Memorial Hunt- Dorothy

YouTube Comments on Bone Thugz N Harmony's "Tha Crossroads"as Memorial

Youtube comments represent the least respected of the throwaway commentaries that have infiltrated our post Web 2.0 lives. I have always had a sort of perverse fascination with the spirit of YouTube commenter (extremeness!) and feel that there is an interesting study of memorialization at hand in the comments left on a song like "Tha Crossroads" which hold a cultural significance in many urban communities of color as a song to be played at funerals and to remember one's loved ones with.

The comments above shows the most obvious form of memorialization, that of lost loved ones. The urge to create a virtual memorial of this video by commenting "R.I.P Eddie Guerreo" reminds me of Debord's concept of the spectacle, in that the comment's existence stands in the place of Eddie's existence. It forces the reader to memorialize Eddie, even though they have no idea who he is. There are pages and pages of "R.I.P -----" on this song's comment page and they were all created as little spectacles, in the sense Debord uses in this quote

[The spectacle] is not something added to the real world- not a decorative element, so to speak. On the contrary, it is the very heart of society's real unreality.

The second form of memorialization is perhaps less obvious, but still important- the memorialization of the past. Not the past in the sense of people we once knew, but the past in the sense of people we once were. Along with the comments on loved ones who have passed, there are an equal number of comments about famous musicians who have passed and, most interestingly, supposed musical eras that have passed. Commenters like "cmoneyking123456789" and "paperchaserdru" use this song to force the remembrance of how things used to be, when we had singers like Aaliyah and music that was more grounded in "reality." The anger commenters have towards the present while they continue to valorize the music and performers of the past bring to mind a discomfort with reality mirrored in this Debord quote

So long as the realm of necessity remains a social dream, dreaming will remain a social necessity. The spectacle is the bad dream of modern society in chains, expressing nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep.