Dear clout chasers, thank you. We live in a comfortable time in a very uncomfortable universe. Most of our needs are met so we don’t have the need to hunt anymore. A lot of us in the west don’t farm, hunt or go anywhere other than our grocery stores and restaurants for food. Getting food used to take all day but now it’s a 30 minute trip. We have all this free time and instead of chasing our dreams or experiencing the world, a lot of us work jobs. So we spend all day working at our jobs, getting some food and catching up on the latest entertainment. In a world of Netflix where every show is at our finger tips it’s become hard for any form of entertainment to compete.
So there we are living our mundane lives. Work to home, home to Netflix, sleep to work, uber eat to shit and shit to uber eat. But once every blue moon there is one who rises out of the pack. “I don’t know how y’all do this 9-5 shits” he thinks to himself. But he has no talents and no education of how to better his life situations. What he does have is an iPhone and a particular set of skills. Skills that are unfathomable to regular folks like me and you. This clout chaser is willing to go places and make a fool of himself to a level that the average person wouldn’t reach in solitary confinement and soars into internet relevance.
This clout chaser is willing to harm himself and everyone around him for clout. Clout. What is clout you ask? Clout is defined as influence or power especially in politics or business. The problem I have with that definition is that it sounds like these people are leveraging this for monetary gain. In some cases there are clout chasers that are business minded. There are clout chasers that go on to do advertisements and rap or something along those lines. The two don’t necessarily correlate though. There are clout chasers that just do it for the views and then disappear off the planet. They’re either in rehab, in jail, dead or irrelevant.
Remember put him in a coffin? I didn’t expect you to. Put him in a coffin was a dude that would go to grocery stores and jewelry stores, yell “ put him in a coffin” then back drop on whatever object is near him with his hands across his chest. Put him in a coffin was red hot for that week in 2013 but then he disappeared into irrelevance. I don’t know what happened to him but someone must’ve called the cops at some point. Put him in a coffin didn’t care about his well being, the stores employees, products or human decency. Put him in a coffin wanted those views and that clout. And the trend hasn’t stopped.
We’ve had Boonk. 6ix9ine. Fouseytube. And a clown circus of people trying to get internet clout. Rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine spent a year enacting buffoonery across the country. From getting into fist fights at the airport, shooting at rappers, going to Chicago and feeding their homeless people then going to Chief Keefs block (for 15 seconds) while he was in a feud with him, mocking rappers by parodying them on Instagram and so many genuinely entertaining moments. For a moment there our otherwise mundane world was painted rainbow by Tekashi. Despite him being a despicable person for all the damage he’s caused, he was also the most entertaining part of a lot of people’s days and has given us stories to tell.
Youtuber Fouseytube came back from his hiatus from the website with a declaration. He was going to throw the royal rumble of concerts where the fans wouldn’t know who was gonna come out. He said names ranging from Lebron James to DJ Khaled. He was clout chasing on another level and he had the notoriety for his name dropping to be deemed legitimate for a second there. He went on a rampage on the streets screaming about how he had energy and how he was going to manifest himself meeting Drake through the law of attraction. He openly wept and said he met Drake that night and that Drake promised him that he would be at the concert. He put Drake in the thumbnail of the livestream and titled it “2 million views needed for Drake” the implication being that as soon as the stream hit 2 million concurrent views Drake would appear. The implication being Drake was in the vicinity of the concert and not on the other side of the country. The concert was shut down as soon as it hit 2 million views due to a bomb threat being called on the event.
Fouseytube proceeded to tell the fans to meet him in the parking lot and went on a WWE style promo where he screamed, danced and told stories on top of a car. He called out fellow youtuber and frequent critic keemstar, talked about the state of his mental health and the world. He talked about a speech he was supposed to say that would end racism and proclaimed that he was going to buy the uber driver who’s car he was standing on top of a new car. What came afterwards was months of documentaries, video responses, sightings and decodings of the July 15th event and Fouseytube as a person. In every interview he did there was this look in his eyes which he now attributes to his adderall use at the time.
Fousey would be on the streets telling people to call him Rose and that he manifested their presence at certain locations. He would promise everyone he came across thousands of dollars. He would ask Sam Pepper and DJ Akademiks to fight him. I was glued in. I watched every second of it just to see if he was crazy or not. It doesn’t feel like keeping up with celebrity tabloids. It’s different. Back in the day you’d see a video of Britney Spears shaving her head and smashing cars with umbrellas every once in a while but this is different. These people are coming up with more and more creative ways to get your attention as opposed to breaking down after having had your attention. They give you live updates 24/7 in real time. Adding layers to their story lines until the inevitable end point.
It’s the same reason we watched Tekashi and for the same reason we watched Boonk. It’s the same reason why people watch nascar. You can’t help but look at it. You know that at some point if a car is going that fast it is bound to crash. Some times they don’t and rounds go fine and you’re surprised but you know that at some point that car is gonna fucking crash, and you wanna see it cause how often do you see a car crashing while going at that speed right? So clout chasers take us out of our mundane lives and give us that car crash every once in a while. And for that I thank them.
That is the hallmark of our generation. This literally couldn’t have been a thing like 20 years ago. I think America’s funniest home videos is to blame. Cause people couldn’t get famous off of dumb home videos before that. You just had that at home for your family to laugh at forever. But then dumb shit was given a platform. You could get famous off getting hit in the balls. And everyone’s got balls somewhere. So now everyone was hitting each other in the balls and then YouTube came along. The ball hits were a little more centralized but then the market got oversaturated so the ball hitters had to get creative. Instagram made the clout chasing a drug. And out of that emerged our modern age clout chasers. Those who are willing to do whatever it takes for those likes and follows to flood the dopamine through their brain.
At their best these clout chasers gave us interesting and genuinely hilarious moments. All of 6ix9ines antics in 2018 are hip hop stories I’ll tell forever. Him dancing in the rain like Usher or dressing up like 50 cent and remaking the in da club video, or beefing with everyone in the country and going on the run from state to state with rappers in every city saying they were gonna kill him. We watched for whole weekends as Tekashi achieved the impossible. He didn’t crash. And he kept not crashing. In a any shape or form. He was even getting the upper hand on journalists while doing interviews. Every song he would put out would make the billboard charts. Tekashi couldn’t take an L even though all the odds seemed stacked against him. He made everyone that hated him change their minds until the inevitable happened. His actions caught up to him and the car crashed. Even though everything that’s happened afterwards is well documented and quite sketchy, we can’t deny the memories.
At their worst clout chasers were like Boonk. If selling your soul for fame had a face it would be the tatted penis of Instagram personality Boonk. A drug addict amateur instagram porn star. Boonk got famous committing crimes and he shot himself at some point. He went on Adam 22s No Jumper podcast and was passing out and throwing up on air. Boonk has no redeeming qualities. Tekashi and Fouseytube had their music and YouTube careers to fall back on. He would just expose himself on Instagram every once in a while until he disappeared into obscurity.
I don’t condone any of their actions but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t entertained or at the very least invested for a moment in time. Watching these clout chasers feels like watching wrestling in the 90s. The WWF was going through a rigorous competition with the rival wrestling company WCW. Both companies aired their primary shows live on Monday’s. So both companies upped their game and the wrestlers took the feud personally and that bled over into the performances.
The wrestlers were willing to put their body through hell for their respective brands. And we all watched as Mick Foley was flung off the roof of a 30 foot steel cage hurdling on to a table. This wasn’t done with ropes or anything. There was no way to fake this. And everyone knew that. The story might’ve been fake but there’s no way to fake someone falling from that height. And yet we all watched it and loved the performers and we began to respect what these people were willing to put themselves through for our entertainment. Cause in their own weird way, Tekashi 6ix9ine with his 69 covered body, Fouseytube with his burnt tatted scalp and Boonk shooting himself, they did that for you and me.
I don’t condone you harming yourself or others. I don’t condone you getting rid of all human decency and catering to our most primal tendencies. But if you’re gonna do it anyway, thanks. You make the 21st century more interesting. Just make sure you’re entertaining and less Boonk-ish. They’re definitely gonna come up with laws to stop you niggas but I’m glad I was here to live through this era.
