Monster Circus | wen
Do you know this black guy? You have a high probability of knowing.
In the same period last year, the fame of this little brother was spread to China. People call him the "human IQ ceiling," and what he does is simple: spitting on TikTok looks at a stupid video, and he will first show the work that has been spit on, then appear on his own, do things in the normal way, and put on his trademark expression with both hands.
This routine is so simple that it can be summed up in one sentence. At that time, this little brother named Khaby Lame was also popular in China for a while, and everyone was amused by his simple spit video, so now you go to Baidu to search for "black emojis", and you will find that the picture has become him, no longer the black question mark of Nick Yang before.
But at that time, many people thought that his fame was only a flash in the pan - the little brother had indeed passed the speed of light in China, so that now, he did not even have a Chinese name that spread, so that we had to call him black brother.
However, as recently as July this year, the black guy has become the most TikTok fan, about to reach 150 million fans.
For some, this is definitely a counterintuitive thing to do. In particular, the more you learn about the ecology of TikTok, the more counterintuitive it becomes. In view of the fact that TikTok is basically an overseas version of Douyin, we can look at the accounts in the front row of Douyin, and we will find that in addition to the official media, they are basically stars and handsome/beautiful Internet celebrities. The same goes for TikTok, where the black guy is extremely abrupt.
Why is this happening?
We can try to ask Andy Warhol.
"In the future, everyone can be famous for 15 minutes" – have you ever heard the phrase? You've most likely heard of it.
This is Andy Warhol's most famous remark, and since its inception, it has been used thousands of times a day by editors around the world (like me) to elevate articles. It was so hot that Warhol, who was a lover of fame and fortune, was annoyed by it, and angrily declared that it was irritating, and he wanted to make a whole new sentence.
The new remark is: "In the future, everyone can become famous in 15 minutes". Then, it satirically and naturally became a new quote, and it was sewn together with the previous sentence.
Everyone cites Warhol, but not many are still studying his art. He is the soul of pop art, the prophet of modern pop culture, and if you look a little bit about what he said, you will find that the answer to the black brother's explosion has always been in his prophecy.
The black guy is famous in 15 seconds, and his content is back to the simplicity of the basics, really using the same expression and posture, over and over again to spit on those short videos that can be seen at a glance to be doing useless work. To this day, such videos still form the bulk of his creative content.
They're funny, but they don't seem like the level that can turn a person into the king of TikTok.
However, on second thought, the video of the black brother is indeed a bit like Warhol's two famous sayings: there is a certain connotation, the threshold of understanding is low, it is still very short, and it is slightly subversive. As a result, it has the potential to be repeated and spread until some people are bored; Then, it continues to repeat and spread until it becomes unknown.
That's what happened to the black guy.
To introduce the black brother, there is a model template. Last year, you could see a bunch of these articles at home and abroad, and they would all mention how simple his videos were, and that's the basis of everything.
Black guy videos are not simple, they also conform to a kind of thing called the "shoulder law": if a video can be on the subway, let others cross your shoulder, see it from your mobile phone, and get its meaning, then it is in line with the law of shoulder crossing, and has the potential to become a hit.
You will find that many of the works with the highest number of plays on the short video platforms in various countries today are like this. To spread, you don't need details, you don't need language, you don't even need sound.
The video of the black guy happens to be silent, simple, and short, and people of any country and cultural level can understand what it is saying. The black brother never spoke in these videos, his first language was Italian, he was not good at speaking English, his early Italian videos were not popular, and his silence just made him cosmopolitan.
So why pantomime is so popular, from Chaplin to Keaton to Mr. Bean, every era needs a pantomime comedy star, and the black guy has caught up with the era of short videos.
A year later, you'll find his videos extremely repetitive. Although the black guy is already experimenting with content in other directions, some of which are still very creative, his basic disk is still on this kind of spit video. Repetition is annoying—this common sense doesn't work out in the black guy because it's not necessarily right in the first place.
"Staring at something for too long loses its meaning." Hovol said so, but Hovol didn't think it was bad to lose meaning. The recommendation mechanism of social networks is exactly like this, it makes people's eyes narrower and more precise, always let you see similar content, but people still enjoy it.
Repetition and simplicity are two of the main elements of Andy Warhol's work. Warhol famously tells that he painted two propaganda paintings for Coca-Cola, one with a little abstract artistry and one clear and realistic. In the end, he chose the latter at the suggestion of a friend, and it was a great success, setting the style of advertising in the 60s and half of the United States.
Because pop culture doesn't need complexity, it just needs to add a shallow layer of nutrition to the meaninglessness: Warhol's painting skills and first-class design of the shape. Just like the video of the black brother, shallow floating on the contentless spit material.
Pop culture is also not afraid of repetition, as long as it is not truly repetitive. Just as Warhol, after hearing that Picasso created 4,000 paintings in his lifetime, bragged that he had to paint so many paintings in a day, and then repeated one thing over and over again, just changing colors; Then, repeat this artistic model again and again, just change its depiction object - this is pop art.
The same goes for the black guy. He always repeats, and repetition becomes an accumulation, a sign that makes his video understanding threshold lower and lower, and makes his personal style more prominent. However, he is always changing, and you often can't necessarily guess the direction of his spitting, and even if you just look at the silly videos of him complaining, it's funny.
Like Warhol's work, the video of the black guy, "crooked" finds a precise balance between simplicity and repetition. They have just the right amount of simplicity and repetition, and just the right amount of complexity and creativity to get rid of simple repetition, so they are the perfect ingredients for making the king of fashion.
Throughout his life, Warhol was fascinated by two things: stars and advertising. He believed that stars could spread some kind of brilliance, just like stars sprinkle starlight, make people intoxicated, and then, make money from it. So in his time, he added to the glow that people believed in his time: unreachable, beautiful and illusory, with a beauty that did not exist in reality in advertising.
But my lord, times have changed. Half a century later, dreams have been disillusioned, the myth of models has been punctured, and the Victoria's Secret show has disappeared. The starlight that modern people need is not wealth and beauty, they have seen too many stars, so they also want to become them, no longer because of the beauty of people is superior to others and convinced, their stars, become the grass roots that have been processed.
The black brother is the starlight of the new era. The light of a star is never real, it is always man-made. The black brother was "discovered", but in the era of big data, nothing was really discovered, and his popularity was due to coincidence, but his fire was because of the creation of gods.
TikTok needs such a god, because the black brother represents the grassroots dream, and the people who have been hit by the epidemic have regained hope.
The black brother was born into poverty, in Italy, but he did not even have citizenship. Before the explosion, he was a waiter who constantly jumped jobs and lost his job because of the epidemic. Not to mention, he was a black Muslim, even a Hafez—someone who could recite the entire Quran.
The press releases that introduced him always cast him as an example of the American Dream coming true. "Even if you don't have a job or go to school, you can be famous on social networks. The new star will not come from Hollywood, but from any country" - this is the original words in the introduction video of the black brother who has been played by YouTube for tens of millions of times, and every time he has seen it, he says that he wants to be a photographer.
The black guy never whitewashes his labels, and when someone advertises that he has been racially discriminated against, he will counter that he was respected as a child — and his attitude makes this propaganda uninpugnant.
Therefore, TikTok will naturally support him strongly, and they need to tell the world that they have more than just white beauties who sing rap; At the same time, they need to tell their users: Come and shoot videos, volunteer to contribute content, so that one day, you will stand under the stars.
At the same time, the black guy is also the star of the audience. Warhol promoted countless stars, all of whom were extremely refined, except for himself. People call him the king of pop, but he's anti-pop, a bald man with a silver wig and nerdy glasses who lives with his mom all the time.
People always need a star, to be anti-star. The character used to be Warhol, and now it's a black guy — TikTok is anti-TikTok, which sounds equally counterintuitive, but it's perfectly logical.
Even TikTok users, many of them can't stand its content for a long time. Flood of stupid videos; Strange talent display, in fact, is just showing the figure of handsome men and beautiful women; Or embarrassing love words that make people's toes cut the soil.
So we need a knight to spit them out for us. But at the same time, he can't really come to the destruction charge like a heavy cavalryman, because these silly videos are not nutritious, but they are not guilty, and sometimes they are quite funny; For many people who are tired from life, they need them.
The black guy was such a knight. He always accurately spits on the silly content of the Internet, never plays the edge ball, and does not have the traditional Internet celebrities in the style and quality of the broken; But his spit is gentle, even friendly, not aggressive.
As a result, he became the star of the platform, the knight of the user. He first belonged to the platform, incorporated into it, and then went beyond it, and people who weren't interested in TikTok would also look at him. As a result, he surpassed all the influencers on TikTok.
If you want to stir up trends, you have to offend some people, cause controversy and topicality, but you can't overdo it – this is what Warhol taught the world.
Finally, there is a most obvious reason for the explosion of the black brother: he has industrialized.
Warhol refused to call his studio studio because the word was latin, too sunny, and he insisted on calling it a factory. In his view, pop art should be industrialized and commercialized.
The same goes for the black guy. Led by his agent, his creative team looks for suitable material for him every day, adding some innovative videos of other styles to him, as if they are not the main condiments.
Black guy and agent
Then, he worked with countless stars: Boss Huang, Piero, Snoop Dogg... They built him in a way that went beyond influencers, as if he were a true star. So, he received a star-level advertisement, promoted for Netflix, and modeled for Hugo Bosch.
The black guy had a very successful industrialization background, which was successful, but not complete. Just like Warhol no matter how much he calls the studio a factory and calls himself a businessman, it can't change that he is still an artist.
The same is true of the black brother, whose industrialization has not changed his essence, and he is still doing what he originally did,repetition and simplicity—which has another meaning here.
In the same way, they also diluted the upper class flavor of these star linkages: he was in the same frame as Piero because Piero was his idol when he was young, and who can't understand this kind of touch? Even if you know it's marketing.
So the black guy who hasn't deteriorated and isn't "polluted" is safe. Watching his videos, you don't need to ring the alarm bell of the subconscious, avoid the hypocritical consumption trap, you can really empty your brain to appreciate, you don't need to jump, you can touch the human IQ ceiling.
It's like Warhol... Why Andy Warhol again? Aren't we talking about black guys?
Maybe it's because Warhol is a guide that pop culture can never avoid. In China, people always say pop art, pop pop, which makes people feel that this seems to be an art form that has been eliminated, like Dadaism and Rococo, forgetting that in fact, the original text of "pop" is just "pop", it is popular and has never died.
So instead of talking about influencers, it's better to talk about pop culture, it's better to talk about Andy Warhol. In particular, he did predict the core of the short video era in some ways.
Warhol was a painter, but he also made films, very experimental films. Two of the most famous are: one was shot at the Empire State Building for 8 hours until it faded into darkness, a work known for being the longest film in film history; The other is that he eats hamburgers in front of the camera.
These two extremely alternative videos reveal the truth of the short video era: to be famous, you either become the first person to do something; Or take one thing to the extreme of absurdity; Or, you eat the burger in front of the camera.
Pop culture is Warhol eating a burger in front of the camera — it's empty, ironic, absurd, and at the same time funny, lighthearted, and gentle. Then, it will defy common sense and sweep the world like a sea of mountains.
The earliest food broadcast in history - 1982
So, we see black guys become TikTok brothers, and we see cat pieces dominating the Internet.
Andy Warhol's ghost always emerges in the wave of popular culture, and when we look at the black guy, it's not like we're looking at Warhol. So even if he repeats it, even if it is simple, he still gets more and more angry. Because he's topical, slightly offensive, and refined industrialization and sincerity enough to make you enjoy yourself when you don't need to think so much, don't want to have so much fun – that's the essence of pop culture.
You see, even if you don't read the text in this article, just looking at the black brother's spit GIF, it's quite interesting, right?
"I am a profoundly shallow man" – Warhol
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