My favourite internet trend this summer/pandemic is “It’s not coming from where you think.” Whatever’s going to amuse or captivate you, whether it’s Sarah Cooper or 2020-by-celebrity-month memes, everything interesting is gonna surprise you. That’s not new, of course, it’s basically what half the internet is made on, but I love it because ‘mainstream’ culture is following suit – the people who were anointed as celebrities are as bored and worn out as the rest of us and are actively going “I’m the WORST, look over here instead.” 

 

Case In Point: Joyce Carol Oates’s Foot. 

I am going to be very blunt – a gross AND FASCINATING picture of her foot is behind this link. Click it or not, but that’s our starting point here. (Lainey: you know if it were me, I would have just embedded the photo of it right here on the site because I love gross sh-t and besides, it’s not like anyone could have escaped it this weekend on Twitter, but Duana is much more considerate, I guess.)

Joyce Carol Oates writes important books. Modern American Literature, if you will. She’s high-brow, and the stereotype would be that high brow people don’t engage on a sort of base level, right? 

Then she posts a goopy, gloppy blister-foot picture (a chemical burn/reaction from something called either Hogweed or Cow Parsnip, I kid you not) and, though she got only a relatively modest 738 retweets, there are articles in Vanity Fair and Vulture and more. About her gross foot. Lainey and I are open about our delight for online gross body stuff, but it doesn’t usually get a Vanity Fair focus, any more than the latest Pornhub offering does. I love the meeting in the middle. 

 

Not just because it’s unexpected, but because it allows people to be more real. If Joyce Carol Oates can publish something like this – first of all, that means “weird body stuff happens to all of us, including Pulitzer nominees”, and that “maybe I don’t have to hide my weird stuff”, and it’s kind of a bit of pus-related challenging of the status quo that I’m really into. 

It’s also super-savvy social media strategy – or it would be, if I thought it was in any way calculated. But I don’t. At best, I’d bet Oates thought ‘why the hell not’, but I don’t think she was aiming for virality or sharing some of Dr. Pimple Popper’s glory – and the genuine guilelessness of that is why it’s caught everyone’s attention. 

Then there’s the Twins – you know, Fred and Tim from TwinsthenewTrend? They went viral for their reaction to Phil Collins’ “In The Air Tonight” and Alicia Keys recently responded to their video about “Fallin”:

 

I love the one where they get blasted back in their seats by Adele’s “Rolling In The Deep" - they pause before the first stanza’s even over! because they are clearly not expecting much, as in many of these clips, but they’re also not snotty and skeptical – the openness and sweet-naturedness is incredibly refreshing in a time when we all know every trick in the book for ‘engagement’ and can smell it coming (yesterday my stir-crazy husband improvised a montage of how every influencer starts their videos with “What’s up guys?”).  

It’s winsome and it’s real – this is an incredible piece in the New York Times about how music is served to us in bubbles which allows the twins to experience these ‘hits’ for the first time – and I would wager that is what’s behind the spike in sales: the idea that maybe we could get back some of that first-time earnestness. 

So if I’m a celebrity – on the one hand, I can totally see how this might be terrifying, because the one thing you lose forever as a big-deal professional is to be able to pretend like nobody’s watching, but also, can you imagine the relief some of the most pursued, most obsessed-over must be feeling right now? Like, every “I wish I could just get away from it all” celebrity complaint/plot of Notting Hill is coming true right now. No wonder they’re saying “Look over there!” Can it be long before one of them finds my beloved College Admission videos? 

If I end this piece with ‘shoot your shot, Internet’, as in ‘go out there and do your earnest thing’ – it’s sort of the most cynical thing on earth, because being told to do so because it’s proven to work is… kind of the opposite of what we’re talking about, right? So I’ll go with the better takeaway: how exciting is it to follow people who break the rules*? Let’s do more of that. 

*I see you, firing up your email to write “Yeah but only the ‘right’ rules”. Let’s do this.