Srsly awesome

I have recently seen too much art and too many vids.  Here are the highlights relevant to my research:

Hennesy Youngman: Art Thoughtz new video:

“IM ON THE INTERNET BITCH IM ON THE INTERNET BITCH IM FUCKING FAMOUS”

I am so obsessed.  Hennesy is a persona created by Jayson Musson.  Visit Jayson’s site here. Visit Hennesy’s youtube here.

MFA Student work: J.R. Uretsky

I recently saw an exhibit of mfa student work.  I was especially interested in work by J.R. Uretsky.  I checked out the website when I got home.  It is a weird, engaging mix of excessive materials, family stuffs, gender, pop culture, etc..  I definitely felt some art kinship to the work.  Here is one video I rocked hard to:

Nicki Minaj’s new video:

Here is a link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ks3_kuRAzHs

Not my most favorite song, kind of cliche, not so much edge, but I like the part in the beginning when she goes in to some of her characters.

Damali Abrams:

This weekend I went to the lecture Sonic Art and Activism: Exploring the ties between feminist art and popular music. The entire panel was great.  Particularly relevant to my own research was panelist Damali Abrams .  Her work deals with identity, culture, gender, race, more things, etc…  She uses self-help videos, vlogging, popular (and un-popular) music, stickers, and more things in the work I have seen of hers.  On her youtube, I found this video of her on the MTV show “Say What Karaoke” from the late 90′s and early 2000′s.

In the context of the rest of her work, this video is so poignant and complicated.  It is almost hard to believe it is real.  The racial undertones, sexualized comments, and over-all reality of the whole situation has left me curious.  I used to watch and dance to this show all the time when I was a kid.  I am still kind of in awe at how the mere re-contextualization of this clip changed the reading of this situation to one of extreme criticality.

structures of sentimentality

Structures of sentimentality.

I have been thinking about what this means lately.

sen·ti·men·tal [sen-tuh-men-tl]

–adjective

1. expressive of or appealing to sentiment, esp. the tender emotions and feelings, as love, pity, or nostalgia: a sentimental song.

2. pertaining to or dependent on sentiment: We kept the old photograph for purely sentimental reasons.

3. weakly emotional; mawkishly susceptible or tender: the sentimental Victorians.

4. characterized by or showing sentiment or refined feeling.

sen·ti·ment [sen-tuh-muhnt]

–noun

1. an attitude toward something; regard; opinion.

2. a mental feeling; emotion: a sentiment of pity.

3. refined or tender emotion; manifestation of the higher ormore refined feelings.

4. exhibition or manifestation of feeling or sensibility, or appealto the tender emotions, in literature, art, or music.

5. a thought influenced by or proceeding from feeling oremotion.

6. the thought or feeling intended to be conveyed by words,acts, or gestures as distinguished from the words, acts, orgestures themselves.

I hadn’t viewed any top Youtube videos in a while when I came across a story about American Idol contestant, Chris Medina.  I want to try to understand his story in relation to structures of sentimentality.

Here is an article that discusses the use of sentiment in this story

‘American Idol” sob story stirs a debate

Youtube personas: Miranda Sings

For this post I want to talk about sincerity and irony is regards to a Youtube persona, Miranda Sings.  Here are some video by her.  I have also included the links to each video, as the youtube comments are essential to the development of this persona.

Youtube link

Youtube link

It is interesting to see how the character has developed over time.  Here is one of Miranda Sing’s first videos:

I think this last video reveals a lot about the character.  Miranda Sings is a fictive persona made up by actress/comedian Colleen Balligner.  Ballinger drew her inspiration for the character from other students in her college acting in singing class.  This evolution is best described in an article by the Sunday Times titled “Miranda: teaching the world to sing”:

“Appropriately, the character was born on Christmas Eve 2007, when Ballinger was on a break from what she terms her “private Christian university”. ‘There were a lot of cocky girls who thought they were really talented, and they weren’t. They were so rude and snotty, it drove me nuts. Then I saw all these girls trying to make a career out of putting videos on YouTube for thousands to watch, clueless to the fact that they were terrible. The characters were so ridiculous, I wanted to make one of my own. Miranda was created out of spite.’

Ballinger made several videos as Mirandasings08 — her parents were shocked that she was ‘butchering’ her voice — which attracted a few hundred viewers. Last year, she still doesn’t know why or how, things suddenly went crazy. Her parody of Beyoncé’s Single Ladies has received more than 700,000 hits, while both her infamous Voice Lesson and Poker Face postings have attracted more than 400,000.

‘Viewers thought Miranda was real,’ she says. ‘I got a lot of hate mail from people, saying ‘You are stupid, you can’t sing’, and I was eating it up. Some people are still coming up at the end of my shows, telling me, ‘You are such an inspiration. I really love your work — keep trying to make it.’”

Now she has over 40,000 subscribers and almost 12 million views.  At least some of those subscribers are likely to believe that Miranda is sincere.  And what about the others?  Do they like her because she is ironic or do they want to believe that Miranda is sincere?  Where does her appeal lie?  I am also interested to know if Ballinger’s ideas about sincerity and what constitutes good singing have changed through this whole experience.  She now tours around the world as this character performing a cabaret show.