Youtube Nation: Christmas Hangover Edition

It's the weekend after Christmas. All the thrill is gone, the trash is full of gaudy wrapping paper and everything seems a little less vibrant, a little less festive, a little less alive. Maybe it's the memories of your childhood slowly fading a bit more every year. Maybe it's the realization that in just five more gray days you'll be forced to reflect on the 365 shades of disappointment you just walked, only to watch 365 more bloom on the horizon. Or hell, maybe it's just the fact that, once again, you discovered only too late that you can't stand to be around your family during the holidays so you drowned the frustration in something as inherently ill-advised as brown alcohol mixed with cream, eggs and nutmeg. Whether actual or psychosomatic, you've got a Christmas hangover and all you wanted to do was surf the Net and have a laugh, except now all you've got is some cantankerous Jew who kinda hates Christmas hitting you with some crazy, androgynous Youtuber lip syncing to a ridiculous Nordic kid's song. Great. Just freaking great.

But don't despair, reader. Youtube itself is kind of like a hangover. It's a palpable feeling of regret, either for something you did in the recent past or something you have right in front of you. It's ugly. It's sickening. Though past all that, there's a kind of relief in it. You can only do the rainbow yawn so many times before there's nothing left and all your gestures of nausea are both literally and figuratively empty. When you're collapsed on the bathroom floor, no pretense of dignity or respectability about you, you can come to appreciate the little fragments of intrigue in your agonizing abandon. Yes, you can go deep into that pain and maybe even come out enlightened.

That's roughly my experience with JoeLeTaxi's videos. When "Trollkarlen Lurifix" found its way into my inbox, I was about ready to quit this business altogether. No, this video isn't bizarre enough on its own to break a mind, but after six months of Youtube analysis, I've learned that it's more the rule than the exception to find a girlish boy or boyish girl goof around with costumes, wigs and weird songs with so much irony it rounds right back around to genuine.

Then comes the enlightenment. I fell into the same loops of frustration over JoeLeTaxi that countless commenters have. I wanted to know if Joe is male or female, actually Eastern European or just some bored Westerner, a serious performer or a kid screwing around. Most of all, I wanted Youtube to be a source of actual information, not just further confusion. But then I went to JoeLeTaxi's channel and found this surprisingly not-terrible video. "Pretend" opened my eyes to the distraction of the Internet. For a good fifteen years now we've been so used to having an endless font of information at our disposal that we seem to have forgotten how to consume the ambiguity of art.

See, it doesn't matter if JoeLeTaxi is a boy or a girl, serious or goofy, foreign or domestic. Not just because JoeLeTaxi is just the Youtube persona of a real person, but because the point of JLT's channel is to exist in an imagined realm where those delineations aren't even relevant. Whoever this person is, he or she has a screen presence and an eye for ludicrous pop culture. That should be enough. Sure, it's not clear, clean, sober and pro-social, but on the holiday season bender that is the Internet, neither are any of us.