Kyle Andrews
I’ve been learning a lot of weird things about internet content and culture this week. It seems that, because of the unlimited depth of cyberspace, anybody with a pulse and a keyboard can post information on the worldwide web. And in a striking contrast to what I generally believe about the ambition of the average pulse-having keyboard owner, a lot of them do. A lot of them. And thanks to the reach and efficiency of the modern search engine, they can easily find each other and gather in some poorly lit corner of the internet, obsessing over a bunch of pointless crap.
Of course it comes as no surprise that the internet is full of crap, but goddamn! Some of this crap is so crappy that the crap has twisted back into itself, causing layers of meta-crap to grow out of the original crap. On top of this crap grows whole online communities who have devoted themselves to the intricacies and subtle nuances of the crap. It’s like a small society of people who spent years and years breeding in a giant incestuous orgy, then took acid, then built websites based on what was in their minds.
I’m talking specifically about lolcats. This is the whole reason the expression “WTF?!?” was invented. Have you seen this shit? It’s pictures of cats ostensibly doing cute things with wacky captions written in some sort of juvenile half-wit Ebonics. That’s it. Just pictures of cats. With poorly written captions. And there are literally dozens of sites devoted to this. The most popular lolcat website gets over a million hits a day. The pictures posted there have hundreds of comments under them.
This means that every day over a million people turn on their computers, log onto the internet and look at pictures of cats while imaging that the cats talk like a four year old with a speech impediment. And hundreds of those people then make the additional effort to think of and write comments like “ah…da las fing souns jus ryt fur a cheezpeep.” I’m sorry, but that shit is too fucked up. I honestly think it would be a more productive use of your time to spend all day downloading porn. At least you would get an orgasm or two for your effort.
Another weird internet phenomenon is the practice of claiming first response in the comment section of any blog or website. Obviously you can expect some poor grammar or strange ideas to show up when you pass the mic to the public, but I don’t get this one. Basically, that way it works is, if you find that you are the first to comment on a picture, video, or article, you don’t actually write a comment. You just write “first!” which is then quietly acknowledged as a small personal victory by all of the other would-be commentors.
Although we here at Tough Customer//Wire pride ourselves on digging up obscure and unknown artists, we get no particular thrill from being the first to do so. And even though we usually are one of the first, we occasionally make exceptions just to prove this point. For example, take Nashville’s Kyle Andrews. We are definitely not the first people to sing the praises of his music. His new album Real Blasty is eminently likable and has a shiny pop finish that has caught the ear of many a blogger. The album features sing-along choruses, synthesizers that gurgle along with the verses and drums that bridge the gap as the music swings back and forth from electronica to indie rock.
And just think. We found this music using the same tool that somebody else used to find a picture of a kitten eating Cheetos. Cyberspace is indeed a strange, strange place.
MP3: 'Naked In New York'
MP3: ‘Blow It Out’
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