It’s also that Supa Hot Fire is a perfect encapsulation of the experience of culture and politics on the social-media dominated internet, where all politics and culture is seen through the lens of fanatical mob fandom divorced from actual content.
#Source filmmaker memes series#
Or that, as an early web series masterminded by a young black comedian that became a crossover triumph (Chris Rock and Soulja Boy appeared in the series years before it became normal for celebrities to be on TikTok), it blazed a trail to success for a huge amount of the decade’s digital culture. It’s not just that it gave birth to a canonical GIF, a shot of Supa Hot Fire smirking as his crew goes nuts. This series of parody rap battles - masterminded by comedian DeShawn Raw - might be the only internet thing you need to witness in order to understand the 2010s online. Pow.”) and yet his friends gas him up anyway. The concept and core joke of Supa Hot Fire is simple: He is a rapper who continually reminds you that he is “not a rapper” he is not very good at rapping (his killing blow is “Boom.
(See also the paternalistic narrative of Ted Williams, the homeless man with the “golden voice” rediscovered by Reddit.) At the time, an NYU music professor told NPR, “There’s a way in which the aesthetics of black poverty - the way they talk and they speak and they look - sort of becomes this fodder for humor without any interest in the context of the conditions in which people actually live.” I think we’re generally smarter than that now - aside from whoever came up with the opening credits for “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” - but “Bed Intruder” set the tone for too long.
“Bed Intruder” was just one entry in a too-long list of viral videos and other memes in which a black American speaking in AAVE went viral for reasons that most people didn’t want to fully articulate or interrogate. 89 on the Billboard Hot 100 when it was released - ends with “Hide your kids, Hide your wife / And hide your husband / Cause they’re raping everybody out here.” Yikes! Like, the chorus to this song - which landed at No. I don’t think there was any intended malice, but it was hard not to notice that the reaction was less about Dodson’s agitated heroism and more about, well, the way he talked. Huntsville, Alabama, resident Antoine Dodson protected his sister from an attempted rape and told a local news station about the incident - and then YouTube stars the Gregory Brothers Auto-Tuned it. “Ahaha,” says I.įew internet memes reflect less well on the internet of the early 2010s than the “Bed Intruder” meme. “Go!” the little girl shouts! “Bwaaah!” she yells as she slams into the concrete. But the seeds for the six-second masterpiece were sown early in the decade: The funniest video I’ve ever seen is only two seconds long and has a complete dramatic arc packed inside a video the size of a postage stamp. From Vine to TikTok, a generation of teenage auteurs and idols demonstrated the value of hard limits when it comes to video. If any one format dominated digital culture in the 2010s, it was the short video. What are the posts that we will remember ten or a hundred years from now? What are the posts that told us something about how we lived this decade? What are the posts that were so funny, or so strange, that I cannot get them out of my head? I am interested in those those individual instances of human ingenuity, or derangement, that best expressed digital culture as it crystalized in the 2010s. Others can debate the greatest memes of the decade or the most powerful internet personalities. Now, as the decade draws to a close, like a film critic looking back at the memorable movies, I am thinking back to the posts worth remembering - the posts that will stand the test of time. I’ve spent this entire decade creating, consuming, and writing about posts. Just as the cell is the building block of all organic life, the post is the building block of all online culture, the raw matter out of which memes, in-jokes, dance challenges, and trend stories are born. What is a “post”? A comment, a tweet, a status update, a Story, a forum contribution, a blog post, a photo, a video, even an email - these are all posts. Over the course of the last decade, the internet and the people, businesses, and institutions that call it home have matured into an astonishingly powerful force. When it comes to internet culture, discussion often focuses on the big picture: Viral memes that mutate over months and draw in millions of participants, vast world-striding platforms with powerful and menacing algorithms influencers with global political clout and hackers with the backing of nation-states.
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