This week's trip into the world of young people culture takes us from the heights of a PSA that signals a positive shift in cultural ideas about Down Syndrome to the depths of a new incarnation of "Gamergate." Along the way we'll take a look at some memes about Timothée Chalamet and learn why, exactly, the music was so much better when you were young.
Timothée Chalamet: a generation’s most meme-able actor
Twenty-eight year old actor Timothée Chalamet starred in Dune, Wonka, and Dune 2 and has been nominated for an Academy Award, three Golden Globe Awards, and three BAFTAs. But he looks like a shoe.
Since as early as 2020, people have been pointing out Chalamet’s resemblance to footwear. “Timothee Chalamet looks like a pointy italian shoe that was turned into a real boy by a witch's curse,” reads the first tweet about the phenomena. Check out this video and see if you agree. Or these side-by-side photos.
Shoes aren’t the only things Chalamet resembles, however. The first photos were released last week of the actor dressed as a young Bob Dylan for upcoming biopic A Complete Unknown, It looks like this:
According to the internet, Chalamet looks like Fievel Mousekewitz from An American Tail. Or like “every single character in love actually.” Or like he’s “On his way to become a governess to a captain with seven children. Seven!” Or like “a Charles Dickens character with a jam band.”
I generally don’t celebrate bullying people online, but it’s all pretty good-natured, and he really does look like a shoe; plus, if Chalamet is mad, he can cry into a big pile of money.
This is why you hate young people’s music
Have you ever had a younger person play current music for you, and it sounds wrong and bad? It happens to me regularly. My teenager will pull up the Soundcloud of some underground rapper or bedroom producer he likes, and my (unspoken because I’m not an asshole) reaction is usually something like, “How can anyone like this shit?”
It’s not the music itself necessarily; it’s the production—the mix. The drums are too low. The vocals are sludgy. There’s no separation. Etc, etc. “Why would anyone release something that sounds like this when professional production tools are easily available to anyone with a PC?” I’d think. But I think I figured out the reason.
Since at least the 1950s, the music young people like was identifiable partly because older people hated it. The distorted, dissonant guitars of rock and roll and the hard-edged minimalism and obscenity-laden lyrics of hip hop sounded wrong to squares and parents, like mistakes or like something dangerous, so artists heaped it on.
But at some point musicians ran out of runway. For rock, I’m going to say the 1987 release of Big Black’s Songs About Fucking marks the moment where no more distortion or noise could be applied to a recording and have it still reasonably be called “music.” You could pick a similar, arbitrary date for hip hop, too. Maybe NWA’s first album. As extreme as the content was at the time, though, both Songs About Fucking and Straight Outta Compton are expertly produced.
Big Black’s Steve Albini went on to produce Nirvana’s culture-defining In Utero, an album today’s parents grew up on, rendering “noise and distortion” forever incapable of giving offense. NWA’s Straight Outta Compton is practically cuddly nostalgia in 2024. But in a glorious piece of teenage subversion, young artists recently (maybe unconsciously) recognized that they could still make music that sounds wrong and bad to squares like me, even if they can't do it through noise or curse words. The ingenious solution is the sludgy, imperfect, unlistenable mixes of today’s underground music. So the next time you catch yourself thinking about how music was so much better in your day, remember that it’s really just your old-ass ears; when your kids are old, it will be played in dentist offices.
Is Gamergate making a comeback?
If you were lucky enough to have missed the first incarnation of “Gamergate” in 2014, I have bad news. The second version of the harassment-masquerading-as-activism movement is brewing within in the fetid hangouts of a new generation of online cranks and assholes. Gamergate 2.0 has dropped the faux concern about “ethics in video game journalism” in favor of just being against things it considers “woke,” but the tactics remain the same: Choose a target, make up things about them, then turn on the harassment hoses and fire up the death-threat cannons. This time around, the focal point of the anger is a small narrative design company called Sweet Baby Inc. The cover story for Gamergate’s harassment campaign involves the belief that this 16-employee company is dictating the editorial choices for the entire $214 billion game industry, including deciding the race of the main character in Alan Wake 2, the choices Kratos makes in the last God of War, and is responsible for basically every not-white, not-straight character in all of gaming.
Encouragingly, the industry seems to be responding more aggressively this time, with the heads of game development companies pointing out that Gamergate jerks don’t understand how the games industry (or anything else) works, as companies hire consulting firms because they want the services they provide; consulting companies don’t dictate terms to their employers. So if Sweet Baby is providing 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, with the Discord server where the harassment is organized having only around 2,000 members.
Cheating in the connected age
I don’t have sympathy for them, but today’s cheaters have a harder time covering up their indiscretions than any previous generation. The number of apps and platforms which can gives you away is always increasing, and one small slip will give away the game. You can even get busted through fitness app Strava.
In a recent video, TikToker meg.c.mcgee recounts the story of how she found proof of her husband’s infidelity through the running maps on Strava. His jogging route led directly from the home he shared with his wife to an illicit partner’s house a half mile away, and the unnamed dude didn’t set it to “private” or delete the data. Commenters on the post tell stories about catching cheating partners though Airbnb, Venmo, the AMC app (he took too many trips to movies she hadn’t seen), and secret calculator apps that look like innocent math aids but act as repositories for hidden photographs.
Viral Video of the Week: Assume That I Can
This week’s viral video is a public service announcement from the National Down Syndrome Society that’s really hitting a nerve with people—the ad has been viewed nearly 30 million times on TikTok and even more on Instagram. It challenges viewers to consider how the limitations we place on people with Down syndrome become self-fulfilling prophesies. “Coach, you assume that I can’t hit harder,” actress and model Madison Tevlin says in the vid, “so you don’t train me to hit harder.”
The ad basically plays out like a standard do-gooder PSA, the kind of thing that might get 5,000 views, but then Tevlin informs us she can, in fact, “recite fucking Shakespeare.” After a pause, she asks, “You assumed I couldn’t swear, right?”
I didn’t assume that, but I did assume that the people making a PSA about Down syndrome would infantilize its subjects in the name of good taste or respectability, so it’s refreshing and powerful that they refuse to, and instead acknowledge that cursing, drinking, and having sex aren’t special privileges for the neurotypical or something that we should never talk about in connection with people with intellectual disabilities, but are basic human rights that everyone should have the option of enjoying.