YouTube Poop is punk rock in the era of the internet and you probably do not get it

Fifteen years ago, in the dark, at the time of the pre-smartphone on the Internet, a 15-year-old child with the online pseudonym SuperYoshi posted a video entitled "The Adventures of Super Mario 3 remixed. The video remixed an episode of The super show of Super Mario Bros., a series of short cartoons based on the character of Nintendo's mascot, which first aired in 1989.

He could not know it at the time, but SuperYoshi had created a genre: a genre that preceded YouTube by just a few months, although that would become synonymous with the video streaming service. The poop of YouTube, as they are called, have become an art perfectly suited to the era of the internet: provocative, absurd, surreal and accompanied by a good dose of diabolical trollololol.

"My best description of YTP is an badogy of digital graffiti," YouTuber EmpLemon, a teletext specialist, told Digital Trends. "YTPs take existing, usually professional, media and desecrate it intentionally with ridiculous editing. More simply, YTP is a means of free expression and experimentation through editing, a skill that is generally considered rigid and precise. "

At 15, the poop YouTube are as old as their creator when he downloaded the very first. Their funny humor has become the sense of de facto humor on the Internet: the concentrate from which the most danks memes are derived. Here in 2019 memes are a source of fascination, frustration and, in many cases, derision. They are a form of art that could not exist outside of the online culture.

And yet, despite their important role in creating the culture itself, YouTube puppies are not respected. Do they deserve it? In spite of their scatalogically caricatural name, our verdict: You bet they do it!

What's pooping on YouTube?

EmpLemon, like SuperYoshi, was a kid when he entered the YTP world. He remembers that they had appeared in the recommendations bar on YouTube a few days before, before he became the most corporate leviathan, which belongs to Google, that he is nowadays. hui. "I think what attracted me to the idea of ​​looking at innocent cartoon characters that I grew up looking at, [such as Spongebob Squarepants], to be radically transformed to swear, murder and use drugs by simple edition, "he said. "As a child, I was dizzy to think that it was even possible. I have therefore finally consulted tutorials and decided to try it myself. "

To agree exactly what is and is not a poop of YouTube raises surprising debates. As EmpLemon notes, the main ingredient is the subversion of mainstream media content: frequently cartoons and popular movies or TV shows, but not exclusively. They regularly evoke pop culture in an earlier period of life, giving them a nostalgic quality under their layers of adult cynicism and teenage snark.

Aesthetically, they owe something to the frenetic montage style that MTV popularized in the 1980s. This style of film editing was characterized by fast, non-linear cuts that put less emphasis on the character and the character of the film. only intrigue about mood, feelings and places totally radical. In the case of YouTube Poufs, he relies on a series of techniques designed to create a glitchy repetition, a humorous juxtaposition or, sometimes, a shock and annoyance. Cut the sentences to create blasphemies is a favorite. The same goes for a jerky loop in which a small part of the video is repeated. On the audio side, you can expect the volume levels to be maximized and distorted, or the source sound to be pitch shifted so that the effect gives the spoken word the same tone as the song. . The central principle: it can be realized by an average person sitting at his computer at home. What punk music represented for the literate children of 1970s pop, the poop of YouTube belongs to the group of digital natives today.

"YTP is essentially a form of content that allows you to avoid hints that you could not anywhere else," EmpLemon said. "Nowhere else can you afford to deliberately blow the eardrums of any unfortunate viewer to watch your videos with headphones. No other kind of video embodies the "because I can" mantra like YTP.

Enter the remix culture

The remix culture is of course not new. The idea of ​​taking fragments of existing cultural artifacts and turning them into something new exists in the ether of pop culture for decades. It is a technique that has been used in many samples, ranging from sampling old soul music in hip-hop to William Burroughs' "cut-out" experimental writing styles, which have influenced songwriters such as Kurt Cobain from Nirvana.

YouTube has added to this the overload of frames in cultural reference frames. The art world has long relied on the public to produce works with a certain area of ​​reference on which to rely. Renaissance artists badumed that you knew the works of the Bible, thus informing the paintings you were watching. When Andy Warhol filled the Los Angeles Ferus Gallery with paintings of Campbell's Soup Tins in 1962, he knew it would be controversial, as lovers of intellectual art had long sneered at the love of the mbades for preserves. . A good poop YouTube casts similar (but updated) references, with all their built-in inferences, at a rate that would dazzle all the most hardcore web surfers and online browsers.

Combined with the constant evolution of form and the tenuous distinction between remixing the past and not retreading old memes, it can make YouTube Poop's world a daunting task for foreigners. Despite its deceptively low access barrier, this perhaps gives the medium more things in common with the world of great art than its creators might think.

In the book The dehumanization of art, the late Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gbadet says that the goal of modern art is to divide the viewer into almost everything between those who understand it and those who do not understand it. It's a decisive social test, and the answer dictates your perception. Gbadet writes that art works "as a social agent that differs from the shapeless mbad of many different castes". There are those who are illustrious and those who are vulgar. Likewise, there are those who will understand a particularly humiliated Spongebob meme and those who will not understand it.

The golden age of the poop

Today, we can say that the golden age of YouTube Poops is over. As with all other corners of the internet, they have become fragmented; less a community than a series of communities with their own interests. Instead of YouTube Poops more generally – an era described by EmpLemon as a population of poop with names such as Dinner, Mah Boi, Losta Spaghetti, Weegee, Pingas and others – there are now sub-communities differentiated by their source . These have allowed references in references to flourish and become more obscure and more specialized, while the progress of publishing has pushed the limits of what is possible in the genre.

And yet, poop YouTube continues to have a disproportionate influence on the Internet culture as a whole. They are the source of many disposable GIF or Reddit one-liner reactions. They are, in some ways, a kind of zero point for modern culture.

Recently, the same has led a series of new battles that challenge their immediate future. Initiatives such as Article 13 of the division of the European Union, which divides the European Union, could threaten the spread of memes by repressing alleged infringements of copyright. (Not good for a medium built on reallocation!) There is also the adoption of culture itself as a "we are fashionable" ploy by companies, just as for skater culture, punk, hip hop and countless other forms of DIY counter-culture in previous decades. Finally, there are accusations that self-memorial culture fits into a broader theme of extreme right-wing toxicity: designed to exclude and harbad.

"In my opinion, the biggest misconception surrounding memes is that they have a purpose or a definite end," EmpLemon said. "Internet memes have exploded in mainstream culture over the last few years and many people do not really know how to react. It turns out that a lot of humor based on memes is derived from YTP based humor, where both can be very experimental and open. I am dismayed to see memes painted under the patron brush of a political or shameless agenda of a billion dollar company to sell more hamburgers to young people. "

Can not get any satisfaction

Now, a decade and a half has been removed from the first poop of YouTube, there has been enough time to begin to critically evaluate the support. After all, even if the approval of a company can irritate some of its creators, a traditional acceptance can also mean giving the credit it deserves.

But that has not really happened yet.

"The general lack of respect for YTP's artistic merit certainly confuses me, especially given the fact that people are generally very open to various obscure artistic genres on the Web," said EmpLemon. "I believe this discrimination stems from a general lack of understanding of what YTP really is. Many who are ignorant of the medium are unaware of the absurd amount of effort that some Poopers devote to their projects. Anything that comes from Awful Fawful or Aliantos probably requires as much dedication and skill as any piece hung in an art museum. What puts the YTP above, in my opinion, is immersion. If you simply allow yourself to treat these videos as subjective expressions of creativity, you may find yourself transported to a different realm. "

EmpLemon is very fond of modern art, he says. "But nothing really compares to YouTube Poop." Since he was one of the first followers of YouTube Poops, this review may be a day more bbad. We will have to wait and see.