Donald Glover's 404 Error
December 13, 2013 5:39 PM   Subscribe

"Glover feels that the Internet has cut him off from the experience of feeling truly alive, and he believes he can express this feeling only on the Internet." Steven Hyden reviews Childish Gambino's Because The Internet - and ruminates on social media's "hunger that can't ever be satisfied."
posted by paleyellowwithorange (60 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
I love Donald Glover the writer/comedian/actor. I am not a fan of Donald Glover the rapper, frankly I wish he would just focus on what he does best. The rapper Mega Ran once said in a song "Just because you are a fan of rap music, does not make you a rapper." And I feel this applies to Glover very well.
posted by mediocre at 5:55 PM on December 13, 2013 [8 favorites]


In two recent interviews, he casually mentioned that he reads Kierkegaard, and while I really want to make fun of him for casually mentioning this, I'm not going to.

So why bring it up? What's the author's point? What's so funny about reading Kierkegaard? Are you just not supposed to talk about it? Should he pretend to do something else with his time, or else people won't think he's cool?

If anything, this is emblematic of the modern problem with "feeling alive" on the internet, in the age of the "hipster", and so on. You can't just mention that you read something or other without somebody else thinking that it's inherently funny that you have an interest in a thing.
posted by Sticherbeast at 5:57 PM on December 13, 2013 [10 favorites]


I think the point was that he considers casually mentioning you're reading Kirkegaard as some kind of big performance of something or other rather than just a thing someone said.
posted by aubilenon at 5:59 PM on December 13, 2013 [5 favorites]


Yeah, people have been snarking on each other like assholes for hundreds of years before the internet.
posted by stoneandstar at 6:02 PM on December 13, 2013 [1 favorite]


It seems like Hyden's objection to Because the Internet is that it very accurately portrays its subject matter and communicates the feelings that Glover has about that subject matter. And then, I guess, that it doesn't include inspirational prescriptive advice. However bad the record may be, I have my doubts that these are the reasons so.
posted by Kylio at 6:03 PM on December 13, 2013


Sometimes, the best things on Grantland are on those asides... like this one:
My favorite song on Because the Internet is "Shadows," which was coproduced by the brilliant bassist Thundercat, whose 2013 album Apocalypse ranks among the best albums of the year. If you haven't heard it, stop reading and seek it out right now.
The rest of the article isn't that good. The author's sentiment that the record "blocks out everything else; the idea of just unplugging from all of our shit never comes up" makes it sound like he wants another record than the one Glover actually released. Is it my favorite rap record of the year? Absolutely not, but I can commend Donald Glover for putting it out and (hopefully) starting a worthwhile conversation and introducing it in a creative manner.
posted by raihan_ at 6:08 PM on December 13, 2013 [2 favorites]


I love Donald Glover the writer/comedian/actor. I am not a fan of Donald Glover the rapper, frankly I wish he would just focus on what he does best.

I agree from a selfish standpoint, but would never begrudge him choosing that which he prefers.
posted by neuromodulator at 6:11 PM on December 13, 2013 [4 favorites]


I think the point was that he considers casually mentioning you're reading Kirkegaard as some kind of big performance of something or other rather than just a thing someone said.

I get that.

But!

I would also say that the author's being Part Of The Problem by being the person who turns it into a big performance, even if just in a passive-aggressive way. "Fnurr fnurr, I totally want to make fun of this, but I won't, even though I sort of did exactly that just now, except I didn't even go so far as to make an actual joke. Either way, I mean it's not like the album is pretentious."

If Donald Glover really is reading Kierkegaard, then there is literally nothing funny whatsoever about that. It is no more funny than eating sandwiches or watching Breaking Bad or whatever.

And that's part of what Glover is trying to get at, I think, with some of what he's doing. In the age of the internet, it's all too easy to have people jump on your comments, in real time. Speaking only for myself, as a person with weapons-grade anxiety, I also know that the anticipation of this pushback creates all kinds of truly nasty feedback loops.

So, yeah, that's why I think it's actively bad that this author could not suppress his need to snidely poke fun at Donald Glover for daring to admit to the world that he reads Kierkegaard.

(I haven't heard anything from this album, so I can't comment on that.)
posted by Sticherbeast at 6:17 PM on December 13, 2013 [17 favorites]


The most obvious question of all (at least to me) went unasked: Why in the hell would you scrawl seven pages of sentences, photograph them, and then post them on the Internet?

As a drinker...

Sometimes it's easier to scrawl on paper and then take photos of what you've done
posted by banal evil at 6:31 PM on December 13, 2013 [1 favorite]




I'm gonna give Because the Internet a chance. I really wanted to like the first album, I would listen to it feeling like I should .... but I just didn't. Even after 15-20 tries nothing stuck, just in one ear out the other. I don't how else to describe my reaction to it except to say it left me completely cold.
posted by mannequito at 6:46 PM on December 13, 2013


"...and the collective burden of miscellaneous fears and insecurities that many humans wrestle with every day. (Do people "get" me? Will I ever be loved by the people whom I want to love me? Does Dan Harmon hold me in low esteem?)"

Every day, several times a day, I wrestle with Dan Harmon's likely poor opinion of me.

Seriously, this idea of feeling abused by technology and wanting to do without it and finding oneself incapable of doing anything about it is rather nicely captured by another frequent contributor to Grantland, Chuck Klosterman. [link to pdf]
posted by eric1halfb at 7:21 PM on December 13, 2013 [1 favorite]


I think if I could have a dinner party and invite anyone in the world (OK, maybe anyone in Los Angeles), I'd pick Donald Glover and Aziz Ansari. We could dork out about Kierkegaard, instagram pictures of our food, and worry about what it means to be in your thirties in an increasingly cold digital world where we are ever more connected to each other, and yet ever further away.

Wait did I say dinner party?

I think I meant a getting blazed and eating doritos party.
posted by Sara C. at 7:55 PM on December 13, 2013 [18 favorites]


Mr. Glover has been known to occasionally miss the point.

stop it that is so cute
posted by sweetkid at 8:08 PM on December 13, 2013 [4 favorites]


Sara C.: "Wait did I say dinner party?

I think I meant a getting blazed and eating doritos party.
"

Yeah. A dinner party.
posted by mannequito at 8:40 PM on December 13, 2013 [12 favorites]


This article links to a needlessly long article "On Smarm" from Gawker. Thirty years ago I used to take an Exacto blade to every instance of the word 'smarmy" I saw in the MSM. It was an old word, enjoying a well-deserved renaissance. Oily/insincere. The noun form was not in evidence.

Now, we all know what snark is. But smarm? The article used the word dozens of times and I'm still not sure that the author knows what the word means. He implies that it means something different than snark, but I don't think he explains himself well. I'd advise on resisting your impulse to click on this hyperlink.

Glover's work? Looks good to me. I don't mind hearing important ideas about our hyper-involved Internet fascination being discussed once again. This ain't going away.
posted by kozad at 8:58 PM on December 13, 2013


Love this record a lot obviously.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 9:59 PM on December 13, 2013 [1 favorite]


i do fucking think Tequila Sunrise was better than any thing he has done since.

have at it.
posted by Colonel Panic at 10:40 PM on December 13, 2013


Seriously. It took me a couple minutes to realize this said DONALD and not DANNY.
posted by fluffy battle kitten at 10:44 PM on December 13, 2013 [2 favorites]


I'm kind of the worst. I like Troy, but Donald is a little heavy for me. I like to have fun, and like when other people are having fun and not taking themselves so seriously and aren't in their heads all the time. I saw him in this video and didn't think he'd be too much fun to hang out with (maybe an hour or so).

But that's just me.

He's an excellent rapper, especially as Jehovah's most secret witness.
posted by discopolo at 10:46 PM on December 13, 2013 [1 favorite]


discopolo, you know that's a bit from Community, right?

(The weird thing is that this FPP reminded me that I've been working my way through Community on Hulu, I paused the episode I'm on to watch the "this video" link you posted, and then I hit play on the episode again, and it was that exact bit.)

It seems kind of weird to be all "THIS DUDE TAKES HIMSELF WAAAAAAY TOO SERIOUSLY" when the person in question is literally at work, trying to do their job. I spent an hour digging through old accounting paperwork today. A video of that would probably make people think I was no fun, too.
posted by Sara C. at 10:54 PM on December 13, 2013 [3 favorites]


Ooooh dinner party, Sara C.? This is so interesting. I NEVER used to know how to answer this question, but now I completely do! I'd want to bring Amy Poehler and Taylor Swift. I feel like me, Amy and Taylor would have out faces painted like magical tigers by the end of the night and we could prank call John Mayer (he's been asking for it for years).

Shrug. It's just who I am. A girl who just wants to have fun. (I'd love to bring Cyndi Lauper, too! Just have a girls night! Mindy Kaling, too!)

But I just feel like Donald Glover is one of those comedians who is super burdened. Half a red wine bottle in, he'd probably start crying and there's no crying on girls' night.
posted by discopolo at 10:58 PM on December 13, 2013 [2 favorites]


discopolo, you know that's a bit from Community, right?

Yup. I'm a huge Community fan. I assumed he wrote it/helped write because he'd been a writer for 30 Rock and because of the whole Childish Gambino stuff.
posted by discopolo at 10:59 PM on December 13, 2013 [1 favorite]


Yeah, I dunno, probably?

Either way, the video didn't make him seem like that horrible a person or anything.

And Donglover is welcome to cry in his wineglass at any party I throw.
posted by Sara C. at 11:08 PM on December 13, 2013 [1 favorite]


Uh I don't think anyone was saying he's a terrible person. Just too heavy.

I kind of agree-- I want to like him, I feel like I should, but I just get this overthinky vibe from him which is a miracle because I am a world champion overthinker. Maybe I am just not wanting to stare into my own eyes lovingly as much lately.
posted by stoneandstar at 11:13 PM on December 13, 2013 [1 favorite]


Oh well I followed the link to another story about him, and I guess he's depressed?

Way to go, discopolo. Foot mouth etc
posted by discopolo at 11:14 PM on December 13, 2013 [1 favorite]


I'm depressed too, I guess it's just the case that depression is a very heavy & boring disease much of the time.
posted by stoneandstar at 11:44 PM on December 13, 2013


The actor-comedian-rapper (who by coincidence happened to have a new album coming out in a few months) availed himself for several "Dude, are you OK?"–style interviews

Does the author of this piece know that 'avail' does not mean 'make available'?
posted by tractorfeed at 2:07 AM on December 14, 2013 [1 favorite]


Come back Ad Hominem we miss you. :(
posted by Potomac Avenue at 5:30 AM on December 14, 2013


I glanced at this briefly, read a bit of it and then moved on to the next unsatisfying nugget.

Problem?
posted by clvrmnky at 6:22 AM on December 14, 2013


On the one hand, I am not a huge fan of Childish Gambino, or of Don Glover in general. I think he's a solid performer on Community, but not much more; I think his writing is funny, but not anything more than that. He seems to have a lot of talent, but doesn't strike me as any kind of insane craftsman, and when I went to see him live (Don Glover the comedian opening for Childish Gambino, which is kind of fun), I definitely got the same impression of, dude's trying to have fun, but he doesn't have the kind of spark that interests me in performers, so, shrug! I especially don't have interest in following along as he starts to self-examine—maybe in five years this'll lead to something cool, but I don't want to follow all the way along.

So I guess I can do the usual thing and go into snark about all that, talk about why I disapprove of his style/his career/his public persona/the direction of Community post-about halfway through season 2. And every few months we can check in on him and I'll provide the latest update to the world on Why I Don't Care.

But...

I had a pretty lousy freshman year in college. I could go back and point out a dozen awesome things from that year, but the memories I have from that year are all of sitting in a cramped dorm room, feeling completely disconnected from the life I wanted to be living, feeling like a complete failure to be in that little room in the wrong school in a place that I never actually wanted to end up. It was a year of quiet desperation, and for all that I knew people in real life who were interesting and neat and I should have kept on being friends with, the real main players in my life that year were Facebook and Tumblr, and I felt trapped by them in a way that resonates with what Don Glover is going through right now.

It's been talked about a lot that Facebook has a tendency to make you feel isolated and unlively, as the curated content from five hundred pseudo-friends floods your newsfeed with stories of How Happy People Are Being. There's a tendency that still occurs among younger users where everybody is sharing stories that simulate happiness—look at me! look at who I'm with! look at where I'm at! look at the life I'm living!—without actually reflecting anybody's inner state. The result is a bunch of people performing happiness in ways that make everybody else but them miserable. It's a vicious circle, and it's not limited to social networks but it's certainly amplified there. Close contact with the sorts of people that can drive you mad oftentimes, well.

And while that's crappy and I could go on about how sucky Facebook is and how much worse it becomes when you're checking a dozen social networks rather than just one, each with its own arcane set of rules and behaviors—a younger friend of my acquaintance just got totally Harriet the Spyed when her roommate started browsing through the archives of her now-public Twitter account—the thing that makes me really sympathize with Glover is what happened on Tumblr. At the time I'd been using the dream of start-ups and Silicon Valley as a kind of escape from my depression at college, and I'd been cynically manipulating the Hacker News crowd to gain a following (which it turns out looks awesome on resumes!). So I had a fairly sizable following on my blog, which ran on Tumblr, when my life abruptly became too much for me to handle and I converted my tech-and-business blog into a personal confessions-type deal where I just started trying to figure my life the fuck out. Turns out eighteen-year-olds have a lot of bottled-up shit and a ton of misconceptions about the way the world really works, who knew! It was very cathartic and yay for writing your problems out of you and then I transferred schools and now life rocks

BUUUUUUUUT

Because I had a following of people as I was trying to work out my shit, and because that following consisted, not of general well-wishers/any kind of support community, but of a bunch of random nerdy people who were following my blog for entirely separate reasons, I got to witness firsthand what it's like to have people commenting on your life in real-time. Not surprisingly, it totally sucks. I mean, it sucks in GENERAL, but it gets so, so much worse when the things you're putting out there are actually your feeble, vulnerable attempts to work out your own problems, the ways in which you fail to see things properly, the deficiencies in your own character. That kind of writing is frequently messy and tortured and very easy to mock if you're an outside observer who doesn't have the precise issues that the writer does, so it's very easy to jeer and catcall and demand that the person you're following start sucking less. Which is a totally godawful thing to go through as the person at the center, trying to work your shit out.

I imagine it has to be orders of magnitude worse when you're a bona-fide celebrity, and when you're audience is a thousandfold larger than mine was, and when people think they know more of you than they could possibly know, just because you're on TV and have done interview circuits and have sold them albums of music. That kind of experience is maddening under NORMAL circumstances, and when you start to figure your shit out in public, I'm sure it gets horrendously worse. I can't possibly understand what it's like to be Don Glover and work your shit out in front of an audience of millions, and I'm glad I had my emotional crisis when I was too young and obscure to suffer all that much for it.

The response that always comes up from the peanut gallery is, "...so why did you do all this in public, you conceited ass? Why take to Twitter or Tumblr or wherever with your confessions?" To which the answer is, because it has a different impact when you admit to your thoughts out loud and in front of other people. Sometimes it's nice to do this to friends and not strangers, but friends aren't always available and there's often a feeling that you might say the wrong thing and lose your friend forever; I still get that feeling at times. Ideally, these are things you'd work out with a professional therapist, but not everybody's comfortable with going to therapy or with admitting that their problems might benefit from it, and while I went to a therapist for a while when I was younger and neurotic, there's something relieving about talking your shit over with an audience, getting the feedback good and bad, and sort of forming a picture of "Okay, so this is how the world feels." Not like that picture is at all reliable, but it's still nice, you know? This seems to be something else Glover is working hard to express.

I dunno. None of this makes me any bigger a fan of Glover or his work, but I want to make the effort to separate my aesthetic/artistic criticisms of him from my feelings about him as a person or as a struggling artist. Just because I don't like what he's putting out doesn't mean he shouldn't be putting it out, you know? I'd rather him do what he needs to do in order to work out his life and be satisfied. He can get to improving his product for me and all the other lazy consumers later; sometimes it's permissible for a guy to work out his shit without our express approval. I do get where he's coming from here, and think that all the stuff he's talking about is relevant to a wide swath of people. Hopefully those people will find this, and the Don Glover fans will keep bobbing along, and the rest of us can take our criticisms and go elsewhere and wait for Glover to do more things that satisfy us, or else we can at least keep our grumpings and criticisms at a reasonable level. Not everything in the universe has to be tailor-cut to our liking.
posted by Rory Marinich at 7:02 AM on December 14, 2013 [10 favorites]


Well put, Rory. I'd also add that I think what Glover is touching on is relatively unexplored territory, and it's especially specific since Glover is of the generation that graduated college just before social networking and the internet panopticon became de rigueur.

I had fond memories of Having A Life in the real world, and of making my weird art and my pretentious comments in hidden spaces on the internet. Now everything's blurred together. That sorta sucks.

Seriously. It took me a couple minutes to realize this said DONALD and not DANNY.

In college, the professors would often ask if he was related. Of course he's not, but then the professors would just say, "Ha ha, you want to make it by yourself, that's alright."
posted by Sticherbeast at 7:45 AM on December 14, 2013


The part of the article that annoyed most was when Hyden got snarky about Gambino's night of nihilism ending in McFlurries and cartoons, rather than, like, something more, y'know, rapper-y. Hyden feels bored because Gambino is describing an actual black person's rather mundane life, rather than inventing a grandiose fantasy of black self-destruction for his white entertainment.
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 8:02 AM on December 14, 2013 [6 favorites]


Re: Kierkegaard, you're supposed to say something like "I've been reading Kierkegaard... I know, isn't that the most pretentious statement ever???? Goddddd. Yes, I'm a huge pretentious ridiculous idiot, but I've been reading him, and..."

That will properly acquit you. You always have to be prepared to show that you're aware of things in this world, or else people like this author will snipe at you for it. You can't just engage with something on a pure level, you have to simultaneously engage and be aware of the context and defenses for that engagement. Because the internet!
posted by naju at 9:13 AM on December 14, 2013 [4 favorites]


I saw him in this video and didn't think he'd be too much fun to hang out with (maybe an hour or so).


What? What is so "heavy" about that video? I think if that's too heavy for you, do you just do cartwheels everywhere or something? Also, I've heard interviews with Mindy Kaling where she's serious. She's kind of reserved a lot of the time actually, which is something she talks about being kind of hard to deal with, because people expect her to be super pink bubbly chatty Kelly Kapoor/Mindy Lahiri all the time.
posted by sweetkid at 11:01 AM on December 14, 2013 [1 favorite]


Is that the truth, though? Like, things like that happened well before the internet, it's just that the internet is the new context, instead of magazines or whatever. There were plenty of snarky character-assassination type pieces in the 70s from writerly sorts shooting others down for being pretentious. And before that, great writers wrote novels about how pretentiously douchey people could be... Revolutionary Road? And I mean, watch Annie Hall. From that movie it would appear the man lived to tell pretentious people to put a sock in it. And I mean everywhere, all over the world, since before Shakespeare, this has been happening, just with different inflection.

I mean, what's really going on here to me it seems is people are afraid of being criticized-- and the internet makes that ever more possible, so it is more scary, more intimidating to do and say what you want to. But artists &c. have always had to stand up to bitter, acrid criticism from other artists and journalists.

I just looked up one of his casual mentions of Kierkegaard (he's talking about proving he's himself to security, re: being racially profiled):
"It's one of those things where I'm right, so I'm just going to keep stating my argument calmly. I'm reading [philosopher] Kierkegaard and truth is a power -- but it's a power, it's not the power. People don't do it just because it's the truth, people do it because they're afraid."

Seems intelligent, not braggy, very normal. So this guy writing for Grantland is being a douchebag, then. That's for intelligent people to determine. I don't think it's the internet's fault that this guy on Grantland is anti-Kierkegaard. (Or what Kierkegaard in the mind of a young person represents.) On the other hand I kind of get what Grantland guy is saying-- he thinks there's something wrong, something that falls short in the album, and he could point to Kierkegaard and say "nyah nyah, pretentious!" but he knows that's not it. The way he put it was smarmy but his meaning is still there.


And oh c'mon people, every time someone casually mentions that they're not into or captivated by a beloved celebrity do we have to get mean about it and tell them how they're wrong and clearly a moron who is only entertained by cartwheels and foolery? It's not about being serious/bubbly, it's about not having a spark that clicks with some people. Which is fine, and not morally bankrupt-- I don't think Donald Glover has a lot of charisma, even though I find some of his stuff interesting.
posted by stoneandstar at 11:08 AM on December 14, 2013 [1 favorite]


Or what Kierkegaard in the mind of a young person represents.

I have a more substantive response about these general issues for later, but:

It's well worth pointing out that, by the time Kierkegaard was Glover's age now, he had already published, among other things, Either/Or and Fear and Trembling. If we're talking about Glover reading those books as a "young person", then we are talking about books written by an even younger person.
posted by Sticherbeast at 11:16 AM on December 14, 2013 [3 favorites]


What? What is so "heavy" about that video? I think if that's too heavy for you, do you just do cartwheels everywhere or something? Also, I've heard interviews with Mindy Kaling where she's serious. She's kind of reserved a lot of the time actually, which is something she talks about being kind of hard to deal with, because people expect her to be super pink bubbly chatty Kelly Kapoor/Mindy Lahiri all the time.

Kinda rude, sweetkid. He just doesn't seem like a very warm person. The guy doing Abed's part is so psyched he's there and Donald just seems bored and disinterested, though he does do Troy's part.

I can take reserved from Mindy, though.

And I have been known to cartwheel a lot.
posted by discopolo at 12:48 PM on December 14, 2013 [1 favorite]


It's well worth pointing out that, by the time Kierkegaard was Glover's age now, he had already published, among other things, Either/Or and Fear and Trembling. If we're talking about Glover reading those books as a "young person", then we are talking about books written by an even younger person.

Well, "a young person who is presumably not as intelligent or educated as Kierkegaard." We have different concepts about youth and adolescence now which have nothing to do with the internet and predate it. "We" aren't really talking about anything, I'm just saying that Mr. Grantland (I am lazy and don't want to go back to the article) is sneering at the tendency for young people who are not schooled in a philosophical tradition (either self-schooled or formally schooled) to say "I read Kierkegaard, let me drop some wisdom on you, also I have no idea what I'm talking about." I don't think that description applies to Glover in his interviews where he's mentioned Kierkegaard-- maybe neither does Mr. Grantland, actually, since he says that's NOT the reason his work comes up short.

I just don't get how any of this has anything to do with the internet. I think the lack of perspective on history is actually the bigger problem-- something Glover is maybe right about, that the internet being constantly available urges us to be more and more self-indulgent and instead of turning to history to recontextualize ourselves and our thoughts we just keep archiving our indulgence (so Grantland is right too). I disagree with Grantland in that I think the internet has changed the world irreversibly; I disagree with Glover in that we can still open up a book and read about something else.
posted by stoneandstar at 1:08 PM on December 14, 2013


He just doesn't seem like a very warm person. The guy doing Abed's part is so psyched he's there and Donald just seems bored and disinterested

Weird. My take on the video was that it was some behind the scenes stuff at Community and the Abed-esque guy was one of the production people or a sound guy or something. I had no idea it was some kind of fan thing at all. So I didn't take away that Glover was somehow not doing something he was supposed to be doing.

FWIW I don't think really any celebrities come off well in youtube stuff documenting fan culture. Every once in a while I'll slide into a rabbit hole of watching videos from panels at Comic-Con and the like, and pretty much any direct interaction between celebrities and fans is awkward as hell.
posted by Sara C. at 1:20 PM on December 14, 2013 [1 favorite]


sneering at the tendency for young people who are not schooled in a philosophical tradition (either self-schooled or formally schooled) to say

Not to mention that Donald Glover went to NYU. The guy has a college degree from a liberal arts school. There's a very strong chance that he took a philosophy class at some point. He's as likely as any of us to know about Kierkegaard.

My takeaway from the Grantland piece is that the author is irritated that Donald Glover doesn't conform to some hood-rat rapper stereotype (with maybe a side order of Chris Rock). How dare he have diverse interests! How dare he like both hip hop and dead Scandinavian philosophers! How dare he HAVE NEAT HANDWRITING!

Everyone knows only Kanye and white people get to contain multitudes.
posted by Sara C. at 1:26 PM on December 14, 2013 [5 favorites]


I'll add that I think the main symptom of the internet is taking a subculture and making it into a panopticon. Being ripped to shreds within a subculture is one thing, having your life open like a buffet to the world on the internet is another.

Wow, I did not say Donald Glover wasn't educated and didn't know about Kierkegaard. I said he probably wasn't as smart as Kierkegaard, who was a boss. I went to a very good liberal arts school too, and read Kierkegaard. I am no Kierkegaard. Donald Glover seems smart, but he is not a philosopher-- he's an artist who is interested in philosophy. I think that's good and I would not snark at him, but there is a tendency to ~dress up~ shitty art with a patina of philosophical name-dropping, so the author says "I COULD accuse him of that, and say that's why I didn't like his art, but actually I don't like his art because it says and enacts something I think is fundamentally untrue about the internet age."
posted by stoneandstar at 1:30 PM on December 14, 2013


No, no, no, I know that!

Sorry. Didn't mean to come off as arguing with you.

I think I'm arguing with the Grantland author, or with other people who assume that when someone like Donald Glover name drops Kierkegaard, he can't possibly understand what that is or have anything meaningful to say about it. It must be a pretentious pose.
posted by Sara C. at 1:31 PM on December 14, 2013 [1 favorite]


OK, cool. I was actually just writing my own apology saying I may have misread you!

I just think that while the Grantland author is being a little snarkass and obnoxious (in the usual journalistic "here's what he ordered for brunch, a omelet and black coffee in an attempt at everymannishness, oh droll" type way), I think he's being suspicious of how image is everything in the celeb world, which is warranted. Also, I think that when mainstream artists drop philosophical nonsense they often don't know what they're talking about, or it's annoying, like Sting or something, so I understand being suspicious and derisive. On the other hand, I too want to be less assuming with Donald Glover, because he seems earnest and thoughtful, so I kind of dislike the author too.
posted by stoneandstar at 1:35 PM on December 14, 2013


I don't know, the author is so derisive of every single thing about Glover. It was hard for me to find an actual point in the piece aside from "lolololololol Donald Glover instagrammed his handwriting how dumb" and "Donald Glover is not a better rapper than either Kanye or Drake".

Maybe there was some substantive criticism about life in the digital age in there somewhere, but it was so hard to find in his larger thesis of "Donald Glover is totes lame."
posted by Sara C. at 1:41 PM on December 14, 2013


The real world is just too fast and up close. It feels more comfortable to experience human existence with a five-second tape delay, as a safeguard against living in the moment. I suspect Glover feels the same way. I think that's why he took the time to carefully write out those notes and then, once they were perfectly constructed, preserve them for public consumption on his Instagram account. It was his tape delay.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 1:50 PM on December 14, 2013 [1 favorite]


FWIW I don't think really any celebrities come off well in youtube stuff documenting fan culture. Every once in a while I'll slide into a rabbit hole of watching videos from panels at Comic-Con and the like, and pretty much any direct interaction between celebrities and fans is awkward as hell.

I can take reserved from Mindy, though.

It's also been my experience that performers often don't seem "on" when they're at work but not really performing per se, like at a panel or at some "industry" event. I think that's just a consequences of the weirdness of the dynamic of those kind of situations -- the performer is sort of on display (often to both his fans and to his boss at the same time, which is extra strange) but everyone's pretending that he's not...It seems normal to me that someone would feel self conscious and awkward in that sort of situation, I don't think that seeming so reveals much about the performer's actual personality or commitment to his work or anything.

But with Mindy Kaling in particular, the one time I did go to a panel she was on (it was held by the WGA I think), she actually was effervescent. I hadn't seen her in anything before (this was in 2010 or 2011?) and I ended up seeking out her stuff because she seemed so charming and fun.

My takeaway from the Grantland piece is that the author is irritated that Donald Glover doesn't conform to some hood-rat rapper stereotype (with maybe a side order of Chris Rock).

Of course Glover doesn't. No hobo.

Sorry, that's just my favorite lyric of his, I had to find an excuse to include it. Though, uh, I also agree that the writer tried and failed to paint Glover as pretentious.
posted by rue72 at 1:52 PM on December 14, 2013 [2 favorites]


Yeah, it really seemed like that author had a thing against Glover. Bizarre. One of the strangest things I've read on Grantland.
posted by sweetkid at 1:59 PM on December 14, 2013


FWIW I don't think really any celebrities come off well in youtube stuff documenting fan culture.

Hugh Jackman does:-) Sigh. Hugh Jackman....

Taylor Swift also does a great job being really kind and sweet and friendly and warm to ordinary people/fans. But she seems like a genuine people person.

Though generally I think you're right. I've been really disappointed by celebs who lack spark in real life, but they're just trying to be people.

I'm a little spoiled though. My first interaction with a celeb was a teen actress who I ran into one day as a teenager on a street corner in my hometown (I was waiting for my mom to pick me up haha) and she just started a conversation with me and was so sweet and warm and friendly, despite having roles in like 3 movies that were playing in the movie theater, and a made for TV movie! And I used to be such a shy, self conscious kid that I would have personally not bothered talking to me (though I finally shook out to being kinda extroverted).

So that's how I started judging actors and actresses, and people, I guess. Maybe it's wrong, but it's fun and I don't have too many hobbies going on right now, know what I mean?
posted by discopolo at 2:02 PM on December 14, 2013


I'm not sure I've ever seen a thread on MeFi where literally almost everyone seems to have missed the clearly-stated point of the article, which in this case seems to be that Glover has produced a work which is supposed to serve as some sort of reflection/critique of internet culture but has ironically embraced all the worst aspects of that culture and failed to really say much of anything meaningful.
What frustrates me about Because the Internet is that instead of illuminating an alternative — or allowing for the possibility of an alternative — it personifies why Internet life is so depressing. The tone is nostalgic, self-referential, and complacent. Like so much of web culture, this record favors archiving (of personal neuroses, of pop-culture references, of hip musical signifiers) over imagination. And it blocks out everything else; the idea of just unplugging from all of our shit never comes up. "I don't want anyone to think this is an indictment," Glover told Time. For him, "it's not like it's a bad thing" that constant exposure to the soul-deadening agents of the Internet has resulted, according to his own lyrics, in his inability to feel anything. Really? So why did you make this record again?
You can agree or disagree or go some other direction, but it's astonishing the extent to which this thread has just totally failed to engage with the substance of the piece.
posted by crayz at 2:06 PM on December 14, 2013 [1 favorite]


But with Mindy Kaling in particular, the one time I did go to a panel she was on (it was held by the WGA I think), she actually was effervescent. I hadn't seen her in anything before (this was in 2010 or 2011?) and I ended up seeking out her stuff because she seemed so charming and fun.

I never thought she was charming but she seems fun and unapologetic about liking immature stuff and girly stuff. I think she really made it possible for me to finally embrace liking pink and glitter and other girly stuff I'd been socialized into staying away from if I wanted to be taken seriously. I like her because, in her book and in interviews, she makes it abundantly clear that she's going to be herself and she doesn't think liking vintage Britney or boy bands or pink glitter or makeup should keep her from being taken seriously.

So yeah. Love Mindy. And I think I'm harsher on celebrity men than on women, because I think I'd like talking to Lisa Kudrow, who always seems a bit heavy and sarcastic. But she's so interesting, though.
posted by discopolo at 2:12 PM on December 14, 2013


Crayz -- that's because the author of the piece doesn't make a very convincing case for the fact that Glover's album has done just that. It's really hard to get any sort of cogent support for that thesis in all the "lololol Donald Glover is such a dumbass lololol" noise.
posted by Sara C. at 6:08 PM on December 14, 2013 [1 favorite]


Looks like Glover's not the only one:

Why This Designer Writes Text Messages By Hand And Sends Them As Images
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 3:19 AM on December 15, 2013


Looks like Glover's not the only one

Tell me about it. Mike Tyson Explores Kierkegaard
posted by Kylio at 2:52 PM on December 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


You want to know the big secret of why people write stuff out and then instagram it or whatever?

MARKETING STRATEGY.

There a few reasons this can be a good thing to do.

1. Looking at your various social networking platforms, how you use them to engage with your audience, where you need to gain followers, where you KNOW if you post something it'll get seen and passed on, etc. And then milking that. So maybe Glover or his people or whoever know that he has a huge following on instagram and anything he posts there will go viral. So anything he wants to go viral with, he finds some way to make it a photograph.

2. It is always better to post an image or a link or something your audience can easily engage with and share rather than a text post or status update. So if you have something word-based you want to really go viral, it's better to send it out into the world as a link or a photo. Hence writing something down and photographing it as opposed to just tweeting it or making a text post on tumblr.

Both of these are basic social media marketing 101 level things.
posted by Sara C. at 3:31 PM on December 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


so the author says "I COULD accuse him of that, and say that's why I didn't like his art, but actually I don't like his art because it says and enacts something I think is fundamentally untrue about the internet age."

But that's not what the author says! The author says that "really want[s] to make fun of him" for "casually mentioning" that he reads Kierkegaard. The very fact that Glover invokes Kierkegaard is something that the author wants to mock.

(I'm also a little amused at the idea that Glover was not supposed to have "casually" mentioned having read Kierkegaard. Should he have been more formal? I'm reminded of an old Dave Barry gag about a newspaper article in which a "giant grasshopper leaped great distances, without warning". What kind of warning is a giant grasshopper supposed to give before leaping a great distance?)

Wow, I did not say Donald Glover wasn't educated and didn't know about Kierkegaard. I said he probably wasn't as smart as Kierkegaard, who was a boss. I went to a very good liberal arts school too, and read Kierkegaard. I am no Kierkegaard. Donald Glover seems smart, but he is not a philosopher-- he's an artist who is interested in philosophy.

But nobody, least of all Glover, asserted that he was the intellectual equal of Kierkegaard, whatever that even means. You do not need to be the equal of Kierkegaard in order to read Kierkegaard - that is such a strange thing to even bring up.

"Hey, watcha reading?"
"A biography of Abraham Lincoln."
"Oh, like you're as smart as Lincoln, or even as smart as the person who wrote the biography!"

Besides, Glover hasn't even begun to pretend that he's writing philosophy. So, why bring it up the fact that he's probably not the intellectual equal of Kierkegaard himself?

...

Well, "a young person who is presumably not as intelligent or educated as Kierkegaard." We have different concepts about youth and adolescence now which have nothing to do with the internet and predate it.

Okay, but now we're talking about intelligence and education, and not youth. Besides, he's in his early 30s. Not that young, even by today's standards. In about four years, Glover could run for president.

So...why bring up youth? I'm not picking on you personally, but I really do think it's revealing that Glover's age is seen as relevant. In addition to the unfair scrutiny and pigeonholing that comes with Glover being a hip-hop artist, I also think that people like this Grantland author are treating Glover as a hipster. And I think that a large part of the modern conception of the hipster exists, well, "Because The Internet".

Hipsters are young people, seen as overgrown adolescents: callow, ironic, insincere, and superficially educated. Hipsters don't have "real" jobs. Hipsters don't have "real" interests. If a hipster has an interest, it's because he wants to impress other people. If too many people share his interest, then he'll switch to something more abstruse, so as to be more impressive.

As such, it's seen as inherently comic and ill-fitting that a young person could have an interest in reading Kierkegaard. Because, philosophy, wow, such difficult, so challenge.

Except...reading Kierkegaard is actually enjoyable and rewarding. You do not need a PhD to read Kierkegaard. Much of his work is perfectly readable. He's funny and poetic and prone to questions and parables, as opposed to big fat technical grand unified theories. Kierkegaard has special relevance nowadays, as so much of his work (and life) has to do with the various masks we wear and the points of view we audition and the ways in which we try to find meaning in a world that might not seem to offer any to us.

And...Glover is a perfectly intelligent and well-educated guy. I went to NYU with him. He's an acquaintance, we've hung out in group settings. He is as smart as anyone you will ever meet. Not only did he do very well in the highly-regarded Dramatic Writing program, but NYU is supposedly one of the top-ranked schools in the world for Philosophy. He was writing for network television straight out of undergrad. I'm not writing this to pretend that there's this close relationship, nor am I defending him (or NYU) for personal reasons. But, I am saying that I have both personal experience and more-than-reasonable inferences on my side, all leading to the conclusion that there is no reason whatsoever to suspect that Donald Glover is not intellectually up to the task of reading Kierkegaard.

What I'm saying is, there really is something weird about the fact that it's considered normal to look askance at an educated man for reading Kierkegaard in public. Like, he's too young to read Kierkegaard - but, he's older than Kierkegaard was when he was writing his foundational work. Or, he's not as smart as Kierkegaard - but, who said he had to be, or who says that he has to be in order to read Kierkegaard? Why is it that the very fact Glover reads Kierkegaard inspires people to cut him down, or to qualify his appreciation for Kierkegaard?

It's not just about Glover, and it's not just about Kierkegaard. There is a general trend in society to mock people, especially "young" people, for having perfectly acceptable interests. It's as if people are confused and/or threatened by the fact that people do, in fact, read adult books for pleasure and get things out of them. It feels like a mishmosh of Tall Poppy Syndrome and a general feeling that "young" people are incapable of doing anything.
posted by Sticherbeast at 6:48 AM on December 18, 2013 [5 favorites]


There were plenty of snarky character-assassination type pieces in the 70s from writerly sorts shooting others down for being pretentious. And before that, great writers wrote novels about how pretentiously douchey people could be... Revolutionary Road? And I mean, watch Annie Hall. From that movie it would appear the man lived to tell pretentious people to put a sock in it.

It's funny about Annie Hall. The single most famous joke in that movie is the Marshall McLuhan bit. Something interesting about it, with regard to this thread: the entire joke is based on the premise that one ought to know who McLuhan is, and what he actually said. It's not funny to mention having read McLuhan. It's funny to have read him incorrectly.

I'm not even sure who the modern-day equivalent of McLuhan is.
posted by Sticherbeast at 2:30 PM on December 18, 2013 [2 favorites]


Exactly, and not two minutes before the McLuhan scene Woody Allen is pointing and laughing about the sort of idiot who would demand an autograph of someone they knew to be a celebrity, despite not knowing who they actually were. He's clearly not AT ALL suggesting that it's dumb to know about stuff, or have opinions about things like Fellini films or Marshall McLuhan. The only way to come away with that reading is if you've only seen the McLuhan bit and no other part of the movie.
posted by Sara C. at 2:54 PM on December 18, 2013 [1 favorite]


Right, and the scene itself wouldn't exist without the assumption that Annie Hall's audience would agree that it was desirable to be clearly well-educated and up-to-date on the theories of public intellectuals.

...

Nowadays, I feel like the pop culture which occupies a similar niche has more to do with grimdark pseudorealism, childhood reverie, or how to deal with young adult rudderlessness. I can hardly think of any contemporary movies or TV shows which feature characters talking about anything that they would have read in a book, other than a book necessary for their profession.

There are occasional exceptions. For example, in Parks & Rec, there was a funny off-hand joke about how Ron Swanson hates metaphors. He then says that this hatred of metaphors is why Moby-Dick is his favorite book: after all, it's just a book about a whale.

Put another away, Allen's Love & Death was a light comedy which assumed at least a passing familiarity with art films and Russian literature, although it probably plays just fine even if you don't have that familiarity. I can't think of many movies or TV shows quite like that nowadays. Does Pride and Prejudice and Zombies count?
posted by Sticherbeast at 9:38 PM on December 18, 2013


Oh, god, the great thing about that Parks & Rec bit is that IT'S TRUE. You can absolutely read Moby Dick as a fucking rip-roaring yarn, and it's still just as good. That's what makes it great. What I love about that show is that they manage to never talk down to people, always speak truth, AND assume that at least some of their audience actually knows about things.

I can't think of many movies or TV shows quite like that nowadays. Does Pride and Prejudice and Zombies count?

In terms of intellectualism, probably not. But on the other hand I think it's really just that people focus on different things. People are much more design and media savvy today and much more culturally aware. There's also a lot more space for low culture, which frankly I don't think is such a bad thing. But I don't think that appreciation of low culture should lead directly to mocking people for wanting to read philosophy. Because obviously we need both. And the whole POINT of the resurgence of low culture is that it's now OK to like both, and draw influences from both. If you can either read Kirkegaard or listen to hiphop, what the fuck is the point of being alive in 2013? Because that's the best part of being alive in 2013.
posted by Sara C. at 10:03 PM on December 18, 2013


« Older July 30, 762 to February 13, 1258   |   GeoQuiz Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments