Jerk’s Cultural Year in Review
It’s VERY easy to say 2016 was the worst year ever, but there were some interesting pop-culture moments that came out of it all that we must appreciate. Memes ruled the year, Leo finally got an Oscar (not even for a good movie…), and Ken Bone gave us hope.
BuzzFeed’s Facebook Live Watermelon Explosion
Ah, when 2016 was still rather innocent. This video has over 11 million total views, and while it was broadcasted live, it had the most views ever on a live stream. While this has got to be the dumbest way America could spend 45 minutes of a Friday afternoon, we’d like to pretend it derived from some form of scientific curiosity. Although several of you probably ran to the grocery store to get a watermelon and some rubber bands, Facebook Live has got to be the lamest invention of the year, since all it essentially does is capitalize on people’s FOMO.
Beyoncé’s Lemonade
It’s been more than 7 months since this dropped, and we still have not discovered any words that do it justice. Her surprise release of a VISUAL album was groundbreaking for the music industry. Not only was it packed with amazing songs but it was full of bold statements—it really reminded us of the power Beyoncé wields. She won a shit ton of awards for this and every girl wanted to go buy a bat and smash the car of her imaginary cheating boyfriend.
Harambe
This is genuinely too sad to even write about. In short, we learned yet again, that humans are dumb. While this beautiful gorilla is not with us anymore, everyone did a fabulous job of keeping his spirit alive—applause for anyone who got a Harambe tattoo—until the rumor spread that several thousands of people voted for him in the presidential election.
Pokémon GO
As predicted, this lasted all of two minutes, but it was the only thing people talked about for those two minutes (mostly because during the summer we didn’t have any battery power left to read anything about politics). Pokémon Go excited everyone, inspired them be more active and even led to some unfortunate robbery traps. There have probably been several updates to the game since the summer, but we are all pretty over it. Nonetheless, the Pokémon franchise made bank on this and the doors to everyday augmented reality apps were blown open. All around the longest period of positivity in 2016 came out of this game.
Kanye West
Kanye had quite the year. He started off releasing The Life of Pablo, which all of our basic asses loved (you all have a shirt styles inspired from the album cover and you know it). This led to the great Taylor v. Kim controversy, which was nothing short of hilarious. All Kanye fans admit that sometimes he can be a huge POS, but for once, he did no wrong. Kim’s epic Snapchat recording of Taylor approving Kanye’s song put T Snake Swift so in her place that no one has seen much of her the rest of 2016. Along with this came the weirdest music video we have ever seen, and can never unsee. This left us all thinking the nakedness of Donald Trump was probably an insult against the millionnaire, but recent recordings of Kanye reveal him stating that if he had voted, he would have voted for Trump. Now, angry and confused, no one knows what to think. Maybe in 2017 he can regain some of those lost fans.
Naturally, there were plenty of other Events That Shall Not Be Named, but these are the important ones that will be included in the backs of yearbooks and then never again remembered. Here’s to hoping that in 2017 the Internet stops ruining everything and maybe becomes useful again.