Has Pop (Culture) Eaten Itself?

Have we finally reached saturation point with internet culture? I ask as I stumbled upon The Kiffness (pictured above) the other day, aka. the musician David Scott on YouTube who creates songs based around “singing cat” videos, playing an actual gig, with a proper audience, all of whom were singing along to him, and the cat, and all of whom were filming it. It felt like the apex, a full circle moment. It’s one thing, I mused, to chuckle at “singing cat” videos, another altogether to go and see the content creator himself play a gig.

It feels a bit much in a world of too much, all doom scrolling and chronically online. I’m as much to blame as anyone else – this is my problem too and I can’t deny it. I should be outside in the fresh air on a rare sunny April day in Scotland.

Andy Warhol once said, “everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes”, and David Bowie, ever prescient, warned of the Pandora’s box nature of internet ubiquity to a nonplussed Jeremy Paxman in the nineties. Of course, with hindsight, it seems they were both probably right. More recently, documentary maker Adam Curtis bemoaned the constant cycle of nostalgia, particularly within his own medium of film making. He wondered why we keep looking to the past for inspiration.

I don’t want to grouse as an older critic. I’m generation X and it’s too easy to get bogged down in the discourse around cultural capital, context and societal norms, but I do wonder if the pop culture we’re in is self-reflexive to the point of oblivion.

Saw the meme, bought the t shirt, saw the show, made a meme about the show wearing the t shirt, shared the meme about the show, meme went viral, now making a show about how my meme on the show went viral… I’m going back to my parchment and quill and Jumping Jack on ZX Spectrum. (It’s an old computer and shit computer game).