The Hardy Annual / Vlogging Superstars

Having just bought the Hardy Annual I need to make some money and what better way than to....wait for it.....vlog! Yes! I got my wig coiffured up, teeth whitened and make-up bag ready to make myself look 30 years younger. I got a camera. I've got cool friends to do cool things with................ye-e-aaahhhh! I will be so, like, popular...more popular than Alfie, Zoe and Tyler - oh yes!

Last week a BBC documentary, Rise of the Superstar Vloggers, caught my eye so I watched it...well, some of it...............ten minutes, roughly..........BECAUSE IT MADE ME WANT TO SMASH THE SCREEN, THEN EVERYTHING IN THE OFFICE, THEN GO OUT, BUY A GUN, TRACK DOWN THESE VLOGGERS AND SHOOT THEM ALL!

(To make their vlogs more bearable I suggest using auto titles, as I did - it was a larf, for two minutes)

............calm down man, they're just kids having fun, making loads of money...with millions of followers...what's wrong with that? Oh, nothing, except it looks worse than Rollermania (the Bay City Rollers were a 70s pop group who - oh never mind) - why? Because.....hold on....is it any worse? Vloggers and the Rollers are/were clean-cut (mind you, the Rollers looked like rock'n'roll barbarians compared to these vloggers) entertainers with millions of young fans idolising vacuous products, as teens will......but...the funny thing is that to this middle-aged mind producing a pop record seems like a creative act compared to just sharing your everyday life or arsing around on YouTube. That said, whether The Rollers actually played on their records is disputed and as yet dark undertones of death and extremely dubious managerial behaviour have yet to be linked to these vlogging superstars...I live in hope....

Perhaps it's just the whitened teeth...whenever I see them I want to take a crowbar to the chops they're housed in and enjoy the spectacle of erupting peroxide-soaked fragments mixed with blood - is that cruel? You know what I mean? These vloggers are symptomatic of what looks to me like our ever-increasing empty culture to which they now seem to be contributing wholeheartedly having been scooped from just being YouTube megastars to mainstream channels and radio and bigger fame and on to probably run for parliament and succeed, thus making Jeremy Corbyn's success seem logical and sane....

Meanwhile, some people wonder what went wrong with Brit culture, which was once edgy, rebellious, anarchic, stylish etc in part, but now seems to mirror the teeth-whitening process, reflecting back on itself as nothing but dazzling emptiness, the superficial appearance being everything, the whole meaning of the thing itself. What these vloggers represent is the death of content/meaning/imagination/rebellion/anger/attitude
and all the other elements that would produce great culture, that did once produce great culture here on this little island. For now, though, I'm going to vlog myself stupid...after I've bought that gun...

See how long you last

Joe Bish for Vice on the subject