Tom Scocca - "On Smarm," Excerpt lyrics

Excerpt from "On Smarm," by Tom Scocca for Gawker.com This article seeks to introduce a new term, "smarm," to popular lexicon. The article gives many examples of uses of the word, and reasons why the word is useful in describing a particular climate mediated by online culture that we now find ourselves in. Generally, "smarm" is an attitude possessed by individuals, and communities, who seem to be resistant to critique and other forms of critical an*lysis, instead dismissing this sort of discourse as "snark". Smarm has a peculiar relationship to hip-hop because a phrase like "no haters," a phrase this article a**ociates with smarm, has certainly been borrowed from hip-hop. At the same time, "no haters," in hip-hop, is a term situated in experiences of being rejected time and again by powerful stakeholders (causing hip-hop artists to respond with what may be labeled as "snark" others may know as "keeping it real"). But, in fact, the use of "no haters" is now employed primarily by the stakeholders themselves that "no haters" hip-hop artists typically found themselves in opposition to. -AB 1989: A young black man — a movie character, who is played by the film's director — picks up a trashcan across the street from a pizza parlor. The entire film has been building to this scene, slights and resentments and misunderstandings and injustices accumulating on a hot day till the young man's friend is dead outside the pizza place, in the hands of police, and an angry crowd has gathered. The young man carries the trashcan in his arms, past the crowd, and heaves it through the pizza-parlor window. A white man in his mid-50s — two decades older than the filmmaker with the trashcan — watches the movie. His job is to write film criticism. He sees the trashcan go through the gla**, the crowd riot, the pizza place burn. A pivotal moment in movie history, in pop-culture history, in the history of America's imagining of race. The middle-aged white movie critic writes that the filmmaker is "thoroughly mixed up about what he is saying." He is, the critic writes, "playing with dynamite in an urban playground. The response to the movie could get away from him." Someone's response to the movie certainly did get away from someone: Rather than attacking the police, the rioters attack a symbolic target, and that part of the movie is hard to justify... The end of the movie is a shambles, and if some audiences go wild, [the filmmaker] is partly responsible. That was what David Denby had to say about Do the Right Thing: that Spike Lee would be to blame if the movie made black people riot. There are many, many things that can be noted about this piece of writing (e.g., Denby was more moved by the loss of Sal's Famous than by the d**h of Radio Raheem), but one of them is simply that it's not artistic judgment. In the moment of crisis, Denby chose to deliver his verdict not on the film as a film, but on whether it represented responsible and appropriate social behavior — and whether black audiences could be trusted with it. Keep this in mind when David Denby puts himself forward as an expert on the terms of appropriate and inappropriate response. Anger is upsetting to smarm — real anger, not umbrage. But so is humor and confidence. Smarm, with its fixation on respect and respectability, has trouble handling it when the snarkers start clowning around. Are you serious? the commenters write. Is this serious? On Twitter, the right-thinking commenters pa** the links around: Seriously? Seriously?? Are you serious? Are you? Serious? Seriously? Well, no. But yes, yes we are. If you can't say something nice, say something anyway. Make it something nice. In the age of rampant runaway snark, the Newest Media are doing something else entirely. Adam Mordecai, an editor-at-large for Upworthy, explained to Quora readers what his site's headline-writing philosophy is: Don't depress people so much that they want to give up on humanity. Negative headlines breeds negative shares. Don't curse in your headlines. Moms hate it (and are the biggest sharers on the internet by a significant margin [...] Don't make people take positions they might be uncomfortable with. For example, "I Really Hate All White People" is going to not get shared, whereas, "An Open Letter To Pasty People" is far less hostile and more likely to get shared. Don't use terms that overwhelm, polarize or bore people. I never use Social Security, The Environment, Immigration, Democrats, Republicans, Medicare, Racist, Bigot, etc... You can talk about issues without giving away what they are. The result of this approach, the Upworthy house style, is a coy sort of emulation of English, stripped of actual semantic content: This Man Removed the Specific and the Negative, and What Happened Next Will Astonish You. Even Upworthy's fellow participants in the ongoing SEO race to the bottom are horrified. But it works, in the sense that people who do not want to think about actual things or read any information will reliably share Upworthy stories. People want to be uplifted, and through social media people want to demonstrate to other people that they are the kind of people who appreciate being uplifted. Negativity is a bad market niche, according to no less a figure than Malcolm Gladwell — a known expert, in theory and practice, on the marketing power of popularity: [T]here's very little negative stuff you can put in a book or an article before you turn most of your audience away. Negative stuff is interesting the first time, but you'll never re-read a negative article. You'll re-read a positive one. Part of the reason that my books have had a long shelf life is that they're optimistic, and optimism permits that kind of longevity. One curious fact about this long view is that it's quite untrue. I can't recall ever, unless compelled by duty, rereading a Malcolm Gladwell article. What I have reread is Mencken on the Scopes Trial, Hunter Thompson on Richard Nixon, and Dorothy Parker on most things—to say nothing of Orwell on poverty and Du Bois on racism, or David Foster Wallace on the existential horror of a leisure cruise. This belief that oblivion awaits the naysayers and the snarkers shouldn't survive a glance at the bookshelf. When you hear a voice say "Everyone's a critic," listen for the echo: Everyone's a publicist.