Trolling to Tradition

Earlier in the week, I told you about how me wearing sunglasses started out as a joke.

I came to reject the premise of wearing sunglasses because I didn’t want to be associated with that projection or mentality.

It wasn’t until I decided to make an ironic fashion statement that I ultimately started wearing sunglasses. I began making fun of the things I didn’t want to be associated with, and one of the ways to do that is to pretend to be the most ludicrous, cartoonish version of that thing.

This got me thinking about other things that I’ve done that started out as me making fun of something, but gradually (then suddenly) evolved into an activity or practice I still enjoy today. There’s 80s music, which I grew up with but eventually came to see as superficial and a part of the commercial, soul-sucking system that had given us the nuclear arms race, among other things.

In the same vein of making fun of things, I started belting out 80s tunes at karaoke during the mid-2000s. Now, 80s music is considered pretty cool these days and somewhat mainstream to be into it, but back then? Decidedly uncool and just plain weird—and that’s where I wanted to be.

A funny thing happened, though. I realized that many of those 80s songs had tremendous artistic merit. They had a lot of anti-commercial, subversive messaging too, but it wasn’t always incredibly obvious upon first listening. Artists like Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, and Tears for Fears weren’t just here to celebrate the world; they were here to critique it as well.

More recently, I’ve seen this happen with Yacht Rock, but the truth is that I already loved those songs thanks to my ahead-of-the-curve 80s resurgence, but also because those songs are amazing and I grew up with them. They bring me way back.

I’ll have to put more reflective thought into my own experiences to discover more of these little jokes that became real, but there are plenty of examples from history. Immediately following the conclusion of the First World War, an art movement sprung up in response to the ridiculous state of toxicity that led to the conflict in the first place.

Dada wasn’t just about pointing out the atrocities of war; it was a wholesale critique of the underlying system itself. This very much included fancy art that was selling for a lot of money, for academia and institutions and cold, rational thinking was what led us to devastating war, the likes of which humanity had never seen (but would see in far worse terms just two decades later).

In poking fun of art institutions and trying to make non-art art, Dada utterly failed. Instead, it succeeded in launching an entirely new art style, which was quickly subsumed right into the system. Dada artists became the rock stars of the 1920s. Up was now down and down was up.

You might think of this phenomenon as trolling that becomes tradition.

Drag shows are another great example. Men dressing up as women and performing on stage goes back literally as far as stages themselves go, but that’s mainly because women weren’t allowed to perform publicly. This was as true in the time of Shakespeare as it was during Ancient Greece.

It was the Vaudeville era where the first sketches of drag shows appeared, but they were more along the lines of making fun of feminine characteristics; it was jarring and perceived as funny to see a man moving and behaving this way, and you can get an idea of how uptight society was back then.

However, it was the black and LGBTQ communities in Harlem that first really set the stage for drag shows. Here, queens would walk long runways and show off their elaborate attire, while onlookers cheered and hooted. This was parody at its finest—still making fun of gender characteristics, but in a way that included how uptight society was about all this. Clearly, this was a threat to the mainstream system, so the police would frequently raid these shows.

By the debut of RuPaul’s Drag Race in 2009, drag had clearly become its own art form, just like Dada.

There are other good examples from popular culture, but I want to hear from you today. Have you ever found yourself liking something ironically, only to like it for real at some future time? Is this a form of fake it til you make it?