I am become Tiger Beat, Destroyer of Vocal Cords
June 4, 2016 4:12 PM   Subscribe

Ellen Cushing of Buzzfeed drops in on the DigiTour: 7 teenage boys (and one girl) who have become so famous on social media that together, they can sell out arenas and drive teen girls to madness.
posted by Diablevert (56 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
The article is a year old so I'm genuinely wondering if they are still as famous or have they already been replaced by younger, newer stars? I'd probably have to find a young person to ask - they may cross my lawn to inform me.
posted by billiebee at 4:28 PM on June 4, 2016 [9 favorites]


This is amazing stuff. Not surprizing (watching my 8 year old devour Minecraft Youtubers) and am hoping some of the genuineness stays as it gets more mainstream (or something like that). More established.
posted by emmet at 5:23 PM on June 4, 2016


Two words. Spatch Cocking.
posted by Sphinx at 7:12 PM on June 4 [5 favorites +] [!]


I thought I had opened these comments, but I had opened the next thread down. I was very confused.
posted by JDHarper at 5:55 PM on June 4, 2016 [31 favorites]


The article is a year old so I'm genuinely wondering if they are still as famous or have they already been replaced by younger, newer stars?

Haven't read the whole article yet, but from taking a quick look, it appears this is the same tour that came to my city a couple of months ago. I'm in Mexico. My 12 year-old niece begged to go unrelentingly until my sister said "ok but I have to go too, to see what the whole thing is".
posted by CrazyLemonade at 5:56 PM on June 4, 2016 [4 favorites]


Sounds like not even one of them has the talent to flip a water bottle. Hmph. Kids!
posted by clawsoon at 6:09 PM on June 4, 2016 [10 favorites]


digital communication is amazingly powerful and specific, i'm a bit in awe that it created a beatles i wasn't aware of.
posted by eustatic at 6:19 PM on June 4, 2016 [5 favorites]


Giving a 14-year old hundreds of Twitter mentions a minute almost seems like some kind of mad scientist human experimentation that should not be allowed....Internet fame breaks grown-ass people every day......maybe they can handle the pressure, like deep sea creatures, and it just seems natural to them, I don't know.
posted by thelonius at 6:36 PM on June 4, 2016 [9 favorites]


The farther I read, the darker it got.
All that intimacy means hundreds, sometimes thousands of strangers confiding in you — often about very heavy subjects. “Some of the girls will say stuff like, ‘Because of you, I’m clean for 30 or 60 days,’” Carrie tells me. “Or ‘I haven’t cut anymore.’"”
I would find that a crushing load.
posted by clawsoon at 6:49 PM on June 4, 2016 [12 favorites]


The article is a year old so I'm genuinely wondering if they are still as famous or have they already been replaced by younger, newer stars?

So it is. That explains why it doesn't mention Hayes Grier being on Dancing with the Stars last fall.
posted by SisterHavana at 6:53 PM on June 4, 2016


this is some crazy deep primate grooming gossip stuff.

we're a long way from picking each other's knits, toto
posted by eustatic at 7:34 PM on June 4, 2016


we're a long way from picking each other's knits

I beg to differ.
posted by kenko at 7:55 PM on June 4, 2016 [3 favorites]


we're a long way from picking each other's knits, toto

I beg to differ.
posted by clockzero at 8:32 PM on June 4, 2016 [4 favorites]


Young people, mostly girls, have been totally into slightly less young but still non-threatening boys since, I believe, the Punic Wars. That adults have no idea who these guys are isn't a bug, it's a feature. It helps kids have some identity and interest separate from their parents. Half a century ago teenage girls were screaming at their TV sets because The Beatles were on Ed Sullivan.

Also not new is the phenomenon of Famous for Being Famous.
posted by LastOfHisKind at 9:30 PM on June 4, 2016


Young people, mostly girls, have been totally into slightly less young but still non-threatening boys since, I believe, the Punic Wars.

There's a reason why I put bobbysoxer as one of the tags. But the fact that this flavor of mass hysteria is something we've seen before doesn't mean that there's nothing new here. What's new is what's being asked of them as performer: They perform the self, 24-7. Everyday, they shoot video diaries and film vines and tweet and make phone calls, dozens of times a day, and when they do they must perform their ongoing role as Dream Boyfriend. Every once in a while, they have to talk people out of suicide, apparently. All they are is themselves, but they must be that, perfectly, all the time. The fantasy is not just, "If only I could meet him, he would love me," it's "we are friends, really". He retweeted me or liked my post or added me as a follower or sent me a DM. Frank Sinatra or David Cassidy or whoever got whisked into the limo or closed the door on the greenroom and they went back to living in your TV or on your radio. These kids can't, really. And yet at the same time it's weirdly private, these transactions. Everything's tête-à-tête when it's on your phone. That's interesting. What does it do to a person, to have to be their persona all the time, whether they like it or not, or risk everything? A 14 year old person.

And the ephermerality of it all, too. That seems to linger in the air like a cloud of mustard gas. Before it was always, well, if you had real talent and were canny and lucky, you could make it out of the teen idol ghetto and become a real star. A handful: Justin Timberlake. Michael Jackson. Sinatra, of course. For the rest, either get a real job or wait a couple decades and hit the nostalgia cicuit. Can these kids still do that? When there was never an albumn that got bought in the first place, no relic left for the nostalgia to curdle around? There's been a bunch of 90s boy bands out on tour the past couple years, IIRC, but at least for them there were hits. There were songs. All these 30-something year old women gather their buddies and get a buzz on and sing along, and I can understand the appeal of that, for a one off night out. I guess technically some of these kids have that, but not all of them. Twenty years from now, are these same trembling teenagers really gonna go stand in the selfie line again? No concert necessary? Maybe, I guess.
posted by Diablevert at 10:08 PM on June 4, 2016 [53 favorites]


I think there is a fundamental difference between this and previous iterations of fame. These kids' fame wasn't granted by any particular Adult. And it certainly can't be taken away by any particular Adult (except, maybe, their parents). I'm sure these kids all learned almost immediately that you can't please everyone, but that's a lot easier to deal with than needing to please a specific handful of people who hold the keys to your continued career.
posted by mantecol at 11:04 PM on June 4, 2016 [3 favorites]


I, too, think there's a fundamental difference between this and previous iterations of fame. These kids' fame happened after I grew up and in ways that are confusing and scary to me.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 12:49 AM on June 5, 2016 [15 favorites]


7 teenage boys (and one girl)

Why the parentheses?
posted by Too-Ticky at 2:39 AM on June 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


Here's their latest marketing video. Pretty much says it all, I think.
posted by effbot at 3:58 AM on June 5, 2016


Twenty years from now, are these same trembling teenagers really gonna go stand in the selfie line again? No concert necessary? Maybe, I guess.

I daresay the ones who will "make it" in such a sense will parley their current fame into creative projects they were going to do anyway. It is backward as compared to before - first the fame, then the art - but if much art is an expression of the personal anyway it seems an entirely logical step.

Oddly enough, I feel like the missing link here is Earl Sweatshirt, for those who keep up with hip-hop. Here was a creative teenage individual who was functionally imprisoned during the time the collective he was associated with became famous. Getting out, he had a lot of traction and a lot of creative freedom, and has since made some extremely miserable music. It is this kind of thing that I think we might see more of, and what I think might last - the people in these situations -really- being themselves, because that was what they had from the start without labels telling them to jump onto one trend or another for what sells.

I think twenty years from now if we remember them at all it will probably be more interesting than a Westlife tour.
posted by solarion at 4:00 AM on June 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


Beyond the dirt bike stunt, Hayes doesn’t do much during the half hour or so he spends onstage. Though several DigiTour-ers harbor musical ambitions (and, in most cases, the talent to realize them), beyond moderate charisma and those pop idol looks, Hayes doesn’t seem to — or even purport to — have any of the qualities that one might equate with sell-out-a-theater stardom. He doesn’t sing or act or play an instrument or tell great jokes or even play sports exceptionally well; he just is, and that is far more than enough. As Meridith Valiando Rojas, DigiTour’s 30-year-old CEO, explains later, “Some of these kids, their talent is relating to their audience. They’re the coolest people you know, and they happen to have 5 million friends.”
It's fascinating/horrifying to watch the capitalist exploitation of this corner case of teen girl psyches progress. Like poking a pen on a human brain and seeing an arm jerk, they have now discovered that even the appearance of talent is not necessary, and so search constraints loosen and production costs drop and the process of extracting money becomes more efficient. I wonder how far away we are from paying for appearances to hug the wire mother.
posted by indubitable at 5:35 AM on June 5, 2016 [18 favorites]


is Leggy Starlitz their manager?
posted by JohnFromGR at 5:43 AM on June 5, 2016


Any sentient being knows this phenomenon has been going on in various iterations for generations, but I don't see why anyone would think it's not worth looking into the differences.

As I was writing this I see indubitable has said very well what I was going to say: there is something very "capitalism of our times" about the hollowness and at the same time the scale of this, like a real estate bubble. It doesn't mean nothing good will come of it or that the young fans are permanently warped by it, but I think it's really interesting to see the difference between this and what I experienced as an 8 year old with a passion for The Monkees. Maybe this phenomenon is just bigger and more hollow and maybe that's not necessarily a benign thing.
posted by maggiemaggie at 5:57 AM on June 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


It doesn't mean nothing good will come of it or that the young fans are permanently warped by it, but I think it's really interesting to see the difference between this and what I experienced as an 8 year old with a passion for The Monkees. Maybe this phenomenon is just bigger and more hollow and maybe that's not necessarily a benign thing.

I think there's an observation that heads in the opposite direction of this - the core of the phenomenon is the kids' feeling of connection to the various "known" kids on tour, which comes out of their home-grown performances... the Monkees were kind of interesting, in that starting as a wholly manufactured creation, the members of the group wanted to become genuine. These kids are starting out genuine, and that's the core of the connection, regardless of the tour exploitations. The core of the thing is the very real notion that these are kids just like any other, "just more cool". It's bringing popular culture production closer to the individual, making it much less of an entertainment industry product - again, in the core experience, the tour being somewhat the opposite, and comes long after the social media streams that give rise to it.
posted by emmet at 6:07 AM on June 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


Well, looking back at The Monkees they held up surprisingly well, I think. I still enjoy their music (when I come across it) and their TV shows are still fun to watch. I still think Mike Nesmith is totally hot!

I wonder what it is these fans are going to look back fondly on. Will the ephemera even still exist?
posted by maggiemaggie at 6:32 AM on June 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


The core of the thing is the very real notion that these are kids just like any other, "just more cool". It's bringing popular culture production closer to the individual, making it much less of an entertainment industry product - again, in the core experience, the tour being somewhat the opposite, and comes long after the social media streams that give rise to it.

Are the large numbers of YouTube hits, Instagram followers, and whatnot real? I assume they are for now, but somebody in the "entertainment industry" will eventually hit on the idea of using bots to create fake hits and followers for whoever they want to promote.

It's the same old story: genuine youth culture is created on the margins, and then the conglomerates leap in when they see that there is money to be made.
posted by tallmiddleagedgeek at 7:06 AM on June 5, 2016


Perhaps for this reason, the DigiTour show itself seems mostly designed to enable the boys to mug for the crowd as much as possible and the crowd, in turn, to scream as much as possible... But by and large, the cast do not really perform so much as appear.

The makers of Mr. Show were ahead of their time, as per usual.
posted by spoobnooble II: electric bugaboo at 7:58 AM on June 5, 2016


This is fascinating - they get to be the imaginary boyfriend made flesh, but for thousands of girls who collectively consume them yet claim individual ownership of them.

I don't see the wire mother, I see the Coin-operated Boy.
posted by Ndwright at 8:12 AM on June 5, 2016 [3 favorites]


Kids are weird.
posted by downtohisturtles at 8:18 AM on June 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


So this is what the whole Pretty Patrick Lunchtime thing is about on Bee & Puppycat.
posted by Strange Interlude at 8:21 AM on June 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


I think this part was on point:

There's a reason girls love this type of star, and it's because at 8 or 12 or 15, sex is still, frankly, scary: They want the swoony stomach drop of meeting an idol close up — not an actual sexual encounter with said idol.
posted by mantecol at 8:25 AM on June 5, 2016 [3 favorites]


In one sense this is nothing new - but in another sense it's very new because of the essential emptiness of the platform.

I mean, no one could hear the Beatles when they performed live, but their actual records started off as amazing and went on from there, and we're still talking about them and performing their music today.

But this kids are celebrities for being celebrities. This was essentially true for some of the earlier kid celebs but there was at least the guise of them being musicians or actors - but now it's completely eaten its own tail, and the need for any sort of content is gone.

I tried to think of some big positive thing about this (other than "They could be doing worse" - I mean, this is really harmless stuff) but I can't really find it. It's like if MacDonald's replaced the fries with candy floss... fries are bad for you but at least they have some food value.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 8:29 AM on June 5, 2016


I wouldn't mind if celebrity and music could go their separate ways.
posted by Jode at 8:47 AM on June 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


7 teenage boys (and one girl)

Why the parentheses?


Parentheses are often overused in online writing, sometimes for no apparent reason than to indicate a slight change in tone of voice. In this case, that has the unfortunate result of making the girl seem less important than the boys. But let's presume that was unintended.
posted by John Cohen at 8:47 AM on June 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


In this case, that has the unfortunate result of making the girl seem less important than the boys. But let's presume that was unintended.

No, that was perfectly intentional. If you read the piece, the female perfomer is more of an afterthought; 95% of the audience for the tour is young girls who are crushing hard on the seven teen boys. They're the bulk of the draw, and the atmosphere around the whole thing is very much Beetlemania-type mass hysteria, not Beyonce and/or Taylor Swift-concert girl power. The fact that she's there at all is interesting and worthy of mention, but it's pretty clear that the whole weird electrictiy that's being generated here is mostly due to the swoony boy crush aspect. I felt characterizing her as an afterthought in my description of the content was a fair reflection of her status within that world. Her status within that world may not be just or desirable in some sort of grander what kind of society to we want to have sense, but the length of her selfie line is what it is.
posted by Diablevert at 8:58 AM on June 5, 2016 [6 favorites]


The Hug The Wire Mother tour is brilliant and I want to invest in it.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 9:12 AM on June 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


When DFW was picturing the Entertainment in Infinite Jest do you think it started with a flat voice going "Heyyyyy YouTube"
posted by Potomac Avenue at 9:13 AM on June 5, 2016 [6 favorites]


But this kids are celebrities for being celebrities.

I think I got my earlier post at least partially wrong. It's true that there are people in the world who fall into the Famous for Being Famous category BUT making entertaining short videos is definitely a skill, as are the subtle performance art of being appealing and charismatic even if you don't feel like it and the self promotion that it takes to climb the popularity charts. This is especially true now that YouTube deliberately hides videos from less popular channels on your subscription feed in favor of driving traffic to the big channels. Becoming sustainable popular on YouTube is hard and it's a job so don't let the teen bedroom setting fool you.
posted by LastOfHisKind at 9:26 AM on June 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


the Monkees were kind of interesting, in that starting as a wholly manufactured creation, the members of the group wanted to become genuine. These kids are starting out genuine, and that's the core of the connection, regardless of the tour exploitations.

Or, these kids have been practicing being the product for so long there's not much difference between the public and the private. The article said no one had to tell them to not reveal if they had a relationship. They've grown up in this world.

The Monkees and others of the time could do whatever they wanted when they weren't working, and many struggled with blurring of public and private personas. I guess if you eliminate that line you eliminate the problem. Be the product 24/7.

I feel for these kids. I want their income, but I wouldn't wish their lives on anyone.
posted by bongo_x at 9:34 AM on June 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


> I want their income,

The history of child stars is, for the most part, a story of rapacious adults exploiting kids and taking nearly all the money generated.

I hope they're doing better, but I expect a lot of the money is vanishing - and worse, once they are yesterday's news, they aren't going to have any skills that will support them.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 10:00 AM on June 5, 2016


The history of child stars is, for the most part, a story of rapacious adults exploiting kids and taking nearly all the money generated.

Yes, I literally want to be the adult that steals their income. But I do feel sorry for them.

they aren't going to have any skills that will support them.

I was going to write that earlier, they've spent much of their lives developing the skill of attracting young girls. I'm not sure that's a good long term plan.
posted by bongo_x at 10:04 AM on June 5, 2016


Oh, and if you hadn't guessed, that article really depressed me. The one thing the kids have is "genuineness" - but they're for the most part genuinely superficial and thoughtless. I searched in vain for even a single opinion on anything of consequence.

The whole gender thing makes me feel sick and the kids seem miserable (though I feel the article is also slanting it that way).

It makes me despair for the future.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 10:10 AM on June 5, 2016


I was going to write that earlier, they've spent much of their lives developing the skill of attracting young girls. I'm not sure that's a good long term plan.

If I had 1/10,000th as much money as they have and a couple days to find someone competent enough to manage it in my best interests I would never need another long term plan as long as I lived.
posted by an animate objects at 10:10 AM on June 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


> Yes, I literally want to be the adult that steals their income.

OOPS! Not you. :-D I meant that they probably aren't actually seeing that income.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 10:10 AM on June 5, 2016


OOPS! Not you. :-D

Please, I'm not anywhere near that sensitive. I couldn't even find that sensitive on a map.

Besides, I was serious.
posted by bongo_x at 10:23 AM on June 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


The Monkees and others of the time could do whatever they wanted when they weren't working, and many struggled with blurring of public and private personas. I guess if you eliminate that line you eliminate the problem

which creates a new problem of compensated / uncompensated emotional labor. the whole project is built on emotional labor that happens cybernetically. despite facetious comments above, that's what is new about this (along with the economies of scale from so many more people / generational bump).

when the LP did Mick Jagger's work for him, he could spend that time doing blow and groupies. It wasn't physically possible for Mick Jagger (or Kurt Cobain or Britney Spears; even Myley Cyrus or Justin Bieber) to send personal messages to each young woman. Here it seems the business model is predicated on just that.

when the product is just you, live on video, you have to perform the labor each time, which is much more exhausting than even an arena rock tour (which the article sidebars). The intensity of emotional labor required is enough to make you want to get wasted, shave your head or perform in the nude or something...
posted by eustatic at 10:31 AM on June 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


Maybe curating our Youtube personas is the post-work future. Universal basic income to include webcam.
posted by thelonius at 10:56 AM on June 5, 2016


I searched in vain for even a single opinion on anything of consequence.

The article depressed me too but if you were looking to 14-yr-olds for opinions on things of consequence, you might have been setting yourself up for disappointment.
posted by entropone at 11:01 AM on June 5, 2016 [4 favorites]


It would be a career mistake for one of them to have an opinion on anything consequential right now - that's one of the things that makes you feel bad for them. Though one thing I think people are overlooking is that they are literally growing up with their audience - which in a few years will be happy to receive a less anodyne persona.
posted by atoxyl at 1:21 PM on June 5, 2016


this kids are celebrities for being celebrities. This was essentially true for some of the earlier kid celebs but there was at least the guise of them being musicians or actors

These kids are actors, basically. They're microcasting to fans and there's a pretense that they aren't acting and a further lack of any pretense of a structured, fictional, narrative like a movie, play, or TV show, but they are a variety of actor. They remind me of nothing so much as Japanese "idols" or the stars of the movie mags of the early days of Hollywood. I mean, what was Valentino's talent besides being hot and able to make women swoon?
posted by octobersurprise at 2:35 PM on June 5, 2016 [3 favorites]


Yeah, they're basically jpop or kpop idols, just without the music/marketing machine behind them.
posted by subdee at 4:04 PM on June 5, 2016


In what way are "jpop or kpop idols" different from Western pop idols, in your analogy, subdee?
posted by Joseph Gurl at 9:16 PM on June 5, 2016


The expectation of purity, chasteness and percieved availability is higher (though some groups will play with or partially subvert those expectations as well), and the model involves a LOT more direct contact between fans and idols. There assembly line meet and greets exactly as described in the article, for instance.

The groups also make a lot of "bonus" content for their fans to view online - skits, covers, short greetings, behind the scenes stuff, thank you messages, homemade music videos, etc etc etc.

The biggest different though is that the Asian pop star machine is alive and thriving, while we don't have much of a teen pop machine in he West these days, outside of, like, Disney Channel stars.
posted by subdee at 12:01 PM on June 6, 2016


I know Britney's old now, but what you're describing is exactly what she, N'Sync, Backstreet Boys, One Direction, et al. did for their careers. This distinction doesn't ring true to me (and I've lived in Korea since 2002).
posted by Joseph Gurl at 3:16 PM on June 6, 2016


maggiemaggie: "Well, looking back at The Monkees they held up surprisingly well, I think. I still enjoy their music (when I come across it) and their TV shows are still fun to watch. I still think Mike Nesmith is totally hot!

I wonder what it is these fans are going to look back fondly on. Will the ephemera even still exist?
"

Pssst. They just released a new album celebrating 50 years, including songs written by Ben Gibbard, Rivers Cuomo and other pop singer-songwriter type folks. Mike performs on the album, but he's not going to tour. And RIP Davy. But it makes me glad that Mike's still willing to go to the studio even if not tour.

OK Back to your modern day popfun.
posted by symbioid at 9:11 PM on June 6, 2016


Heh, I went to high school with a Naismith progeny.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 12:17 AM on June 7, 2016


I am become Tiger Beat, Destroyer of Vocal Cords

stealing that line. good one.
posted by Mr.Pointy at 9:20 AM on June 8, 2016


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