A Guide to Children’s Culture for Out-of-Touch Adults: Timothée Chalamet’s Memes
This week’s journey into the world of youth culture takes us from the heights of public service announcements signaling a positive shift in cultural understanding of Down syndrome to the depths of the new incarnation of Gamergate. Along the way, we’ll look at a few memes about Timothée Chalamet and find out why the music was so much better in his youth.
Timothée Chalamet: the most memorable actor of a generation
Twenty-eight-year-old actor Timothée Chalamet has starred in Dune, Wonka and Dune 2 and has been nominated for an Academy Award, three Golden Globe Awards and three BAFTA Awards. But it looks like a shoe.
Since 2020, people have noted Chalamet’s resemblance to shoes. “Timothée Chalamet looks like a pointy Italian boot that was turned into a real boy by a witch’s curse,” the first tweet about the phenomenon reads . Watch this video and see if you agree . Or these photos nearby .
However, shoes aren’t the only thing Chalamet looks like. Last week, the first photos of the actor as a young Bob Dylan for the upcoming biopic Total Unknown were released. It looks like this:
Judging by the Internet, Chalamet looks like Fievel Mousekewitz from An American Tail. Or the “ every character is actually in love ” type. Or like: “He is going to become a governess for a captain who has seven children.” Seven!” Or like ” Charles Dickens character with a jam band “.
I don’t generally encourage bullying people on the internet, but it’s all pretty good-natured and he does seem like a boot; plus, if Chalamet gets mad, he might cry into a big pile of money.
That’s why you hate youth music
Have you ever had a young man play you modern music and it sounded wrong and bad? This happens to me regularly. My teenager opens the Soundcloud of some underground rapper or producer he likes, and my reaction (unspoken because I’m not an asshole) is usually, “How can anyone like that shit?”
It’s not necessarily the music itself; This production is a mix. The drums are too low. The vocals are dirty. There is no division. Etc., etc. “Why would anyone release something like this when professional production tools are readily available to anyone with a PC?” I would think. But I think I understand the reason.
Since at least the 1950s, music that young people liked could be recognized in part because older people hated it. The distorted, dissonant guitars of rock ‘n’ roll, the harsh minimalism and obscenity-laden lyrics of hip-hop sounded wrong to people and parents , like a mistake or something dangerous, so artists piled them on.
But at some point the musicians ran out of runway. In rock, I would argue that the release of Big Black’s Songs About Fucking in 1987 marks the point where distortion or noise could no longer be applied to a recording and it could still legitimately be called “music.” You can also choose a similar random date for hip-hop. This may be NWA’s first album. As extreme as the content was at the time, both Songs About Fucking and Straight Outta Compton were professionally produced.
Big Black’s Steve Albini would go on to produce Nirvana’s culture-defining In Utero, the album that current parents grew up with, making “noise and distortion” forever incapable of offending. N.W.A.’s “Straight Outta Compton” is almost feel-good nostalgia for 2024. But in a great piece of teenage subversion, young artists have recently (perhaps unknowingly) realized that they can still make music that sounds wrong and bad to people like me, even if they can’t. do this through noise or swearing. The ingenious solution is dirty, imperfect, unpleasant to listen to mixes of modern underground music. So the next time you find yourself thinking that music was so much better back in your day, remember that it’s really just your old ears; When your children grow up, it will be played in dentists’ offices.
Is Gamergate coming back?
If you were lucky enough to miss the first incarnation of Gamergate in 2014, I have bad news. The second version of a movement of harassment masquerading as activism is brewing within the fetid coterie of a new generation of internet weirdos and dorks. Gamergate 2.0 has abandoned its phony concerns about “ethics in video game journalism” in favor of simply confronting things it deems “woke,” but the tactics remain the same: pick a target, make something up about it, and then engage in prosecution. hoses and launch deadly guns. This time, the focus of the ire was a small story design company , Sweet Baby Inc. The cover for Gamergate’s harassment campaign is the belief that the 16-employee company dictates the editorial choices of the entire $214 billion gaming industry, including the choice of the main character’s race in Alan Wake 2, the choice Kratos makes in Last God. of War, and is responsible for virtually every non-white and non-heterosexual character in all games.
What’s encouraging is that the industry is reacting more aggressively this time, with game company executives pointing out that the Gamergate idiots don’t understand how the games industry (or anything else) works because companies hire consulting firms because they need services. they provide; Consulting companies do not dictate terms to their employers. So if Sweet Baby is offering woke-if-cation, it’s at the request of an industry that wants to be more woke, not less. Another encouraging difference between this and the original Gamergate: The movement seems much smaller and sadder: the Discord server where the harassment is organized only has about 2,000 members.
Deception in the Connected Age
I have no sympathy for them, but today’s scammers have a harder time hiding their indiscretions than any previous generation. The number of apps and platforms that can give you away is constantly increasing, and one small mistake will give away the game. You can even get arrested through the fitness app Strava.
In a recent video, TikToker meg.c.mcgee tells the story of how she found proof of her husband’s infidelity using running maps on Strava. His jogging route led directly from the house he shared with his wife to the house of his illicit partner half a mile away, and the unnamed dude didn’t set it to private or delete the data. Commenters on the post tell stories of catching cheating partners using Airbnb, Venmo, the AMC app (he went to see movies she didn’t watch too often), and secret calculator apps that look like innocent math books but serve as repositories for hidden photos. .
Viral Video of the Week: Assume I Can
This week’s viral video is a public service announcement from the National Down Syndrome Society that’s really getting on people’s nerves: the ad has been viewed nearly 30 million times on TikTok and even more on Instagram. It makes viewers think about how the limitations we place on people with Down syndrome become self-fulfilling prophecies. “Coach, you assume I can’t hit harder,” actress and model Madison Tevlin says in the video, “so you don’t coach me to hit harder.”
The ad essentially looks like a standard do-gooder PSA, the kind of thing that might get 5,000 views, but then Tevlin tells us that it might actually be “reciting fucking Shakespeare.” After a pause, she asks, “You assumed I couldn’t swear, right?”
I didn’t expect this, but I did assume that people making public service announcements about Down syndrome would infantilize their subjects in the name of good taste or respectability, so the fact that they refuse to do so and instead acknowledge that swearing, drinking, is refreshing and powerful. , and having sex is not a special privilege for neurotypical people or something we should never talk about in relation to people with intellectual disabilities, but are basic human rights that everyone should be able to enjoy.