watch & listen
Are You
Fan almost impossible to keep up with all the meme images that are constantly being created on just about everything. The result is that, although memes are now firmly within the realm of popular culture, individuals are separating themselves from each other once again, selecting to participate in just a few preferred fandoms. However, there is still plenty of overlap, especially among related subjects. Cat people continue to coo over pictures of kittehs, but have added baby sloths to their repertoire. Whovians have joined with Sherlock fans to create WhoLock crossovers, which range from brilliant to bizarre. On a more local scale, colleges create their own meme circles, making image macros out of professors, returning to inside jokes as a source for meme production. Unfortunately, mass popularity has also brought a certain level of stagnation to meme-making. Due to its simplicity, especially with online meme-generators, the overall quality of memes seems to be declining, with gross misuse of memes becoming increasingly common as many creators fail to understand the point of the original image.
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With Facebook came a unification of the masses. Now, a single post could share something with not just a few friends, but everyone you knew...
Enough?
An inside look at Cornell’s true music devotees
2012: end of ze world (fuckin’ kangaroos)
art by CHARLES WANG and LAURA VAN WINKLE layout by GINA CARGAS
Like it or not, memes are here to stay. By nature, a meme feeds itself, in a veritable virtual human centipede (Yeah, I went there. Problem?) of increasingly bad jokes until it is left to die an ignoble death (see Nancy Pelosi’s Rickroll). Our generation, the Facebook generation, is one that was brought up on the Internet. We are a technologically savvy generation; our cameras let us collect ALL the best pictures, and our computers give us the power to manipulate those images however we see fit. And we have chosen to use that power to create a singing Pop-Tart cat. We had the chance to stand tall on the shoulders of giants, but instead we have stumble’d and tumbl’d. ◊
W
hen I first saw A Hard Day’s Night in the third grade, I was still happily lost in Imagination Land. Armed with little more than a copy of “The Golden Compass” and a White Witch of Narnia costume, my eight-year-old self failed to understand huge portions of the movie. If John’s suggestive jokes and George’s blatant flirting sailed straight over my head, what did stick were the scenes of devoted Beatles fans maniacally chasing their heroes through Liverpudlian streets. This scene was my first introduction to the true band obsessive. These days, though, avid fans don’t crowd around the transistor radio eagerly awaiting their favorite artist’s new album. Instead, they gather on fan sites and message boards to meticulously dissect their idol’s latest album or most recent interview—and more often than not, each other. It’s a new phenomenon that seems to have intensified the music appreciation experience, bringing with it a sense of the larger community, a new set of standards, and—for a select few—fame. Interestingly, the most notorious of these communities are loyal to rock bands. Sure, Beyoncé has her faithful few, but perfect-arch eyebrows and lyrics like “All up in the kitchen in my heels, dinner time” can only get you so far. With the possible exceptions of Beliebers and Lady Gaga’s Little Monsters, music fans prone to obsession appear to be drawn to music of a more emotional, complex, and guitar-based nature. Whether it’s the tie-dyed feel-goodery of Phish, the comic-book mythology of My Chemical Romance, or the emotive crooning of Radiohead,
GINA CARGAS rock bands possess a certain quality that appeals and addicts a horde of rabid fans. So what makes these artists so popular— and more importantly, who are the people that follow them so faithfully?
teach a man to phish, he’ll jam for a lifetime Page through any number of Phish fan sites and it’s clear that this community is all about the music. While occasional threads on everything from the Red Sox to DMT appear on fan forums, the vast majority of these sites focus on intense dissection of every album, song, and concert Phish has ever produced. Arguably the best jam band since the Grateful Dead, Phish is noted for improvisational and lengthy concerts—and its worshipful fanbase. “Most people like them because they want to hear interesting, quirky, and groundbreaking music,” said Kyle Walsh, a Cornell sophomore and self-proclaimed Phishhead. “But the thing that attracts a lot of people is their amazing live shows.” A live Phish concert seems to be the core of the Phishhead experience. Though Walsh has attended an astounding fifteen Phish shows, his level of dedication is considered moderate amongst the bearded masses. Many fans have seen the band over 100 times, willingly handing over hundreds of dollars—not
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