Doesn't make sense to me (19 years old) or any of my friends either. The point is that it's ridiculous. I think largely in part to the internet, absurdism may now be part of our youth culture. It may always have been, but it's pretty easy for weird things done by close friends (original Harlem Shake video) to become hugely popular over the internet.
Well you prompted me to check whether I understand what "absurd" and "ism" mean because it seemed pretty apt to me. Still does after checking, at least for the standards of a comment on an article, as opposed to say a language semantics journal.
To clarify, the original use here was "absurdism may now be part of our youth culture", which is certainly something one could argue, but I'd strongly disagree with.
If he wanted to use the definition you're constructing, I think he should have said "little absurdisms like this are a common part of our youth culture". That, I could agree with.
I didn't realize this would be controversial. I meant "absurdism" in a non-philosophical sense. The way you phrased it -- "little absurdisms like this are a common part of our youth culture" -- sums it up perfectly.
At work today we were discussing ideas for a hack-a-thon we're having next month and I suggested a website that would take a URL and make any website do the harlem shake. Looks like I got beat to the punch.
That's not the way culture works, has worked, or should ever work. Cultural interchange and osmosis is the name of the game, without it we'd be stuck with isolated, provincial, outmoded cultures. In this case I don't see any aspect of the recent so-called "harlem shake" meme lessening the culture or the name of harlem.
A better argument would be that the "new" harlem shake isn't dancing, it's just spastic upper body movements.
P.S. If anything I'd say that more people are going to learn about the real harlem shake due to the popularity of the faux harlem shake than if the latter had never existed. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5m6sJCbZEk
I'm not sure I follow some of their claims. Are they saying that the whole genre of trap music (which I consider a hybrid of hip-hop and electronic music) is just a way of "stealing Black culture and morphing it into a form that serves an outlet for your sexual fantasies"? Does that mean that a style of music belongs to a culture, and that its enjoyment among others means it is a ridicule of the culture it belongs to?
If it's the case that that's their argument, then I just don't buy it.
I'm sensitive to institutional and cultural racism, and therefore I realize that it's not for a privileged group to decide what is and isn't racist and what black people should or should not be offended by. Granted.
However, equating the Harlem Shake meme to blackface performances is ivory tower nonsense that belies a willful ignorance to what Internet memes are. No one is profiting from this and it's not diminishing black culture in any way. If you put it back in context then you don't have a viral video because the stupidity and brevity of the whole thing is what made it viral. Just because it got huge and it annoys you doesn't mean that it's part of the problem of racism. It's just an idiotic meme that people watch when they're slacking off at their dead-end white collar jobs. If you actually care about improving societal racism you need to address more important issues like why aren't more black people getting hired and why don't they have more political power, etc. If you get all riled up and insist that anything black needs to be represented in context and everyone always needs to stop and think about how unfair it is that white people can listen to black music without actually suffering the pain of a racist society that led to the creation of that music all you will do is make people want to stay the fuck away from you because being white in your vicinity is like walking on egg shells. It doesn't matter how morally justified you are if you turn off all empathy and refuse to recognize their fundamental humanity simply because they are "privileged" and therefore need to recognize their role as oppressor at all times.
That statement is easy to make from a position of privilege. His point is that a very different dance of the same name from black culture has now been replaced in the public consciousness by a parody of itself on YouTube.
