If you've ever wondered where straight men go to share their feelings, may I humbly suggest the comments section to literally any Youtube video of music more than 15 years old.
-
If you've ever wondered where straight men go to share their feelings, may I humbly suggest the comments section to literally any Youtube video of music more than 15 years old. I am fascinated and honestly really touched by this weird phenomenon. Open the comments thread and you can't get more than a dozen or so entries in before some dude is spilling his guts about the profound personal loss that inspired him to revisit this particular jam. And others will chime in to offer supportive comments, correct the errant hater, and generally affirm the sacred space of the Youtube comment thread. It really feels like a sort of altar and safe space.
-
@other_ghosts YouTube comments are a special part of internet culture and Google could just decide to kill it. I hope it stays around for a long time.
-
This kind of vulnerability is also not just true of sentimental music, BTW. I remember reading a string of comments under a KARP video a while back, where some guy came in swinging with a comment about how all the bands that were supposedly influenced by the Melvins were way better than the Melvins themselves. And instead of getting into a brawl about it, some commenters patiently walked the dude through what they thought was unique or great about the Melvins, and were like, "Oh, but have you listened to..." and proceeded to recommend selections from the discography, to which the previously belligerent poster was open and appreciative.
-
This thread has me thinking now about the foundational sadness that underpins so much of the internet, and without which most of it is simply illegible. Meme culture, conspiracy theories, and online hostility get a lot of attention, but grief is everywhere, once you start looking for it.
-
When I lived in Seattle, there was a wildly popular Facebook account called Vanishing Seattle, that documented buildings and businesses lost to development and neglect. Seattle's predilection for melancholy predates the internet, but these sorts of things exist everywhere, and have become an intrinsic part of what we think about and how we interact when we are online.
-
How much of the internet is devoted to grieving a world we've lost, and a world we were promised but never saw? The technological utopia of the internet has largely not arrived. Instead we have a vast landscape of places to commiserate about how awful the internet is, and how awful our world is because of the internet and the networked hyper-exploitation that it enables.