#006

So I’ve been watching an old ARG internet series I liked as a teen. I swear this relates.

I was anywhere from 13-17 years old when Slenderman Fever had really gripped YouTube watching tweens and made nationwide news for unfortunate reasons. I was up to date on Marble Hornets, watching every entry as it dropped until I deemed it and the Slenderman trend to be growing Too Lame as I entered my senior year of high school in mid-2013. I would come back a few years later to see these series concluded, with mixed results. I wasn’t as fervent of a “Slenderverse” viewer, but Marble Hornets and EverymanHYBRID still, for the most part, gripped me. The latter of which I’ve been watching with varying levels of renewed excitement over the last few days. It’s a hell of a trip.

ARGs, (or unfiction stories as they’ve come to be called in recent years,) are a hell of a thing to go back to years on. This is mainly because they were heavily multi-media stories, (God help you if you start seeing PhotoBucket links,) that took ages to "properly" tell. Watching them in long sprints feels like cheating now. I can’t point to a single Slenderman-orbiting series that didn’t have long periods of inactivity, either for narrative purposes, or simply because these typically college-aged video makers would come into jobs, fall out with friends, and generally have adult life happen to them. It’s hard to even find time for creative endeavors when you’re not running a YouTube channel, a corresponding email inbox, Twitter, and Tumblr, much less collaborating with other channels in the same vein as yours. With hindsight, it’s funny and sort of harrowing to surf the comments for these series and see people lamenting how it’s been MONTHS and these INGRATES can only put up a FIVE MINUTE LONG VIDEO??? Then you realize, oh christ, that’s YOUR comment.

EverymanHYBRID was a fun alternative to the more self-serious Marble Hornets. Where the latter had a more stern disposition and solemn tone, the former was more prone to bouts of levity amidst darkness, laughably bad tongue-in-cheek joking from its characters, a painfully Heath Ledger’s Joker-like antagonist that shows up in the back third, and suffers/benefits from generally being a zero-budget production. I’m in the last 10 or so videos of this 100+(!!!) video series, and it really stumbles its way across the finish line. It’s a lot of melodrama, teleportation, handwaving and leaning into a character that, I feel, was best when seldom seen. In conjunction with these sporadic uploads, you were expected to follow socials, read blog posts, maybe even learn how to decode cyphers, and it took its toll on viewers after a certain point. The entire affair suffers from overinvolvement on a lot of fronts, but the fact I can still go back and bathe in said melodrama for a few hours is comforting. I should also say that It’s not all bad either; where EMH excels is, weirdly, in how it’s aged. I’m struggling to really put it into words, but in addition to the first third still being fun to watch, it feels like time has done a lot of the legwork for how unsettling the concept of “Slenderman becoming real” is. I’ve already started to look back on the turn-of-the-‘10s YouTube horror scene, (and in general some of the more niche spaces on YouTube from the time,) with some fondness, and watching EMH has done a great deal for it. The fact that the series starts off as a health and fitness channel trying to go viral with hoax Slenderman appearances and, rather convincingly, transitions to showing these events becoming very real and dangerous in canon is still very engrossing meta-story-telling. While I can't recommend the entire shebang, the first 30 or so videos are really quite fun.

This is a long and winding fucking path to say— I have had one moment from the series seared into my my memory since the video was first uploaded. This moment from “Dead end with a Pulse,” from a little over halfway into the series. (Easy on the volume.) One of the main cast unknowingly walks into a trap as the Scissor Sisters’ “I Can’t Decide” starts playing throughout the house he’s in, and while it’s charmingly cheesy and heavy-handed now, I was obsessed with both this video and track for like a week afterwards. I still find it intensely emotionally evocative. Years later, here I am, rewatching that scene and thinking to myself, “man, I should go like, listen to one of their albums. It’s gonna suck, right?”

That song isn't even on this album.

The Scissor Sisters’ self-titled 2004 album is fucking absurd. It is insanely good, fun from beginning to end, and takes so many stylistic turns that I don’t even know where the fuck we really started. The group’s second most popular track according to Spotify’s metrics leads right into an insane toe-tapping cover of “Comfortably Numb,” cascading straight into some of the most danceable tracks I’ve ever heard in my life. I don’t think I stopped moving listening to this entire thing.

Weird electroclash melodies and a delightfully gay lead vocalist flow into the insane disco-inspired borderline-parody-song “Filthy/Gorgeous,” eventually closing with a two songs that’d sound perfectly at home on an Erasure and Pink Floyd album respectively. And the entire goddamn time I’m sitting here thinking god, why can’t I stop thinking of PRIVATE, the Danish dance-pop group I was obsessed with for months in 2019??? (I really think it’s just the vocalists sounding similar enough. And both, admittedly, serving.)

I can’t put a fitting label to it but I feel like the late 00’s gave rise to a certain sound and aesthetic niche that’s loosely connected between a bunch of artists. Electric Six, PRIVATE, Scissor Sisters, The Similou, and I’m sure countless more had this sound inspired by or evocative of glossy 80’s pop & disco merged with newer electronic/alt sounds that felt, at any moment, like they might give way to revealing that they’re parody tracks. (My mind keeps leading me back to, well, "camp," but it doesn't feel entirely appropriate.) This is absolutely not to say that any of these groups should be taken less seriously— I want to express exactly the contrary. There’s, I suppose, a zest for life in a lot of the work from each of these groups I mentioned that feels both of the time period and extremely not. It's fascinating! I don’t know! Maybe it’s just me! Or maybe something was in the water at the time! I really do think there’s some grander point to be made here, but I’ve got laundry to do, and I haven’t eaten since I sat down to write this.

So! I’ll back down from this gay little corkboard now, but I’ll be keeping my red string. I enjoyed The Scissor Sisters’ self-titled album way more than I would have ever expected to and I really suspect a lot of these tracks are going to end up in playlists. Danceable, fun, gay, eclectic and pulled off extremely well. The kitchen sink of breakthrough albums. Glam rocking, poppy-indie eccentricity and happiness.

favorite tracks: laura, take your mama, comfortably numb, tits on the radio, music is the victim

(also, go listen to private's "my secret lover!")