Rachel Sklar/Eat The Press
This is the first New York Observer since the departure of Gabe Sherman, and Tom Scocca was either desperate to fill up four pages of "Off The Record" or delighted with the chance. Either way, his resulting 2,000+ essay on YouTube is highly entertaining, particularly for the glimpse it gives into the life of Young Scocca, who loved the Pixies dearly and thought Dennis Miller was funny with innocent, youthful folly.
I can't quite figure out whether Scocca longs for the days when being able to spout off about a TV moment was the right only of those who were in front of the TV at the appointed hour (fie on you, TiVo! A pox on your house, end-of-year clip show!) or if he is embracing the culturally-flattening spread of YouTube and its ilk, which welcomes anyone and everyone into the not-so-secret club of its knowledge (pick a head-butt, any head-butt). Nostalgia laces the piece as Scocca traces the various memories the clips evoke (best line: "Welcome back, Welcome Back, Kotter"), and the benefits of being able to revisit Frank Zappa, a Cassandra on "Crossfire" or the footage of a boyhood basketball hero, his glory preserved in a small online box, are obvious. But though this newly accessible format makes clips almost akin to text, he seems to mourn the fact that "YouTube dispels the mystical air around witnessing things." With YouTube, everyone gets to be in his secret Pixies club, watching the Velouria* video and being privy to all the other secret handshakes that used to be the provence only of those who'd earned them. If I had to guess, he was one of those people who kind of resented the advent of CDs, because it took all the obsessive fun out of crafting the perfect mixed tape.
It's worth sitting back and considering what's being gained and lost in every revolution, and Scocca gets there first with this piece. And yes, I know this write-up takes way longer to read than watching a clip on YouTube.
*Scocca's Velouria, he adoresya
