How students are going to graduate in 2020. (Solange created a Twitter poll, and pants won by a narrow margin.) - Craig Jenkins In an arena, you couldn’t argue about who won in real time, or debate whether Monica was wearing waist-high boots or high heels covered by leather pants. Verzuz is, at its core, a simulation of the live experience, but occasionally it achieves something that couldn’t happen in a concert. The battles between Brandy and Monica and Gucci Mane and Jeezy addressed long-standing tensions the night Gladys Knight and Patti LaBelle serenaded each other ranks among 2020’s best.
#Forward facing vibe check meme face series
As the series branches out, it has sought out legends and attempted to work out historical misunderstandings. Two performers get together to hash out which one has the better catalogue in 20 hits, bringing arguments that used to happen in schools, playgrounds, and hip-hop forums to life. Rachel HandlerĪ post shared by VERZUZ started out as a party and became must-see entertainment for our year inside thanks to a simple premise and a colorful cast of characters. It is and remains insane and beautiful, a relic of a now-lost time when celebrities believed that singing a song together would be enough to save the world. Though the video, as Gadot put it, “didn’t transcend” in the way she intended, it did transcend as a gorgeous work of 2020 camp: an utter misreading of the public mood, a failure of both intention and execution that only served to illuminate the ways in which the pandemic was not actually affecting the lives of the rich and famous, save for imbuing them with a false sense of martyrdom. Motivated by an unknown force, Gal Gadot rounded up her celebrity friends to record an off-key rendition of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Ostensibly as a way to cheer people up, the group sang a song whose lyrics implore everyone to imagine a boundaryless world where people “live as one” … in 12 different keys … with half of the participants wearing the facial expression of a disillusioned long-term hostage. Rebecca AlterĪ post shared by Gal Gadot first truly camp piece of quarantine art washed up on our digital shores like a bloated whale carcass on March 18. It’s the most Lynchian piece of media to come out of the pandemic - and this is a year that saw David Lynch himself release daily weather reports from quarantine. (Cut to Joy Behar, reaching for the Purell on the table.) The episode is an eerie time capsule of how an entire genre of media that for decades has relied on the energy of in-studio audiences adjusted to a world where people could no longer gather. Whoopi Goldberg addressed the dead space where an audience wasn’t, stretching out her arms and yelling, “Welcome to The View!” over and over, to zero people, while upbeat music played and the camera panned across a ghost town of empty chairs. On March 11, the talk show went ahead with an episode featuring the hosts around their signature table without a live studio audience, speaking to rows upon rows of empty folding chairs. Before late-night and daytime shows went on a brief hiatus, and then adapted with at-home editions out of the studio, The View came up with a genius interim solution. By the second week of March, at least in New York, we had one foot in the before-times and one big toe feeling out what would become the rest of the year. Whoopi Goldberg repeating “welcome to The View” to empty audience chairs is both peak apocalypse horror and high camp. And all of it kept us just on this side of sane, as we dragged our withered bodies through the longest nine months on record.
Some of it was absurd, some ingenious, some unintentionally amusing, some frankly reprehensible (and therefore unforgettable). There have been thousands of livestreams, memes, virtual concerts, and other ephemera - this list represents the ones that most memorably shaped our locked-down lives (and brains). In that spirit, Vulture brings you the Quarries: our first, and hopefully last, ad hoc awards for the culture that came out of our year in quarantine. With so many limits on our real lives, we were finally ready to move to the Uncanny Valley. And it meant leaning way into gallows humor, nonsense, and camp. It meant engaging with the politics of race and class and inequity, in tandem with the protests that finally got us out of the house. It meant chats, face-offs, and collaborations that wouldn’t have happened in the before times, when geography still meant something and stars were booked and busy. That meant celebrating the flattened hierarchies of online gaming and Instagram Live, where celebs, politicians, and the rest of us could play and troll side-by-side. Instead of fretting over what was lost, some of the most interesting art this year leaned into the immediacy of the internet.
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