United States of Whatever

This is why I love Youtube. It is one of the funniest places in the world, full of untapped humor. You can just look out there and find the craziest, stupidest, yet equally hilarious things; sublimely idiotic videos that are still awesome and rack up hundreds of thousands of views.

You can find it at this link- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viaTT859Yk0 or just look up “United States of Whatever” up on Youtube.

 This clip came from a show called “The Sifl and Olly Show” after the names of the two main characters. It was actually once a show on MTV-UK and eventually transferred to MTV-US for three seasons before it was cancelled. The show was started by two childhood friends named Liam Lynch and Matt Crocco. They started performing songs and humor sketches to amuse themselves. Even when they grew up and went to different colleges, they still sent songs and scenes to one another. They even recorded a comedy album together. While at the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts Liam found some songs and scenes they had recorded for their incomplete second album. Liam decided to act the songs and scenes out with sock puppets and send the video to Mark. Lynch also sent the videos to MTV-UK, who loved it, and that was the beginning of “The Sifl and Olly Show”.

It’s just so awesome to me that these two friends who were young kids found something they loved to do. They kept doing it just for the fun of creating something and making a friend laugh. Finally they succeeded and actually created and performed in their own show for three years on national television. They usually wrote only loose scripts for the show and improvised most of it. They just had fun joking around with sock puppets and lots of people loved it. It’s amazing and kind of inspiring how far these two people succeeded just by being good friends and genuinely funny people.

 “United States of Whatever” actually was written and performed entirely by Liam Lynch. He said that the song was completely improvised and recorded in a single take. The song itself is a punk style rock that consists of exactly two chords and two basic lines of dialogue. It is so simple, but still gets stuck inside my head often. This song was actually praised and lauded by quite a few people. It was named a “Song of the Week” by a NME, a prominent British music publication. It also hit number ten on the UK Singles Chart. It was the shortest song, at the original song time of 1:26, to ever be on the UK Singles Chart. Its position for five years as the shortest song would be uprooted in 2007 by the world renowned classic “Spider Pig”. “United States of Whatever” also hit top single charts in Belgium, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. An amazing amount of success for what probably came to Liam as a joke to tell his friend Mark. 

The whole song just reminds me of a joke you would tell your friend in class. It’s just so dang funny to me every single time Olly (Liam) says YEAH WHATEVER. He just keeps interrupting them more and more until that last one where the music just cuts out and they both just nod at the camera and say “that’s nice”. It’s a classic misleading of the audience and it made me bust out laughing the first time. The reactions from Sifl are just perfect as it reflects how weird and surreal the whole song is. I have to admit though that the chorus sections can become a little weird and trippy. It’s just a really fun song and when that hard guitar chords hit, I wanna headbang alongside Olly.

Also something a little unexpected from a music video performed completely by sock puppets is that it actually contains some social and moral value. I mean the whole point of the song and the attached skit is to illustrate how apathetic and uncaring American teens have become and why they become so detached. I think Sifl said it best when he said “Olly you can say whatever the whole show and you may think you look cool, but it looks really dumb.” It’s this whole idea that not caring about stuff makes you cool. This sort of reflects how in popular media the cool characters are the ones who disrespect authority and stay detached and aloof (see the “cool guys don’t look at explosions” group). I think this is a serious problem as it has become almost the status quo now that cool people can’t overtly care about stuff or they are “tryhards”. This creates a sense that to be cool you have to not succeed at what authority wants you to and completely not care about it. I think this is what causes a lot of high schoolers to make unwise decisions. They don’t care about school and their future because that’s “cool”.

Well I fervently stand by those kids who take the extra effort to try hard and to succeed through caring about themselves, their future, and helping others. I think it is a major problem in this country, one that many leaders and teachers have been trying to solve. Kids should want to try their hardest in school; they should want to be the best they can be. I mean one of the things parents of this country are most worried about is that are uncaring attitude of “whatever” could cause the US to lose ground economically, politically, and educationally to foreign countries. My history teacher, Mr. Anderson, made an interesting point when he said that humans in America today look for much more shortcuts and easy ways then they would have even twenty years ago. Even looking at this blog project I know for a fact that at least a quarter to half of the students doing this will just barely go over the word limit. Some don’t even care enough to do the assignment. I know this is true because I am guilty of it myself. I know that last year in LA we had to do forum posts in which seven hundred words would get you an A grade. So most of my forum posts were in between seven hundred and eight hundred. I guess you could blame on how busy everyone is nowadays or the distractions from technology, but I think it is also a severe issue in the mindset of teenagers in the country. At the same time, I probably will finish my blog word count this week with about 1300 words. Another person comes up and asks me “why would you say that teens being lazy is a major problem and then take the easy route yourself” and I’m just like YEAH WHATEVER. Thanks for reading, don’t forget to subscribe, and peace out.