Credit: Ariel Shearer
There's
a jovial shit-mouthed wise-ass standing in an outdoor foyer at MIT,
chain-smoking Newports and hitting on every girl who walks by. He's
the 22-year-old whiteboy from Massachusetts whose actual birth name is Blake
Boston, but who became widely known as Scumbag Steve after a pic of
him sporting a backwards hat, gold chain, and fur G-Unit hoodie was
poached off the MySpace page for his suburban rap crew – the
Beantown Mafia – and re-appropriated as a universal symbol for
degeneracy.
He's
here for the third biennial ROFLCon, where trend-setting engineers of
web mirth ingenuity spent Friday and Saturday geeking out in the
company of real-life memes like Steve. In addition to him, other
headliners include Antoine Dodson, whose synthesized memetic banger,
“Bedroom Intruder,” has been viewed more than 100 million times
on YouTube. While more than 50 million people flocked to The
Avengers this past weekend,
the 1000 nerds at ROFLCon cheered on a far more eclectic band of
superheroes – not to mention ones who you could interact with. I
was there less than 10 minutes before getting stoned with Paul
Vasquez, the California native who became known as Double Rainbow Guy
in 2010, when a video he captured at his Yosemite-side farm went
viral.
Hovering
around this motley scrum is Ben Lashes, a pacific northwest punk rock
vet who looks like one of the Lost Boys. Lashes stands out from most
other ROFLCon-goers; with his crisp Air Jordans, crooked
black fitted hat, and matching shades, he's easily the nerd
gathering's coolest-looking attendee (besides the leotarded Tron
Guy). It's a fitting image; according to social media authority
Mashable, Lashes is the world's first and only agent for memes, with
a roster that includes such marquee names as Nyan Cat, Rebecca Black,
and Scumbag Steve.
Credit: Ariel Shearer
Lashes
entered the meme scene in 2009, when he put his music career on hold
to work full-time with Charlie Schmidt, a longtime family friend
whose “Keyboard Cat” video took off in April of that year.
Schmidt had a range of business opportunities, and tapped Ben to
handle phone calls, merchandise, and rigmarole so he could get back
to his lifelong passions – painting, making videos, and pursuing
any number of artistic adventures. Two years later, Lashes now has a
growing client list of new millennium stars with a common power for
winning hearts online.
At the
last ROFLCon in 2010, I broke bread with Schmidt and Lashes. We
partied, drank heavily, and even hung with the Gregory Brothers of
Auto-Tune the News fame. It was a surreal offline experience among
creatures from every absurd nook on the net, and I won't soon forget
it. Still that romp didn't ready me for what they had on deck this
time around.
“VOICE
OF THE PEOPLE”
Charlie
Schmidt didn't have enough dough to crank his furnace in 1986. So he
spent the winter of that year quarantined in one small corner of his
Spokane, Washington home, which reeked as if his kerosine space
heater was barbecuing the cardboard that he sealed the
living room off with. Unemployed after quitting a nine-to-five with a
graphic design firm – Schmidt says he “just needed to make art,”
and his
art only – he also didn't have the means to purchase painting
supplies. Luckily, the year before his wife Joanne had gifted him a
Beta movie camera, giving Schmidt an affordable expressive avenue.
Schmidt still has the first work of art that he ever created. It's a
ballpoint illustration of a guy peeing, scribbled in a pocket-sized
spiral notebook. To this day it gives the 61-year-old as many laughs
as he guesses it did when he drew it 50 years ago. Even back then he
was exploring various mediums, and used to make clothes on his
family's sewing machine for Figaro, a skinny orange cat that Schmidt
adored as a child. That artistic gusto never dulled, and by the
mid-80s he found himself shooting dozens of short sketches every week
– many of which featured a chubby white-chinned feline named Fatso.
Schmidt struck some success in 1985, when he won a local television
station's funniest home video contest for some forgettable
tomfoolery. That submission earned him a meeting with a Hollywood
agent, which led to a series of commercial gigs overseas. Before
those paychecks came, though, in 1986 Schmidt was struggling to stay
warm – spending days making art in his pajamas, and nights praying
that his toilet didn't freeze. On the frigid morning that he propped
Fatso up to his Ensoniq synthesizer, Schmidt had no clue that he was
recording a classic. More like he was trying to get the shoot
finished quickly, so as to avoid catching the wrong end of Fatso's
irritable bowel syndrome.
A trained drummer, Schmidt effortlessly wrote and recorded a ditty
for the bit, then loaded a “meow” sample in the keyboard. From
there he mounted his camera on a tripod, and in just two takes was
able to convincingly move Fatso like a marionette, making it appear
as if the cat was a smooth-operating piano man. The spot didn't
garner immediate attention, though another video that Schmidt shot
the same week – of a silly trick involving him pressing plexiglass
against his nose – landed him on national talk shows, as well as
work on a London-based variety hour. “Cool Cat,” as he called the
Fatso clip back then, did however become a Schmidt family favorite.
After sitting on the tape for 20 years, Schmidt uploaded the 55
second-long “Cool Cat” video to YouTube in June of 2007. It had
been more than a decade since Fatso joined Mozart and the Big Bopper
above us – and Schmidt had sold his synth for $50 in the
late-'80's – but he still had faith in the old tabby, as did New
York blogger and meme aficionado Brad O'Farrell, who interpolated a
spin-off in which Keyboard Cat turns up at the end of clips to stroke
an encore for epic fail scenes. Within weeks of O'Farrell's “Play
him off, Keyboard Cat” getting posted in early 2009, countless
users were mixing and re-mixing their own versions, many of which
clocked millions of plays.
Having
done creative deals before, Schmidt knew that he needed help
negotiating with the vultures who were sniffing around. The artist is
best friends with Lashes's father, a newspaper columnist in Spokane,
and Schmidt had even designed an album cover for Ben's first band, a
garage punk outfit called the Stoics that dressed like an army of Pee
Wee Herman clones. So soon after the call for assistance came, Lashes quit his job
at a music distributor, and began working full-time with Schmidt,
handling everything from getting buttons made to securing YouTube
royalties. “I couldn't be happier with all of this,” says
Schmidt, “Keyboard Cat really is the voice of the people.”
Adds Lashes: “I like to say that he's the Elvis of internet cats.”
SCUMBAG OVERTURE
I'm
standing with Schmidt and Lashes outside of the ROFLCon entrance.
They've been out here for most of the first day, playing hookey from
the panel talks like convention delinquents. Scumbag Steve is with
them, posing for pics with giggling co-eds. In between requests,
Lashes offers some branding advice: “You're
supposed to look down girls' shirts when taking pictures with
them.” To which Steve replies, “Don't worry about me – I just
got her number. I'm getting laid tonight.”
NOTE: Woman above was NOT Scumbag Steve's date
By the
time I get back up with Steve, he and his hype man – an old
kindergarten friend from Wellesley who goes by Naked Dave – are
cheers-ing cocktails at the ROFLCon party, chilling with two girls who they
met earlier. I overhear Steve tell his date, “People always told me
I'd be famous with a name like Blake Boston.” He's not exactly an
archetypal mall hood; for one, he wears a championship ring from his
days as a Medfield lacrosse goalie. But suddenly I realize that there
actually are similarities between the Blake before me and the scumbag
who we've come to know as Steve. In addition to his nonchalantly foul
vocabulary, he's also wearing the same gold-patterned hat from the
original picture.
“Apparently
I look like a scumbag,” says Steve, who embraced the meme soon
after discovering its wide resonance last year. He was an out of work
chef at the time, and figured there was little to lose. “At first
it was kind of difficult, because who wants to be best friends or
family members with a scumbag? You can't beat the internet though,
and now I'm having the best time of my life. I didn't know anything
about memes before I became one, but this is all awesome, and I owe
it all to the internet. I guess I just got lucky.”
YOU GOT THE WRONG ONE, BABY
Despite
the rumors running through the conference halls, Scumbag Steve did
not get laid following the Friday night festivities. It wasn't for a
lack of trying, or because he couldn't seal the deal, but rather
because him and Naked Dave had no place to take their dates, since
ROFLCon dropped the ball on booking them a room. So after they got
dirty with their girls outside the bar, the degenerate duo crashed the hotel room of Brad Kim, an editor from the website Know Your Meme who
Steve was scheduled to present with on Saturday.
NOTE: This was not Scumbag Steve's date either
The
next afternoon, Steve and Kim are sitting in front of nearly 200
people in an MIT auditorium. The former is wearing the same clothes
as the day before, and is visibly exhausted from sleeping poorly on
the floor in Kim's room, and from doing interviews all morning. Still
he wins over the crowd, which is glued to an overhead projector
flashing a medley of Scumbag Steve memes. When asked how he
identified before his face became ubiquitous with poor behavior, he
deadpans: “Back then I was just Bitch-Ass Blake.”
The
lulz continue through more serious issues, like how the Scumbag Steve
meme was used during the Arab Spring uprisings to mock Egyptian
President Hosni Mubarek. But the discussion turns a bit more serious
when the topic of ownership comes up. Last month, Pepsi posted a
Scumbag Steve promo ad on YouTube. Only the company didn't bother to
contact Lashes, and instead hired an actor to dress like Steve and
spout off lines inspired by the meme. The results were disastrous,
with a pathetic number of page views and a litany of comments from
outraged fans demanding the real Scumbag Steve.
“People
want to take advantage of us because we're so underground,” says
Steve, who told the audience at his panel that his fraudulent
doppelganger “gets no ass.” After the poor response and a torrent
of angry tweets from Steve and his fans, Pepsi offered to fly him to
Los Angeles, where he'd get an opportunity to confront the imposter
on camera. But the company refused to pay for his time, and so Steve
told them to go screw. According to Lashes:
“The internet's not stupid, and a lot of these companies still have
yet to realize that. People who know about this stuff and who love
these characters aren't going to be mad if a cool meme is in a cool
commercial – but that's only so long as it plays to their
intelligence and to the rules of the meme."
Lashes
spends most of his time helping clients synthesize with paying
outlets. In 2010 he landed Keyboard Cat a commercial deal with
Wonderful pistachios. Last year he
helped Chris Torres, the 26-year-old Dallas-based illustrator
behind the Nyan Cat meme, secure a video game deal with 21st
Street Games in Manhattan. What started as a joke sketch – of his
cat, Marty McFly, floating on a rainbow-powered toaster – turned
into the boost that Torres wasn't getting from his long-time livejournal site,
lol-comics. With Lashes by his side, he's now hoping to get Nyan
Cat a line of Pop Tarts with rainbow frosting. “I have no idea why
it has 70 million views,” says Torres, “but right now Nyan Cat is
soaring high above the universe spreading joy and happiness.”
“I'm
not the first one to say this, but having a meme happen is like
hitting the lottery,” says Lashes, who sees it as his job to guard
the winnings. To protect the legal rights of his clients, last year
the meme manager enlisted Los Angeles attorney Kia Kamran, who is
currently helping Schmidt sue a company that sold Keyboard Cat shirts
without compensating Fatso. Kamran has represented acts
ranging from Don Ho to Evan Dando,
and joined Team Lashes on this year's ROFLCon voyage. Lashes
continues: “There's way more shit on the table for us now than
there ever was before. In one sense, a lot of [companies] still think
they can screw us. In another sense, though, people who wouldn't
answer my calls a year-and-a-half ago are calling me
now.”
WE ARE THE WORLD WIDE WEB
With
little difficulty, on Saturday night Lashes convinces meme stalwart
and real-life California taxidermist Chuck Testa to join the clique
for their final ROFLCon dinner. Over apps and beers, they all discuss
the possibilities in front of them – Keyboard Cat dolls; Scumbag
Steve's plan to drop a new rap song every week, and eventually a
proper album. Then, after a few rounds it's time to head over to the
nearby Middlesex lounge, where Steve is scheduled to perform his debut
single, “Scumbag Steve Overture,” which was just released on
YouTube. His mother, an interior decorator who drove in from the 'burbs for her son's panel, is in tow along with Naked Dave and
Testa. “You're cock-blocking me,” Steve barks at her, only
half-jokingly. “Don't you know that nobody wants to fuck you while
your mom's around?”
Steve
is visibly nervous for the show – that despite support from some passing college
girls who chant his name as he turns a corner near the venue. Though
he's been rapping in basements for years, nobody cared much until
last week, when his "overture" wracked up more than a million views in
its first two days online. The tension loosens though when Steve gets
on stage, and as the packed room erupts with approval at the sight of
him and Naked Dave jamming with Testa, who's singing back-up in his
trademark hunting gear.
Once Steve finishes, Antoine Dodson steps in to tear shit up. The
flamboyant YouTube hero also has a record dropping soon, and Lashes
has been courting him all weekend, telling Dodson to call if he needs
management. The rocker-turned-agent of anomalies hopes to build a
memetic Def Jam or Sub Pop, and tonight his dream is
fast-manifesting, as Dodson is joined by Steve, Dave, and Testa for a
raucous encore. By the time that Double Rainbow Guy and the redheaded
CopperCab of “Gingers Do Have Souls” renown jump in, the
whole crowd is elated – but especially Lashes, who grins and
gushes: “This is just the beginning.”
Twenty minutes later, all the nerds and memes clear out, and the
regular Middlesex crowd files in. Most of them have no clue that
their favorite guilty pleasures just serenaded the joint en masse,
though a few people do take pics outside with Double Rainbow Guy and
other stragglers. While things are winding down, a bouncer tells
Steve to remove his hat before re-entering, and says that Naked Dave
has to keep his shirt on. Looking somewhat pissed, with a Newport wedged
in the corner of his mouth, Steve looks at a cluster of ROFLCon
peeps, raises his arms, and yells, “Does anyone out here think
Scumbag Steve should have to take his fucking hat off?” Without
hesitation, they give him a unanimous thumbs up as he walks off
waving both middle fingers in the air.
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