My friend Kirsten recently showed me a YouTube video from the platform's formative years. Like human formative years, YouTube's were quite bizarre and surreal compared to what the site would become. It's a crudely animated music video for a song called Schfifty Five, posted in 2006. At first, I was puzzled by what I was watching. I was even annoyed by how weird it was. It reminded me of why, in the early days of YouTube, I showed little interest in watching the videos there, because so many of them seemed like no more than inane, random messes made by people wasting precious time ("The Llama Song" stands out as one of the videos that turned me away from YouTube until the early 2010s).
But in the present day, watching Schfifty Five, a video so old if it was a human it could vote and go to war, I inexplicably became entranced. At first I dismissed it as the novelty of such a stupid song, the way you might listen to "Safety Dance" on repeat when no one's around. But there was something more to this dumb video that I found so striking. It wasn't until my friend Kirsten pointed out how this video came from a golden age of YouTube (my paraphrasing, not her exact words), a time before the site was, at the risk of sounding like a tree-hugging socialist commie hippie, a passionless factory for empty-hearted content driven by cold corporate lust for ad revenue. The creative spirit that went into Schfifty Five was, in a word, pure.
This made me think of my own creative endeavors. My name will never be found on a bestseller list. Not even the Top 100 North-Central Croatian Independent Books list. But the lack of monetary focus has loosened my thinking from the fetters of "content." I have complete creative freedom, not being under the gloomy umbrella of billion-dollar industries. I'm so free I can't even be canceled for using the R-word in my latest book, which you can buy here.
I'm glad my friend shared with me the deranged and beautiful genius that is Schfifty Five. I hope with my writing I can, among other foolish things, maintain the spirit of YouTube's old, insane era of creative purity and freedom.
