maura:

Right?

I think Salem (unfortunately) is actually the “indie” version of Rebecca Black, maybe. (Except in a vacuum I enjoy listening to Salem.)

Still, reading Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s really great profile of Black reminded me of reading David Wallace’s thoughts on the scene in White Noise about he Most Photographed Barn In America. (Jeez, even my reminiscence/analysis is meta-meta.) But anyway. Look:

Several days later Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America. We drove twenty-two miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the signs started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site… . We walked along a cow-path to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides - pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book.

“No one sees the barn,” he said finally.

A long silence followed.

“Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.”

He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced at once by others.

“We’re not here to capture an image. We’re here to maintain one. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.”

There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.

“Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. This literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.”

Another silence ensued.

“They are taking pictures of taking pictures,” he said. (12-13)

I quote this at such length not only because it’s too darn good to ablate, but to draw your attention to two relevant features. The less interesting is the Dobyns-esque message here about the metastasis of watching. For not only are people watching a barn whose only claim to fame is as an object of watching, but the pop-culture scholar Murray is watching people watch a barn, and his friend Jack is watching Murray watch the watching, and we readers are pretty obviously watching Jack the narrator watch Murray watching, etc. If you leave out the reader, there’s a similar regress of recordings of barn and barn-watching.

But more important are the complicated ironies at work in the scene. The scene itself is obviously absurd and absurdist. But most of the writing’s parodic force is directed at Murray, the would-be transcender of spectation. Murray, by watching and analyzing, would try to figure out the how and whys of giving in to collective visions of mass images that have themselves become mass images only because they’ve been made the objects of collective vision. The narrator’s “extended silence” in response to Murray’s blather speaks volumes. But it’s not to be mistaken for a silence of sympathy with the sheeplike photograph-hungry crowd. These poor Joe Briefcases are no less objects of ridicule for their “scientific” critic himself being ridiculed. The authorial tone throughout is a kind of deadpan sneer. Jack himself is utterly mute - since to speak out loud in the scene would render the narrator part of the farce (instead of a detached, transcendent “observer and recorder”) and so vulnerable to ridicule himself. With his silence, DeLillo’s alter ego Jack eloquently diagnoses the very disease from which he, Murray, barn-watchers, and readers all suffer.

I know DeLillo is played. (Wallace refers to him as “long-neglected” before the quotation, which is really funny now.) But the specularity and watching-for-watching’s-sake-ness intrinsic to the Black phenomenon and this web-stuff in general is wafting out the odor of breakthrough such that I may need a gas mask.

On the surface level, Black is just famous for being famous. The etiology of her fame is super clear, even though the provenance of her music is not. The situation is an inversion of the classic musician career arc, as NVC astutely points out. But the point of origin of her fame is interesting to me: Tosh.0. So as one commenter says, “Generation Friday is alive and well and it does not think the 30+ crowd with its magazines and self-appointed opinion-makers is relevant”, they’re actually wrong, I think. Some 30 year old comedy writer found Black’s video and pitched it to the 36-year-old Tosh who then made it famous. And a bunch of 30+ and 40+ writers and producers got it on Colbert and Glee and all that. The commenter may be too young to recall Arrested Development, but it’s only a joke that teenagers run studios and shit.

Another commenter makes the usual sort of comment whenever you see a pop culture topic, “WHY IS THERE AN ARTICLE ABOUT THIS HUMAN? Can we please all work together to uncouple the concept of general notoriety from the concept of having done something worth discussing? Gee willikers”, and at first I was like, ‘come on shut up’, but then I was like, ‘Hmmm… you’re on to something there’. Because, and I really love NVC’s piece here and I think it’s totally worthwhile and fine, people like Rebecca Black probably shouldn’t have anything ever written about them. But the fact of their fame is interesting, and probably worthy of coverage, especially dry funny coverage like this. We’re in a real bind here. NVC is simultaneously Jack and Murray (from above, remember?). She’s the silent observer ridiculing the fame and also the cultural scholar further ossifying the fame. What the hell are you supposed to do, then?

The killer line in NVC’s piece to me — and to her, I suspect — is the parenthetical

(A few days earlier, her publicist had rejected my request to take Black to the local record store, saying, “I don’t think that would work. She’s not that into music.”)

Because duh this Black isn’t a famous musician or anything. She’s just famous. She’s like the Gagaian “fame monster”, but not as a scary story or cautionary myth: she’s real. She’s the Grendel’s mother of fame. She’s terrifying to me as she represents a genuine critical aporia, and one with apparently enough actual capital behind her that she could be a real destabilizing force. And finally, Rebecca Black really does make me feel old and out of touch with reality.