutes and £30 on 3 different types of gel to get the perfect ‘bedhead’ look down. “Nice dress,” he says nonchalantly to the girl at the coffee shop after rehearsing 30 different iterations of the greeting in his perfectly tousled head. “What, this old thing?” she replies, referring, of course, to the ensemble that she spent two hours choosing, and sent to four separate group chats for second (and third, fourth, fifth…) opinions. “Just found it at a charity shop, didn’t I?”I don’t want you to associate the word with examples of extreme artifice and phoniness like that - mostly because I don’t want you to feel violently ill when you think of it like I did writing it. Hating phoniness is dumb and narcissistic anyway, and the point is just to illustrate to you how widespread the concept is. If you simply can’t abide hipsters, no matter how unsympathetic I make them, picture a waterfowl, an eider or a shelduck or something. See how it seems to glide across Carshalton Ponds so serenely, so calmly, as though it’s not putting in any effort at all. Of course, we can’t see the bird’s flippers blasting through the water every second, desperately trying to launch the bird forward with all their might; we just see the cute little duck coasting along. This is the essence of sprezzatura. It’s not simply ‘not trying,’ that’s never going to get you made head courtier or whatever the fuck the point of Castiglione’s book was. The point is the fact that you are trying, but you’ve successfully disguised the effort.
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He a CUTE! He FLUFF! He illustrative of the principles of medieval courtship! |
IV.
I think this is why anyone with a heart prefers Messi to Ronaldo. No, seriously, stick with me here. Messi is, to steal another Italian phrase, the quintessential fantasista. The fantasista is the player that sets hearts alight. Their technical ability, physical prowess and skills (and goals 2018/19 || Welcome to Beşiktaş) prove an inspiration to everyone, from the youngers that model their game after them and scream their name in tribute on the playground when they score, to the elderly that remember just how much joy football can bring them. There are never loads of these players, but there is a particular dearth of them in the modern game, which makes Messi’s prevalence even more important. Watching Messi play is like watching an artist at work. The way he makes ridiculously difficult things look so easy, and all in the context of a game, is truly a joy to watch. Ronaldo is, quite frankly, not that. Ronaldo bends games to his whim - whenever he is playing the whole occasion becomes about him. The closest I’ve come to liking Ronaldo was the 2018 World Cup group stage game against Spain, where this all became clear to me. He scored every Portugal goal and was rightly heralded as the best player on the pitch. Just read the first line from the article I linked: “Cristiano Ronaldo produced one of the great World Cup performances.” Never mind anyone else playing for Portugal or for Spain, never mind even the score - the most important thing, theoretically - this was Cristiano’s evening. And watching the game on my shitty laptop in my dimly lit Lancaster dorm room, I feel like I remember seeing the exact moment he chose to produce one of the great World Cup performances, just before he scored the penalty to put Portugal ahead. This is terrible sprezzatura, it ruins the whole thing.My favourite thing about Messi’s outrageous skill up there is the fact that he gets the pass away afterwards and continues playing as though nothing happened. That’s not as common as it sounds (cf. Wilfried Zaha Skills-And-No-End-Product comps where he’ll do something amazing, get gassed, and then fuck up afterwards) and you see it come up time and time again if you watch his compilations. If Messi’s behaviour could talk, it would mumble “Not that deep, fam,” look away, and take a swig of Supermalt. Pure sprezzatura, pure coolness. Ronaldo is what happens when you remove all “romance” from the game, fail to disguise the cogs turning behind your success, reduce GOATness to pure stats and figures. The ultimate example of this isn’t even about playing, it’s when he called out Messi for never changing clubs, and implored him to take up a new challenge at a new club. Jesus, lad, I haven’t seen a miscalculation that bad since every single piece of working on my A-Level Mechanics exam. Messi is at Barcelona because they took a chance on him when he was just a much-too-small-to-play-football-competitively Argie kid named after a pop singer, and they’ve grown together; he loves the club and vice versa. Ronaldo is at Juventus because it’s a challenge. If there is a greater misunderstanding of why people play football, why people watch football, why people love football, it’s treating the game like a puzzle, it’s thinking of the top leagues like Pokémon regions where you have to (win the league/beat the gym leaders), take your winnings, and immediately fuck off somewhere else. Ronaldo couldn’t even hide the fact that he doesn’t get it all, he has no use for sprezzatura, and that’s why no normal person loves him the way they love Messi. I mean that completely seriously, this choice is reflective of your core values and if you pick him your values are FUCKED.
V.
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| Do not forget this. |
I have never watched a single other video from these dons. I couldn’t even remember what the channel was called off the top of my head (It’s ‘Red Hot Entertainment’, which I’m pretty sure is a porn company). That seems kinda ridiculous to our modern sensibilities - how could you never watch anything else from those creators? - but if you think back to the Golden Age of Actual YouTube, back when the slogan was Broadcast Yourself and they actually meant that, back when there were official channels for neither James Corden nor Jimmy Kimmel nor Gordon Ramsay, and it makes a lot more sense. Did you ever watch another video by the family that made “Charlie bit my finger”? How about anything by Chris Crocker, the guy (!) behind “Leave Britney Alone”? Did you ever think to yourself, “Boy, I sure hope Numa Numa Guy posts this week! Maybe he’ll do a crossover with Tay Zonday!” I shouldn’t bother linking those, they’re indelible parts of the culture, featured in Weezer videos and South Park episodes alike, but they’re not actually famous, are they? They were in a perfectly Warholian sense, enjoying their fifteen minutes, becoming a fantastic way to signal IT IS 2008 in future period piece media, before fading back into obscurity where they belonged. They were fireworks, brief flashes of creativity that momentarily captured our collective eye. In other words, this is all very un-monetisable. Tay-Zonday-in-South-Park puts it best: “Theoretically, I’m a millionaire.” Like I said, no one had a clue what the fuck they were doing or how it made anyone any money. By 2011 or so we’d worked it out. That’s when I first got into YouTube, and at that point, the flash-in-the-pan videos were already no longer what made YouTube YouTube. They phased out “broadcast yourself” as a slogan about then, for reference.
Capitalism doesn’t like unpredictability. The whole thing is based around capital, duh, and capital requires investment, and any sizable amount of investment requires prediction (in the future we’ll need to produce x units, so we should buy a new y), and so on and so forth. Point is, we need stable, bankable sectors, otherwise the whole thing falls apart, and there’s absolutely nothing that can replace it. You heard me. Nothing. My claim is, that impulse toward stability is nowhere more prevalent than YouTube. By 2011 you’ve got channels producing steady, frequent content. I’m talking Shane Dawson, RayWilliamJohnson’s various exploits, iJustine, all the mandem. They mostly had consistent upload schedules, posted the same kind of content every week, and were therefore very easy to monetise (on both ends). This blog couldn’t work on Modern YouTube, for example. First of all, I can already tell that my updating schedule for this blog will be "whenever I feel like it," and that wouldn't do. Secondly, it's not going to be consistent; if people come looking for more YouTube content and I start writing about medieval saints or The Beveridge Report or some shit, everyone will be very pissed off, and YouTube won’t be able to market to them.
Another point is that none of that 2011-era content was very remarkable. I don’t mean to say that Junior Spesh or Chocolate Rain are the 2000s equivalents of [your favourite arty film, I don’t know what films are good, I spend all my time watching Skills And Goals compilations and videos about chicken shops], but they’re certainly unforgettable. Even if you didn’t click on it just then, I know for a fact you can see Tay Zonday *moving away from the mic to breathe in* in your head right now, whether you want to or not. Name one thing that has ever happened in a Shane Dawson video. Just one thing. I’ll wait. Did he cough at some point? Maybe do a swear? I don’t know. They all blend into one another. When you’ve got to produce content on a consistent deadline, you don’t have time to wait for a spark of unrecreateable genius. You either need to not bother with even pretending to be good, or you need to fake it. You need-
VI.
“Spanakopita!” Close enough, babe, I know what you meant. Yes, this is where I was going the whole time: Sprezzatura is key to being creative under capitalism. You need to be able to simultaneously work at your craft with diligence, persistence, and competence, while also being able to make it look like an accident, like a truly organic byproduct of your inner being. You can see it in the regimented creativity of something like Tin Pan Alley, or the Brill Building, songwriters asked to bare their souls to write a hit, then do it again the next week, and the next week…; you can see it in the breakdown of the post-studio New Hollywood era - these were auteurs, working on their babies, refusing to kowtow to any MetroGoldwynMajorCunt that came their way, and all their films ended up costing ridiculous amounts of money, or bombing, or falling apart before being done. “VERY bad for business, let’s bring in that Lucas bloke what made that cute 50s film and see what he’s saying.” And you can definitely see it in the way YouTube videos are put together these days. Or at least, you should be able to.David Vujanic is the brain behind ‘Cheeky Nando’s’. I’m told he’s rather popular. I believe he makes FIFA videos? I’ve not watched any of David Vujanic’s non-Cheeky Nandos videos either, I have too many goal compilations to get through - I know, however, that everyone else watches numerous videos of his though, because I don’t think Cheeky Nandos even figures in his top five or ten most-watched videos. Clearly, he knows how to make YouTube work for him. Unfortunately, this success cannot have anything to do with quality.
The video is bad, and it’s double bad because there’s no sprezzatura. Junior Spesh doesn’t have any either, but it doesn’t need to feign authenticity because it already is authentic. It’s literally just a few youngers, probably using a camera phone, outside the chicken shop they already frequent, screaming a few bars they probably wrote over the course of a meal or two together. You (or at least, I) forgive its badness because it conveys something real. Cheeky Nando’s, on the other hand, was premeditated. It’s very obviously had a lot of work put into it, and if you’re going to do that, you need to make it less obvious. Look at the production values. Proper camera work; properly mixed music; high quality, intricate editing; did they hire that entire Nando’s out, and are these all actors inside it? You simply cannot put this much effort into how your product looks and sounds and then write a bar like “Banter! Chicken gets wrapped up. Don’t like Nando’s? Go home you’re an actor!” It’s very jarring, in both senses of the word. Imagine the horror that would slowly spread through you if you happened upon an eider that looked like it was trying really hard to float. “Honey,” you’d holler to your paramour, above the endless thrashing, splashing, and distressed quacks, “I think this weird-looking duck is fucking drowning or something.” This is how it feels to watch Cheeky Nando’s. Like watching a duck somehow drown.
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| Reise Allasani | Skills and Goals | Welcome To Lancaster City??? | 1080p HD HIGH Quality Video |
If you take anything from this garbled mess of a post, take this: no normal person could love the way YouTube is now, the way the Internet is now, over the way it was back then, and I mean this completely seriously; the choice is reflective of your core values, however few of those you have, and if you pick the present, your values are FUCKED.
Yee
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