How To Excel At Being Mediocre

Modern entertainment is shallow, mindless fun cooked like fast food: attention-grabbing but nutrient-deficient.

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For a good while I thought I was too old for TikTok.

I just kept to media consumption's legacy means thinking "You'll never get me, China!" up until the moment YouTube launched its knockoff feature.

Now I wake up to a mind-numbing thumb cardio session, swiping past a clip or two of Joe Rogan being scared of polar bears, a girl accurately appraised to be 874K likes pretty, several montages poorly timed to the beat of World's Smallest Violin, and critically-acclaimed footage of a kitten climbing into a slipper.

All before I get to have my first original thought of the day.

One recent morning, that thought happened to be about old artists (read: retro content creators) and how they would've had absolutely no fucking chance of making it today.

Think of Tolkien or Bob Dylan; think of Picasso, who painted like someone who had forgotten to take their Prolixin medication for several fortnights. Believe it or not, it took a while for cubism to grow on people. And for people to understand that the point of Bob Dylan was not virtuosic harmonica solos but Nobel Prize-winning lyrics.

Eventually, of course, they recognised their genius, but imagine poor Bob trying to climb the ladder through the For You page. He might be one of the greatest lyricists to ever walk a stage, but if you sampled him for the standard 3-second-long attention span we have online?

He's just a guy with OK guitar skills and a voice no more special than a Walmart clerk's PA call for a cleanup on aisle 5.

And you can bet The Lord Of The Rings is a thing only because back in the 50s reading was one of the three pastimes humanity had invented so far, alongside model planes and dying from pneumonia. To say Tolkien's work is a slow burn is like saying a bullet to the knee is "rather annoying, actually." That thing is a thousand pages long for crying out loud. And absolutely nothing exciting happens up until the part where Peter Jackson makes the movie adaptations.

But isn’t that what's special about the greatest vintage creators?

They were such a shock to the audience's usual tastes. Imagine it's still the 50s, people yet trying to figure out whether they like Tolkien or not, and suddenly you see Elvis Presley come out onstage dressed like a peacock's mating call — ain't that the point of great entertainment? To give the status quo a vigorous booty-clapping twerk dance of subverted expectations and offer something that sounds, looks, and feels like nothing you thought yourself ready for?

Neo artists — modern content creators — feel nothing like that.

It doesn’t take a Stanley Kubrick scholar to understand the appeal of Bella Poarch doing pouty lips on camera. No subtle, nuanced subtext there. No shaking of the orthodoxy. Just the exhaustingly obvious depiction of a cute girl filming herself being cute until some talent scout looks at her follower count and goes "She can lip sync. Give her a music career!"

And yes, I understand not all of the entertainment industry is social media stars trying to come up with ever more ways to move their merch — but there is just so, so very much of it.

I mean the kind of stuff that Kat Tenbarge calls "oppressively average."

Sorry, Bella Poarch, this IS ‘Build a B*tch’

Shallow, mindless fun cooked like fast food: attention-grabbing but nutrient-deficient. Why is the pretty TikTok girl the one to get all the followers, ticket sales, and brand deals? She doesn't have any talent, she does absolutely nothing!

Well, we can all relate to "doing nothing." So there's definitely a massive market for that.

Of course, you can reject the mainstream, let your 'stache grow (or shave it; whichever's out of fashion) and start listening to bands so indie not even its members have heard of it yet, but why bother? It's way too easy to have user-friendly, pointless fun these days. No need to challenge your preferences and predilections; clench your thirst for culture with a conveniently insipid content doomscroll instead (it's not 5 PM, so what are you even doing on your phone anyway?)

We coexist in a clout-hungry, effervescent cultural scenery. My concern is, would we be able to spot the next Picasso without them whipping up an NFT collection? Is the next Bob Dylan quietly uploading to Soundcloud right now, ignored by producers because he doesn't have the body build to pull off a K-Pop idol outfit?

Are we burying the next Tolkien under mountains of Twilight erotica fanfiction and gossip listicles?

Some modern creators’ body of work should’ve never left their mum’s fridge door, but they still win because they are too good at being the centre of attention. They’re attention-grabbing virtuosos. Simon Cowell should rebrand to Got Clout because no one cares about talent anymore. We have reached the climax of talentless success.

We have reached peak mediocrity.

Call me old-fashioned, but I still believe in acquired taste. Things that take a bit of exposure and effort to understand. The kind of entertainment to get review bombed at first but then revered by herds of try-hard snobs wanting to build their personalities around it.

Because no one likes beer at first sip anyway.

And, you know what? Maybe that is exactly what I’m doing with contemporary entertainment right now. Maybe I am yet to wake up to the true genius of all these hyped-up influencers. Maybe I just need a little bit of time to let all this mediocrity grow on me.

But I doubt it.