aesthetic history of YTP

 

Originators of Youtube Poop?

 

Frankly, if we were to include a comprehensive list of people that helped influence the artform, from those YTP creators have denoted to proto-YTP media that was shared widely in the community, I’d be here all day trying to do so. And even so, somebody would inevitably message me and ask, “hey, Liebermintz, why didn’t you mention this? why didn’t you mention that?” And my answer is always, “I knew that existed, I just didn’t think about at the time.”

 

YTP has a lot of its stylistic origin in the 1980s, largely through the cinema and art scenes. However, the techniques used in YTP didn’t originate then. No, they originate much earlier – the dawn of film.

 

There have always been comedic edits of cartoons, newsreel footage, movie clips, public domain footage, etc. that played around with what each character/personality/actor was saying, ever since film editing was codified in the 1910s. In the 1920s, with the Soviet school of filmmakers, you saw a lot more of these creative-edits-with-a-purpose not just in foreign cinema and the nascent art house movement, but also within an increasing amount of Hollywood films as well. You had reversed footage to signify time going backwards or to signify the impossible – and it could be put either in a purely dramatic context or a purely comedic context (what is accomplished with reversing film footage, for example). You had double exposure – which was done to imply ghostly or unseen figures on film (an in-camera way to do special effects – it’s partially why most ghosts in modern film are still transparent to some degree), but could be adapted to overlay bits of footage on top of each other (and was proven to be effective when combined with Soviet-style montage, or the editing together of three seemingly unrelated things to make a clear statement). You saw these edits a lot through the silent era – this is one of the reasons why aficionados of silent film often argue for more film literacy classes in school: to make people realize that what we think of as modern developments aren’t so – but not often during the early sound era (largely because sound cameras were heavy from all the shielding needed to prevent the increased mechanical noise from blowing out the early microphones in use on set, but because a lot of films produced during this time were adaptations of dialogue-heavy stage plays that benefitted from the addition of sound).

 

However, the impressionistic editing of the silent era and of foreign films began to be used by some of the first people raised entirely within a world with film. For example, Citizen Kane is often cited as one of the first Hollywood films to really play fast and loose with various editing techniques that would later become commonplace in modern film. However, what historians will tell you is that Orson Welles and editor Robert Wise (who would later go on to direct The Haunting and the first Star Trek movie) deliberately took the filmic vocabulary of silent-era works and foreign films in order to create something that felt vital, that felt new, that felt immediate yet unfairly underutilized. It’s part of the reason why Citizen Kane is still shown in film classes – its use of modern film editing techniques makes it an easier entry point into classic cinema.

 

But what do you get when you take the artistic editing of Citizen Kane and apply it to experimental film? You get New American Cinema, which often refers to a movement from the 1940s to the 1970s that largely consists of independent filmmakers and artists using the medium to create increasingly abstract art. Creators like Maya Deren (Meshes of the Afternoon), Kenneth Anger (Lucifer Rising), and John Cassavetes (Shadows) would often implement impressionistic film editing in order to set an atmosphere. And like Soviet film theory before it, New American Cinema’s influence began to be felt on many mainstream filmmakers, both domestic and foreign. John Ford’s films, while bound to the traditional storytelling of the Western, would often juxtapose imagery amongst otherwise straightforward stories, more often than not doing so to probe into the psyches of the lead characters. And like Citizen Kane still being canonized to this very day, Ford’s most well-known work from this time period (The Searchers; The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) is celebrated today not just as examples of great Westerns but also great psychological dramas that delve deep into the heart of manifest destiny and warped idealism.

 

(in a slightly unrelated point, the complex psychology of Ford’s late-period Westerns helped spur the reevaluation of his mid-period works like Stagecoach and How Green is My Valley)

 

Similarly, Alfred Hitchcock’s work for Paramount (Rear Window up to Psycho), alongside his pseudo-one-take experimental-film-of-a-sort Rope, would use New American-style editing to further psychological explorations. However, unlike Ford, Hitchcock and his team of editors often did so with an abstract bent. Rather than rely on simple juxtaposing of image A with image B, Hitchcock would often have his editors create entire abstract sequences to showcase the turmoil of his protagonists’ minds. Case in point: the nightmare sequence in Vertigo, one of the most chilling moments in the film. It violates the rules of traditional scene coverage and instead creates this very brief world where James Stewart’s character cannot come to terms with his belief that his own anxieties led to the death of a person, that he too will ultimately fall down her vortex-shaped event horizon, unable to escape his fate. That was revolutionary in 1958 – a Maya Deren-like hellscape created entirely with blue screen, very primitive computer effects, and editing in a Hollywood movie playing at your local theater. And you want to know how audiences and critics reacted to it? They hated it. Outside of a few French critics, some of whom would later start creating films themselves with these same impressionistic edits (Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard), most audiences thought Vertigo was Hitchcock at his most indulgent, at his most mean-spirited. To a degree, they are right: in Vertigo, Hitchcock doubles down on his worst tendencies (his kudzu-like plot entanglements, his cynical misanthropy with a focus on casual misogyny, his often glacial pacing), but at the same time, all of those work together to create one of the most unique looks at what American society was in the late ‘50s.

 

(in my opinion, Vertigo, with its synthesis of New American-style editing and psychological storytelling, is the starting point of the much-documented New Hollywood movement, but I’m in the minority for that, plus it’s not really pertinent to the question being asked)

 

However, impressionistic editing didn’t become commonplace until 1967, when a series of films were released that had these commonalities: they were helmed by younger filmmakers (most of whom derived from the New York City TV and theater scene), written by younger screenwriters (who were becoming increasingly literate and schooled in all sorts of work), and often assisted on by some of the first official film school students (George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Thelma Schoonmaker, Francis Ford Coppola). These films often pushed the limits of what could be allowed in a film – this got to the point where one film in particular, Richard Brooks’ adaptation of Truman Capote’s haunting true crime novel In Cold Blood, was given an all-clear by the Production Code (the old-time film censor board that got really mad if your film implied sex, had violence, made use of anti-heroes, or acknowledged that LGBTQ people exist – basically they tried to make every hard-edged movie safe for the whole family because, you know, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is definitely something the kids have been begging Mom and Dad to go see), but with the added caveat that it be given an advisory of “Suited for Mature Audiences” (SMA). That meant that nobody under the age of 16 could go see this without an adult present. And why? Watch it and see for yourself. It’s not graphic – the most blood you see is a faint bloody shoeprint at a crime scene, plus the worst language anybody says in the movie is “bullshit” – but the editing during the flashback to Dick Hickock and Perry Smith’s robbery/murder of the Clutter family is extremely intense that, even though on a frame-by-frame analysis nothing is actually being shown outside of some extreme push-ins on the family members’ faces as Dick and Perry run up to them with their shotguns, you absolutely believe that you’ve been granted access to see something no fellow person should ever see. Ever.

 

Similarly, movies like In the Heat of the Night, The Graduate, and Bonnie and Clyde made use of editing in less horrifying but still envelope-pushing and provocative ways. That’s where you begin to see rapid-fire editing (when shots are edited together with an average time of a few frames per set-up) – the climactic shootout in Bonnie and Clyde is full of this, plus extensive usage of a camera shooting in a ridiculously high frame rate, in order to showcase the absolute brutality the Texas Rangers laid upon our titular anti-hero bank robbers. The Graduate also makes use of rapid-fire editing to showcase our protagonist Benjamin realizing that Mrs. Robinson isn’t just seducing him as a joke but as something very serious, on top of the montage of him going into bed with Mrs. Robinson and spending his summer floating in the pool.

 

And unlike Vertigo, which still had a decade and a half before people in American began to recognize it as one of the best films ever made, it took mere months for these films to gain a massive following. Initially poorly received for their flirtations with the avant-garde, these select 1967 movies soon gained fervent fans who recommended that their friends go see them, which in turn led to slowly increasing box-office numbers that not only tripled the budgets of their respective movies, but also demonstrated to the Production Code that it was quickly becoming obsolete. Impressionistic editing was here to stay.

 

But what does that have to do with making Link say “gee, it sure is fucking boring around this shit?” Well, for that, we have to jump ahead to the ‘80s – in particular, the rise of culture jamming and video editing in art.

 

A lot of music videos were edited very impressionistically – I mean, when the Beatles helped codify the medium with their promo videos for “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane,” it only makes sense for increasingly abstract artists to adopt the medium, right? You see this happen a lot with live showcase music programs like The Now Explosion and Beat-Club, where the limitations of recording straight to quadraplex video tape also lent themselves to some strange in-camera effects. For the first notable time in film history, one could successfully create a true Droste image (infinitely-repeating image) just by aiming a video camera at a live feed playback monitor – and this was done to give a psychedelic gleam to the visuals being shown. Also showcased was an extensive use of blue and green screen, often to put in dancers, film footage, and/or abstracted visuals amongst, for example, Can playing “Paperhouse” or a guy that kind of looks like John Hartford miming to “I’ve Heard the Tearstained Monologue You Do There by the Door Before You Leave” – this was a lot easier to do with video than on film.

 

These programs – or more specifically, their syndication on various independent television stations throughout the world – made people realize the advantages of videotape over film. Four of these people were a group of musically-inclined performance artists from Shreveport, Louisiana who would later move to San Francisco in order to get a record deal – Homer Flynn (very provocative and transgressive graphic artist), Hardy Fox (gay multi-instrumentalist and composer), John Kennedy (rich kid artist), and Jay Clem (artist and musician). They, along with a group of friends from both the Shreveport and San Francisco scenes, had been cooking up a film adaptation of their occasional stage show – something to keep their name out there while they were too busy working at the hospitals and record stores. Combined with possible soundtracks for this film – a demo tape of which was sent to and rejected by Warner Bros. A&R representative Hal Haverstadt (since Flynn, Fox, Kennedy, and Clem didn’t have a name for their ensemble in an effort to let the music speak for itself, Haverstadt wrote “in care of the residents of [insert address here]” on the return envelope – this project would be dubbed Vileness Fats. On top of German Expressionist-inspired sets and deliberately over-the-top performances, the usage of videotape meant that, as long as Flynn, Fox, and Clem had access to a tape editing machine at a television production facility, they could add whatever effects they wanted. They could create entirely new worlds just from videotape.

 

And then they realized one of the massive limitations of quadruplex videotape: it has terrible visual fidelity. This meant that, since they were using cameras they bought in 1972, footage they shot in 1975 for the project would look the same as footage they shot in 1972 – all while professional and consumer-grade video cameras were improving every day. This also meant that their film could not be shown in any movie theater without people complaining about how the image is too “soft.” No amount of video-specific editing could meaningfully salvage the project.

 

This led to the abandonment of the Vileness Fats project and an increased focus on Fox’s musical compositions, which had been given local limited-run releases under the name Residents, Uninc. However, these four artists didn’t discard the Vileness Fats footage, but rather showed it to their exponentially-growing pool of artist friends (in large part thanks to the fact that their Residents project suddenly took off in the UK and gained a massive cult following amongst the art scene in the US). A lot of these friends would include other filmmakers, future music video directors, and musicians.

 

About 30 miles away from the Residents showing Vileness Fats to their closest friends, in 1979, high school student Mark Hosler, a massive music geek and budding multi-instrumentalist, teamed up with his artist friend Richard Lyons to create an abstract found-sounds and experimental rock album – just something to release before Mark graduated high school, go to college, and waste his days in a cubicle somewhere. This album, credited to “Negativland” (Mark and Richard were big Neu fans), would become locally popular to the point where Mark and Richard began to take their fun side project seriously. At this time, they became friends with local cable TV repairman and very autistic person David Wills over an instrument he built in his spare time called the Booper – and became fans of a radio show by freeform radio DJ Don Joyce called “Over the Edge.” When the band made themselves known to Joyce, he quickly reworked his show to become an improvisational showcase for Negativland. Negativland paid him back by allowing him to become their official tape editor for studio albums (the first one Joyce was on was Negativland’s second album Points).

 

Thanks to the rise of neo-conservatism by way of Ronald Reagan being elected President and an ever-increasingly-disruptive world by way of an untreated pandemic people associated with the LGBT community (at first called GRID/gay-related immune disorder because the first cases were found in gay men in San Francisco, then given the more appropriate name AIDS), a “War on Drugs” that led to increased police militarization and gun ownership amongst people who engaged in white flight (the mass exodus of white people from middle-class neighborhoods and to the suburbs when black people started moving in), and the rise of popular televangelists such as Oral Roberts and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Negativland quickly became a political act. Their liberal to leftist ideals often clashed with the new societal normal – entire Over the Edge episodes were made confronting people with the fact that David Wills is gay, lampooning family-friendly corporate-owned radio stations, and revealing that the increase in gun ownership was not done so people could exercise their Second Amendment rights or because they liked the look of guns but rather because they had been tricked by the media at large to prepare themselves against an increasingly demonized enemy (who was often implied to be a minority of some kind).

 

Also, amongst these episodes developed a conceptual continuity of sorts – Don Joyce would often play a character known as Crosley Bendix, a “director of stylistic premonitions” for a massive multi-national corporation known as the Universal Media Netweb, who would lampoon the sort of straight-laced conservative corporate thinking in an effort to put in a pin in the proverbial balloon. On one of these episodes, Joyce as Bendix, describing what Negativland were doing, would describe them as being purveyors of “culture jamming” – i.e. juxtaposing one part of reality with its more seedy underbelly. This perfectly described what Negativland were doing at the time with their political satire – how else can you satirize if you don’t point out what’s wrong with the thing you’re targeting?

 

But culture jamming also describes something else. By virtue of Negativland’s increased flirtations with leftist ideology and post-modern editing, plus Hosler’s record collecting and Joyce’s history in radio giving them a common interest in the works of sketch comedy group the Firesign Theater (known for their conceptual comedy albums), they found themselves using the sketch comedy format and the often extensive editing prevalent on Firesign albums to communicate the reality of a situation. This meant that entire sentences would be remixed so that a famous politician would say something else entirely. This is somewhat related to William S. Burroughs’ famous cut-up technique he used on his novel Naked Lunch, but rather than chopping up sentences and rearranging words, Joyce would chop up words and rearrange their basic sounds to create new words, to create new possibilities for the satire. Rather than merely rearrange sentences to say something else, now one could rearrange the phonetics of a single word – the building blocks of how the word is said – to communicate something else entirely. This was rough, but Negativland never tried to pass it off as the real thing: merely a funhouse mirror reflection of it. And if you amplify it loud enough, you can drown out the orthodoxy and reveal people that the emperor doesn’t have any clothes, but they’re assaulting as many people as possible.

 

Culture jamming became a big thing in the ‘90s with the rise of groups like Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir (protesting the phenomenon of big-box stores like Wal-Mart, K-Mart, and Target driving away business from local shops) and the Yes Men (who focused entirely on corporate misdeeds), but outside of the art community, it didn’t take off amongst the mainstream. However, it did take off on the Internet with the rise of trolling culture and Internet art. They used culture jamming techniques not only to make fun of people – in effect creating the first lolcows – but also to create something that could otherwise only exist on the Internet. On top of that, a lot of these people were very interested in video games, but not just the new releases either – no, these people were still in the “Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty is garbage, actually” phase of their lives. They were interested in retro gaming – after all, because of the existence of ROM aggregators and increasingly accurate emulators for systems that would otherwise be hard to find thanks to the stocking policy of stores like GameStop, now anybody could feasibly do a deep dive into the libraries of increasingly obscure consoles like the PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16, the Sega CD, and the CD-i.

 

The CD-i became a cause celebre in the retro gaming community in large part to a three-way war between Sony, Nintendo, and Philips. In the early ‘90s, Sony wanted a bit of action in the video game market – they already conquered TVs and music players (their Walkman and Discman had became hot sellers), plus they forced the CD to become so popular that everybody outside of indie labels, alternative rock bands, and overseas markets stopped releasing vinyl records of their new product. Nintendo were on top of the game. On top of that, Philips – the actual creator of the CD format – wanted to reclaim some of the action they lost from Sony (and possibly also meaningfully join the American market not under the Norelco name but under their actual trade name).

 

At this time, CD-based add-ons were starting to become a thing in gaming. Thanks to the introduction of the Rainbow Book standards, CDs could now be standardized for different media – rather than have five or six different CD formatting standards for computers (the most notable of which was High Sierra, commonly used in the first commercially available CD drives for Macs and PCs), now there was one standard (the CD-ROM, or Yellow Book) that every future manufacturer had to abide to. This meant that regardless of which drive you bought, your CD (be it Red/audio, Green/interactive, or Yellow/computer) could play on that drive. This, alongside increased demand for LaserDisc games to be replicated on a similar format AND a backlog of unreleased games ready to be released made for the cancelled Hasbro Control-Vision, meant that video game companies wanted a piece of the action. Sega got their CD console – or rather, an add-on to the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive that you plugged into the console (and required its own power cable) – out on the market.

 

Nintendo and Sony teamed up to create a similar add-on for the Super Nintendo – to boost up its sales, which were slightly lagging thanks to Sega’s infamous “blast processing” ads and its decidedly more teenage-to-adult target demographic. You know that weird slot on the SNES that nobody seemed to use outside of those Japan-only Internet game-streaming service things? That was supposed to be the place where the SNES’ CD add-on would plug into. Not only that, but given the SNES’ more advanced audio chip and its cartridges allowing for more advanced processors to be put in (including the Super FX chip used on 3D polygonal games like Star Fox), this add-on – known as the Nintendo Playstation – would have a more impressive library than the Sega CD’s weird mix of FMV games and regular Genesis games with abysmal loading times (early CD gaming was strange) and Red Book audio (which meant that you could play licensed music in your games or finally have voice acting for your RPGs and point-and-click adventure games). However, as Sony were ready to publicly announce the Nintendo Playstation, Nintendo decides to broker a more favorable deal with Philips (since Sony insisted that they wanted some control over what games get ported to the Playstation).

 

While Sony would get so bitter that they reworked the Playstation from aborted SNES add-on to its own dedicated console with even better architecture (32-bit processors!), Nintendo and Philips failed to get a similar prototype for an add-on out to any of the trade shows. At least the Nintendo Playstation exists – at least homebrewers are starting to make use of the specs and create custom ports for it today. The Nintendo/Philips partnership only resulted in Nintendo allowing Philips to develop four games with their main franchises (Mario, Legend of Zelda) to be released on Philips’ struggling CD-i format. Despite them using the CD-i to their advantage, including full voice-over, CD-quality music, and ostensibly better graphics (less likely to be as compressed as those on the cartridge), everything about them was not good. At all.

 

First off is Hotel Mario. The FMV sequences in particular were very wonky, especially when compared to gamers’ impressions of Mario (through reruns of The Super Mario Bros Super Show and through Charles Martinet’s portrayal of the character from Super Mario 64 onwards). Mario sounded like he smoked ten entire cartons of Marlboros and drank the same battery acid Tom Waits drank right before he cut his vocals for Small Change, even by Captain Lou Albano standards. Luigi kinda sounded like he did in the modern games, but also very uncanny. There were also really corny jokes about Princess Peach making spaghetti for a picnic, the Koopalings running prison hotels for Mario to solve, and toasters toasting toast.

 

The Zelda games didn’t fare any better. At all. The animation was even wonkier than Hotel Mario – they had clashing aesthetic styles, with Faces of Evil and The Wand of Gamelon having incredibly wonky animation and Zelda’s Adventure being entirely live-action FMV. They had slippery controls and mechanics. The voice acting sounded amateurish even by early ‘90s video game voice acting standards – they make Hoagie from Day of the Tentacle sound like he’s a trained Shakespearean actor as opposed to a voice actor trying to play a stoned-out teenager while also trying to read the script for a video game. These animated segments became a joke amongst the gamer community – if you saw somebody say “gee, it sure is boring around here” back in 2003-04, you knew they just found out about the Zelda CD-i games.

 

Also to note was the introduction of torrent clients. Rather than wait for somebody to log on so you could download Nirvana’s “Half the Man I Used to Be” or Jimmy Buffett’s “If You Like Pina Coladas” over a 56k modem AND your mom telling you to log off the computer so she can call the school about letting you check out early on Friday so you can go on vacation, now you could – with your new DSL/cable connection – download entire movies. You could download workprints of Ang Lee’s really weird Hulk movie with all the effects being unfinished. You could download the Stone Temple Pilots album with that Nirvana song you really liked in this weird new FLAC format. Most importantly, you can finally get $300 editing software all the film people use. Now you don’t have to take that shady job offer from Ghislaine Maxwell just to maybe buy Photoshop (if it’s even in stock) at your local Fry’s Electronics that’s shaped like an actual Stargate. You can cut out the middleman and download it yourself. In those days, you didn’t have to worry about always-online DRM – you just needed a key generator, or keygen for short, and you were good to go.

 

And since we’re in the age of torrents, there’s also the rise of video sharing services like YouTube. Instead of paying $10 a month to host your videos on Photobucket, you can upload as many nine-minute videos on YouTube as you wanted in all 240 p’s for free. You can upload your cat mewing things that sound kinda like your asthmatic grandma saying “oh long Johnson” or you could upload that embarrassing video of you screaming about your Nintendo 64. However, with your Epstein-free copy of Sony Vegas/Adobe Premiere, your video downloads of all those weird CD-i cutscenes, and maybe a few illegally-uploaded episodes of those really weird video game-themed cartoons you watched when you were five (back in those days, YouTube didn’t know what in the hell copyright was), you could upload something entirely new. You may not have known it at the time, but you probably heard some blowhard hipster blab about Negativland on the internet and listened to “Christianity is Stupid.” Or maybe you stumbled upon a Maya Deren short film late at night looking for the channel that plays exclusively NC-17-rated films. Or maybe you just liked those weird edits that sometimes happen in movies. Either way, you find yourself mixing and matching all these clips, splicing together word sounds to have Mario say “all toasters FUCK gay Bowser,” and laying over increasingly weird effects and deliberately distorted-beyond-all-human-recognition sound bites. Congrats – you created a weird video nobody wants.

 

And you upload it. But other people like you have stumbled upon the same thing. They start making videos like that. Some don’t have the ability to download Premiere or Vegas – they have to use Windows Movie Maker instead. And those people often varied in quality – some knew how to use that program so well they could create videos like yours but with the more scaled-down effects and splicing selections that WMM tailored for wine moms who edit together two-hour-long sideshows of their trip to China. Others, on the other hand, just played so lazily with the program that all they did was repeat the funny line-reads of “spaghetti” and “dinner” from the CD-i clips.

 

Eventually all these people coalesced and dubbed a new name for their genre of video that could only happen in the Wild West of YouTube: YouTube Poop.

 

also apparently some person uploaded a video of them repeating the lame “hot on our tail” (while tanooki Luigi’s holding his burnt tail top kek) joke from that one Super Mario Bros episode on SheezyArt in 2004 but nobody really knew about that until like 2008