Entertaining but Confusing
I find it baffling that the blogger of “A Gift from the Interwebs” chose to include Marilyn Hagerty’s Olive Garden review in this post about the “Oh My Dayum” video. The link to the Gregory Brothers other viral hit – the Bed intruder song – is understandable. Both are works of auto-tuned genius, and both, unlike the Olive Garden review, are humorous videos. The juxtaposition of two completely different mediums of online humor seems illogical and haphazard. Perhaps Eyder Peralta is trying to keep readers up-to-date on the newest internet sensations, regardless of the form of each. While that is understandable, I would have opted to focus only on auto-tuned hits in this post and saved the link to Marilyn Hagerty’s review for another time.
4 responses so far
I considered Hagerty’s review to be kind of a direct comparison to Daym Drops in a couple of ways, in that they both are small-time individuals who did their reviews just for their own purposes and to assist a few other people who knew them/followed them in making choices. They both found fame at the hands of others, regardless of whether they were auto-tuned or not. I think the author is trying to tell readers that there really is no limit to the ways in which someone can become famous on the Internet.
When i was reading the article, i was also confused about the inclusion of the Hagerty piece. Aside from it not being a video, it is totally different from the Dayum video and the Bed intruder song video because those are:
1. funny
2. about otherwise unheard of people who said things that they normally say and then became famous because someone (the Gregory brothers) chose to make a song out of their views.
Hagerty is a woman who has a newspaper that she consistently writes in, and she gave a review on a restaurant that for some reason became famous. It is her words, not a song made out of them, that people were interested in. The other 2 cases are appreciated for their musical/ creative genius, not for what is actually being said in them.
At first, I too was confused as to what the correlation or connection between the Dayum video and the review of the Olive Garden restaurant were, but rereading the article really struck a chord in my head-we, the generation “obsessed with the internet” will watch anything and everything out there for entertainment and more specifically, we’ll remember it. These people were publicized for talking about nothing in essence; I feel that is both sad that we watch videos and mock food reviews and actually remember them, yet these two pieces really showed the profound effect of youtube and the internet. Nowadays, anyone can take something as trivial as a hamburger, or as lifeless as a food review and turn it into something that we’ll never forget. I think this article really shows a wide spectrum of what we’ll watch or read for entertainment and both the Dayum video and the Hagerty review on Olive Garden, as disconnected as they may seem, truly exemplify this point.
I don’t necessarily think that the article was meant to be autotune-centric. Though the Gregory Brothers are excellent musicians and really have a knack for producing autotuned hits, Eyder Peralta probably felt that mentioning a different sort of viral sensation would help the piece seem less focused on that specific group. Marilyn Hagerty’s Olive Garden review was funny, but in a less obvious way than “OH MY DAYUM” was. Hagerty’s enthusiasm was on the subtler side, while Daym Drops was really in-your-face about how much he loved Five Guys Burgers and Fries. The basic idea is that memes come in all shapes in sizes.