Internet Pop Culture Trend Report

Tween

 

Even though the person behind Teen Witch isn’t technically a tween, the Teen Witch aesthetic is heavily focused on a re-interpretation of tween culture though an avant garde lens that combines the pop aesthetic of teen fan magazines like Tiger Beat & J14 with the contemporary new-web paradigm of sample everything, filtered though a lens of 90s nostalgia, celebrity worship, and trash culture.  As Teen Witch described in the Kickstarter campaign for his newly launched magazine, “TEEN WITCH is a magazine that puts BOP and J-14 through a kaleidoscope, aiming to honor and give praise to the gay and trans youth underground scene. Essentially art-based, TEEN WITCH is inspired by sub-cultures, the Internet, Nickelodeon magazine and childhood nostalgia.”  His amazing Tumblr and newly launched magazine are truly some of the most next level pop-culture skewering platforms available on the web.

Teen Witch Facebook Likes – 452

Muzak

 

Over the last few months or so music culture on the Internet has taken a major turn in the context of user defined micro-genres and the virtual scenes that surrounds them.  The best example of this is without a doubt the ever burgeoning genre known as “witch house”, which combines elements of noise, industrial and goth music with their rather disparate cousins southern rap, chopped & screwed, and other more dancey amalgams.  One of the most interesting aspects of this new synthesis is the culture and deeply rooted aesthetic surrounding this seemingly off kilter pairing.  Tons of blogs, websites and of course Tumblrs have sprouted up over night covering every minute angle of this almost entirely Internet born aesthetic.  One of the best proponents is definitely the Tumblr Gucci Goth, which combines dense coverage of the scene’s underground music while also elaborating on the aesthetic component, which seems to be an important factor in it’s evolution.  This excerpt from the Gucci Goth Tumblr personifies the new anything goes potpourri vantage point:

“So one day for fun I started a facebook group, the idea behind which was ‘people who like wearing loads of black designer clothes and listening to hip-hop/r&b/global bass/witchy stuff’ etc…I can appreciate the impetus and ideals of goth in its early days, which were simply: dress weird and have fun. No dumbass cheese romanticism and mopiness, just punky artsy disco kids in black. ’High fashion on skinny hip kids is not goth’? I say it is, and I say it while simultaneously not believing a word and knowing that it’s true.”

Gucci Goth Facebook Likes – 2,455

Avant (Shhh)

 

The magazine SuperSuper is one of the best representations of the new-web Tumblr fueled aesthetic of maximalist media hyper jumble.  It’s a fashion / music / culture mag that really tries to blur the lines between their diverse content so by the time you’re done reading it all melds together into a single seamless mass of neon colors, Twitter non sequiturs, mysterious interview subjects and fashion mashes straight out of Gwen Stefani’s worst Harajuku nightmares.  It’s one of the best examples of translating the ephemeral virtual wabi-sabi of the new Internet to a print medium.  They feature the most underground meta-artists and micro-genre musicians the Internet has to offer, from the next level CGI mash-ups of Teen Witch, to witch house artists like Ritualz and GuMMy†Be▲R! interviewing each other about banal sundries.  It’s half dada, half otherworldly, and entirely from the future.

SuperSuper Magazine Twitter Followers – 2,623

Tech

 

 

For someone that’s never been on the Internet, describing exactly what ScannerJammer is would be a nearly impossible task.  I’m extremely familiar with Internet culture and I even have a hard time articulating exactly what it is.  Basically it’s a chat room designed around the aesthetic of the early to late 90s Internet, but instead of primarily interacting with other users through chatting, you can post YouTube, Soundcloud, or image links within the chat window and ScannerJammer converts the links for you into a nonstop steam of random video, audio, and images.  It’s a dump.fm esque venue but it allows an endless array of media to be exchanged from every medium the web has to offer.  It also allows you to create a profile and vote on people’s links, which makes your profile gain points and allows you to rise in the ScannerJammer ranks.  One of the really interesting aspects is that it combines the au courant trend of early Internet nostalgia with the endless bandwidth available to nearly everyone.  It’s a perfect blend of the old and the new and truly one of the best examples of what’s now referred to as “the second internet”, a new Internet that subsides off the debris from the old model; diligently cobbled together from the remnants of Geocities and every other IRC chatroom you thought time forgot about.  It’s truly a new form of tech archaeology that’s only now becoming part of our collective web experience.

ScannerJammer Facebook Likes – 684

Tribez

Literally every week a new Internet concocted micro-genre sprouts up and with it comes the mashing of seemingly unrelated genres into a whirlpool of new sounds that were previously inconceivable.  Tribal Guachero is another one of those genres that’s definitely risen from the pixilated ashes to breathe new life into eclectic genre mashing. 

It combines traditional latin music such as guaracha, which is a genre with roots in Cuba, with House, Techno, and Electro rhythms.  It primarily started in Mexico, specifically Mexico City and Monterrey, and due to the web it immediately crossed all ethnic and geographic zones and became a full fledged genre over night.  A real interesting aspect of it is the synthesis between old latin traditions and new electronic genres, which is now easily able to thrive on the Internet due to social media, YouTube, Tumblr and instantaneous worldwide file sharing.