So, I’m taking this class on Pop-Culture theory. We read these esoteric texts about the relationship between commerce and art, mass production, etc. But we also spend a lot of time in class watching youtube videos and analyzing them in pertinence to the theories we read.

First we watched that^^^. Yeah, it’s boring as shit, but this was entertaining circa whenever the fuck it was before we invented the Internet. Then we watched this.

Then we watched this.

Then we watched this, if you skipped the other 3 at least watch the first 40 seconds of this once.

OK, so now you can kind of see why this is a little creepy? Unless you’re a Communist, then it’s just delicious. See that giant “screen” back there, well it’s not a screen [dur] it’s thousands of people holding up these colored cards, flipping them in unison to make a “Human LCD” screen. So wtf does this have to do with Beyonce and the boring ass Tiller girls? Well this one guy, Siegfried Kracauer has this theory about pop-culture or “mass culture,” that I find interesting. He believes that right around the time of the Industrial Revolution, you know when we started using machines and factories, Ford started churning out thousands of the exact same car, well Kracuer suspects this is when this whole “synchronized movement” thing started to get popular.

He doesn’t analyze The Tiller Girls and he wouldn’t say Beyonce are “deep and shit.” But he does relate these kinds of synchronized activity to the standardization and mass production that started to arise. There’s something creepy and kind of cool about so many people, moving together that they completely lose any kind of individuality, any uniqueness, so that they create this larger thing and you’re forced to look at that instead of the individual parts, kind of like a machine?

When you look at it in relation to Communism, it seems a lot more fucked up because we’re conditioned to believe that there is no uniqueness or individualism in Communism, but then our Popular Culture isn’t much different? Well the masses in both  cultures are made up of the working class, people whose lives revolve around completing these monotonous tasks on a day-to-day basis, in order to produce something bigger, kind of like a machine?

See the thing about Beyonce and The Tiller Girls and that big ass Human LCD is that there’s absolutely nothing special about them. I mean, you can commend the physical prowess, the thought behind the process, but the actual product is kind of mediocre. You won’t remember the specific pictures displayed in that screen and you’ll forget the Single Ladies video when Beyonce releases a new one. We’ll all move on with our lives, these “works of art” have no real value and they’re not really intended to, they’re just frivolous entertainment. But, the thing most interesting about Kracauer is, when he says these things are meaningless, he doesn’t completely ride them off. He pretty much says, there are snobby people out there who’ll try to tell you that the Single Ladies video isn’t real art because it doesn’t tell you anything about the human condition, that it’s thoughtless.Well, Kracauer thinks that these videos are even more of a direct reflection of the masses.

“Real art” is hyperbole, it tells us how we should be by showing us exaggerations of ourselves. But the Single Ladies video shows us what we really are, a culture that unapologetically, fully engages and relishes in the mass produced, a culture of individuals who exist as one.

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