#yaloo

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"Ah!" by Jaloo

MG:

This year, I learned about Mr. Beast. But before I learned about Mr. Beast, I learned that I am no longer experiencing pop culture or society or the information drip in the same untranslated, mainstream way I was a few years ago. There are a lot of factors, it’s not simply aging, and I’m intensely satisfied by the way I just do not know about shit like Mr. Beast or the bird test or rizz until it filters down to my chosen sliver of reality. Mr. Beast was already all around me but I was unaware. I use YouTube daily but he’s never suggested to me. I go to the grocery store almost daily but I’m conditioned to ~shop the perimeter!! And tune his cookies or energy drinks or whatever out of my perceived existence. Anyway, all this to say, Mr. Beast is someone who decoded and subsequently gamed the YouTube algorithm to become a ubiquitous presence, a cultural force, a mirror to our monkey brains. There’s a lot that went into making Mr. Beast that I don’t really want to think about or engage with, but one seemingly small but frankly huge and insidious piece is sound effects. Whistles, hands clapping, kazoos buzzing, doorbells, explosions, anything in the Apple ringtone arsenal, etc. Mr. Beast did not invent plunking these sounds every, I don’t know, 15 seconds of “content” (Mr. Beast did not invent anything) but he is responsible, inadvertently, for my own raised consciousness. Once you become aware of sound effects you become aware of how constantly, how pervasively, how insidiously your awareness is being remotely manipulated. Sound effects (I think even more than blue light or screens or whatever) are responsible for our profoundly broken attention spans because while we may be addicted to clicking our phones on and off, we have no fucking say in how often a little noise demands “look!” and it is ALWAYS. 

So, the sound effects aren’t going away. Good luck muting literally everything. I am, instead, choosing to learn to love the bomb. If I must be surrounded by the sound of tiny plinks and rocks hitting the ground, I want it to be in the context of a Jaloo song. Every element of “Ah!” is an attention directive, not just the production, but Jaloo’s voice and his cadence, too. It’s the passive aggressive counterpart to nihilist screaming and industrial noise. It’s irritating your brain but if you can prefer that irritation then your DNA can mutate and your children can better survive.

DV: