The Second Examination of The Human Condition In Its Entirety

Is Dignity Mutually Exclusive with Internet Fame?

The only reason your business, brand, or band isn’t taking off is because you’re not whoring yourself out for social media enough. If only you were born with the proper genetic mutations that didn’t allow for the expression of Shame, you could have it all. This is at least the feeling I get when I see countless crude doppelgängers of myself on social media, mustached and tattooed and raking it in by the thousands. I’ve been making cucumber salad since I was 13, where are my 1,700,000 followers?  

I believe, with about 75% conviction, that were I able to fully extinguish every last lick of self-respect and shame, I could hack it as an internet microcelebrity. Not that I have any real desire to film myself putting silly little outfits together or cooking my mediocre meals, but goddamn it, I Could. The way that this affects me is not regarding any potential pursuit of tiktok fame, but regarding other creative endeavors I find myself stepping towards (and often retreating from almost immediately after).

There are so many artists and filmmakers and musicians out there uploading their projects to the internet, if they don’t unabashedly parade themselves around the digital town square promoting it, who’s going to even remember it 24 hours later when the instagram story has expired? Even this newsletter that you may or may not be reading feels much more like a personal diary than any kind of dignified Publication that anyone would actually seek out. 

The fear of, or the aversion to, constantly fashioning myself into a self-serving court jester has often dissuaded me from sharing my work online in any serious context; what’s the point of posting this poem/drawing/chord progression if I just have to keep trying to bargain with the algorithm so it won’t just get lost in the crowd? If you’re trying to build yourself a platform and an audience, gaming the system with trends seems to pick up more traction than just publishing your work without any of the frills. Even if you were supernaturally gifted, making a brand new Instagram account and anonymously sharing your masterpieces to an audience of 0 followers seems like a much slower way to achieve stardom than daily posts of in-depth documentation of the process accompanied by a conventionally attractive face, dubbed voiceovers, and 60-90 seconds of whatever the Hot New Song is playing in the background.

I do realize this isn’t the most effective use of social media, it’s not even a very rational one, but it’s the one I find myself gravitating towards. There’s probably a balance somewhere in between anonymously posting your work from a burner account with no profile picture and becoming a full-blown “Content Creator,” but I’ve yet to find a point on that spectrum where I can stand comfortably. I want to believe that we still live in a world where the quality of a piece of work can stand for itself, that an artist doesn’t have to beg for attendees at their galleries or bodies on their dance floors, but boy, begging sure does seem to work like a charm. To answer my own question, I think dignity is probably not mutually exclusive with internet fame, but getting to a million followers is going to be a lot harder for anyone that doesn’t plan on doing at least a little bit of shameless self-promotion. 

D.J. Recommendation: Jersey

My first exposure to Jersey, the French D.J. duo, was through a Boiler Room-esque live set on YouTube recorded in a crowded Parisian apartment. They bounce around their U-shaped control panel, reaching over each other and swapping places to manipulate their D.J. controllers and MIDI keyboards while bobbing a glorious head of bleached hair. Live synths and manipulated vocal samples come together in an extremely Fun way, for about 27 minutes until somebody had too much fun and got shoved into one of their synths, ending the set and providing a catchy name for the video, “we play music until someone breaks our synths.” 

I watched this set for the first time about a year ago, and it’s been a staple in my pregame routine anytime I need to stoke myself up for a night out on the town. Just like many other DJ sets where the performance is happening in the center of the audience instead of on a raised stage at the back of the room, some attendants try to make a name for themselves, like that infamous dancing girl from Kaytranada’s Boiler Room set. The most notable from this video is a fellow who holds a floor lamp over his head with both hands, swirling it around the heads of the crowd and shaking it to the beat until the lampshade eventually flies off across the room. This has become a bit of a meme for the band, with many of their following sets being decorated with house lamps that inevitably get picked up and swung around as an homage to that pioneer from the YouTube set. 

Since hearing that set, I was hooked. I downloaded every song they had available online and even discovered some other French D.Js they’ve collaborated with that I’ve grown quite fond of as well (check our Realo too if you end up liking Jersey). I wanted nothing more than to be in a similarly claustrophobic Parisian apartment watching these wizards work their magic. Unfortunately, as they’re based in France and still haven’t quite hit the mainstream, they weren’t going to be in town anytime soon and I didn’t have any plans to go back to Paris quite yet. 

I thought my prayers were answered on February 13th of this year, when they announced a North American tour featuring an L.A. show on April 10th, a Mystery Show at Undisclosed Location on April 13th, and a Toronto show on April 17th. While I could’ve pretty easily bought a flight back home to L.A. and made a weekend out of seeing friends, family, and Jersey, I held out hoping the Mystery Date would be here in San Francisco and I could save on the airfare. It wasn’t unreasonable to hope for that mystery show to be in San Francisco; it’s not exactly on the way to Toronto but it’s not the complete opposite direction either. To my great dismay, the Mystery Show ended up being a set at Coachella, a venue I was much less likely to attend than the small nightclub in L.A. they played.

A few months later, the lineup for this year’s Portola Festival was announced, featuring a set from Jersey on Sunday, September 29th, the day I’m writing this. I wasn’t too familiar with most of the other acts on the lineup, but I felt compelled to go since I wasn’t sure when they would next come back to this continent. However, it seemed downright silly to pay either the $439 price tag for a 2-day ticket or even the $324 price tag for the Sunday-only ticket when I really only cared about seeing this one act that would likely play for no more than an hour, if that. For a few months, I went back and forth on whether it was worth it to just bite the bullet until the tickets sold out and my decision was made for me.

For a moment, I accepted my loss and vowed to do whatever I had to do to see them the next time they were in California. My prayers were answered on August 19th when concert promoter Golden Voice announced the pre and post-Portola parties that would be taking place this week, one of those being a Jersey show the Friday before the festival with tickets for less than $50. I had debated spending $300+ for months to see these guys, and now I had the chance to see them in a much more intimate venue than Portola for a fraction of the price. 

And it was everything I had waited for. The lamps, the live synths, even the sample of The Lord of the Rings theme that they played in that YouTube set, I felt like I was finally in that Parisian apartment, despite the fact that this show was being played in a new, 6-story event space in SoMa. After getting a taste of Jersey live, I’m still a little upset that I won’t be catching their Portola set that begins in an hour and twenty minutes from the time I’m writing this, but my rational mind is still glad I’m not down $325. After Daft Punk’s breakup in 2021, I can confidently say that Jersey is my favorite currently active French D.J. duo; and while I wouldn’t say the two groups make similar music necessarily, I would still highly, highly recommend them to anyone looking for a new D.J. duo to fawn over.