My Big, Gigantic Drum Kit

rainabloom:

clambistro:

nedhepburn:

I got bored last night and searched “who is Paul McCartney” on twitter during his performance because a) people are stupid and b) why not. Apparently it was all over Reddit and the post on Tumblr had something like 15,000 notes last time I checked.

Anyway. This just got Buzzfeed 108,000 page views in the last 9 hours (to give you an idea of how much traffic that is, I get around 900-1800 page views a day). Is Buzzfeed the Huffington Post of memes, just aggregating everyone else’s news to make it their own? I’m not knocking the people that work there, or for them featuring the story, just more the overall business model. It’s basically HuffPo all over again.

Basically, Buzzfeed (potentially) made a shit ton of ad revenue off of something I did sort of baked watching a Beatle. They could AT LEAST buy me a sandwich.

You know what? I actually don’t find any of these “who is [boring artist incredibly important to white dudes]??” memes funny.

Is it so impossible to imagine that, to some people (mostly, judging by the screen shots, people who are not White Dudes), didn’t grow up deifying The Beatles, or don’t listen to ultra-bland aural porridge like Bon Iver? (Side note: until I was about 13, I sure as hell didn’t know who Paul McCartney was.)

Fuck laughing at people who aren’t as “good” as you. Fuck laughing at “dumb” people.

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.*

* Note - I am aware that Google search results are listed on the chart above. I praise those people and have nothing but scorn for people who decide to voice inane questions instead of asking them while they are using a machine designed to help people know things.

Yeah, I’m not following the racism/sexism/rockism thread here.  This could just as easily have been a bunch of white dudes tweeting “who the fuck is Etta James?” or something.

A “who the fuck is?” tweet isn’t analogous to admitting your ignorance of someone or something to a friend in casual conversation; it’s publicly claiming someone or something to be irrelevant.  That is, they’re not admissions, but declarations. If they weren’t meant in that spirit, wouldn’t the Tweeter just Google the person in question, as Raina suggests above? If you’ve ever been the kid who got bullied for knowing something ‘weird’ in grade school or high school, this phenomenon of proud, public declarations of ignorance should seem familiar. There’s at least as much ‘us vs. them’ intrinsic to the tweets as there is in the posts ridiculing the tweets.