"i hugged my dog & cried while listening to this"
Read to the end for an incredible TikTok musical about a grocery store
Hey! Thank you for reading Garbage Day. If you haven’t, consider subscribing. It’s $5 a month or $30 a year and it helps keep this newsletter going. You’ll also get access to special extra issues every month. Tomorrow, paying subscribers will get an interview I did with Rob Dobi, the creator of one of the most important websites of my life… Your Scene Sucks. Hit the button below if that sounds like your kind of thing.
The Fleetwood Mac Cranberry Juice Guy Got A New Truck
Last week, I shared with you guys the TikTok video of the Fleetwood Mac Cranberry Juice Guy. At the time, I wrote, “Just skateboarding and drinking cranberry juice and listening to Fleetwood Mac. I yearn to feel vibes as pure as this.” Still very much yearning to feel those vibes!!
The ensuing days have been a real whirlwind for FMCJG — 37-year-old Nathan Apodaca. He has over a million followers on TikTok, over a million on Instagram, Mick Fleetwood made a TikTok to respond to his video, and, according to this Post Register article, he has the same manager as Honey Boo Boo now.
The Register interview is full of really wild details. He was living in a trailer with no running water. After he broke 100,000 followers, he spent tax return money on a sewing machine and hand-made his own merch.
I’m actively choosing to stay positive about all of this. Ocean Spray gave him a new truck. He was using TikTok to connect with his daughter and kill time before work at a processing plant. I don’t want to think about what modern American poverty looks like and how internet platforms and viral fame interact with it. I don’t want to pull apart how corporate media in this country turns the daily desperation and indignity of working people into feel good stories when we tap dance hard enough for the wealthy to come down from the clouds and effortlessly change our circumstances.
I’m not going to do all that! This guy seems like a great dude and I’m happy for him. In the same way his video was a nice little reprieve from madness of our current era, so too is his new-found fame and success.
This KK Slider Cover Of Sufjan Stevens
KK Slider is the name of the dog plays songs inside of Animal Crossing. This is a cover of Sufjan Stevens’ song, “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us!” and I actually think it might be better than the original. As one YouTube commenter beneath writes, “i hugged my dog & cried while listening to this.”
Let’s Check In On The Gripping Food With Force Twitter Account
Yep, OK, still bad!
Did Tana Mongeau’s #BootyForBiden Campaign Violate Federal Law?
One of my favorite endearing kinds of internet stories is when influencers do something that breaks the artificial reality of their world and then come crashing into ours. For instance, this week, YouTuber and Jake Paul’s ex-fiancée Tana Mongeau started a campaign called #BootyForBiden. In a now-deleted tweet, Mongeau said that if you sent her proof you voted for Biden, she’d send you a nude for free.
After starting #BootyForBiden, Mongeau lost her verification status on YouTube. TMZ put all of this together and reported that it was possible she lost her verification because trading nudes for votes may count as an expenditure to influence voting, which is a felony. Whoops! Mongeau has tried to distance herself from the whole thing over the last few days. In a NSFW-ish Instagram post, she said “u don’t need my ass to know what’s right for America so go VOTE!” And on Twitter Tuesday, she denied that the lost verification had anything do with possibly using nudes to buy votes for Biden.
This honestly sounds more likely to me. But regardless, let this be a lesson to everyone out there. Please read up on electoral law before politically weaponizing your nudes!
The Quest To Find A Mythical MF DOOM Sample
So my main quarantine hobby over the last few months has been getting into music production. I’m on a bunch of subreddits. I watch a lot of YouTube stuff. I’m learning about the whole world. As part of my journey into a wildly expensive and time-consuming hobby, I came across this absolutely unreal article from DJ Booth. It’s a story that some people might derogatorily refer to as an “inconsequential quest,” but for me, it’s the type of story that makes me excited to use the internet.
The video embedded above is a beat from rapper MF DOOM titled, “Arrow Root,” off his 2002 album Special Herbs, Vol. 1. Over the years, as LOFI hip hop has evolved from YouTube background music into genuine artistic movement, MF Doom’s Special Herbs and, specifically “Arrow Root” have gotten a lot of attention. Similar to how all of YouTube became obsessed a few years ago with Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plastic Love,” so too has a pocket of the internet fallen in love with MF DOOM’s “Arrow Head”. And many of these “Arrow Head” fans became completely focused on figuring out where the “Arrow Head” sample came from.
There’s a whole community of “sample spotters” who spend their time reverse-engineering their favorite hip hop and electronic music tracks. The DJ Booth article about “Arrow Root” focuses on one Dutch sample spotter named Roel van de Heuvel. It chronicles his years-long search for the sample and, yes, in the end, he does figure out where it came from. I’ll spoil it only because, like with all of these kinds of stories, the process and obsessive journey is the point, not the result. MF DOOM sampled it from a 90s BET commercial sting.
“I said to my girlfriend, ‘When I die, I want this sample to play at my funeral,’” Roel told DJ Booth. “Not because it’s the best sample, but [because], for me, it’s a metaphorical Mount Everest.”
I Can’t Believe I Didn’t See This In Time for Monday’s Newsletter
Guys, I’m so sorry. I screwed up. I just really beefed it on this one.
A Minecraft User Is Building The Avatar: The Last Airbender Map
I have never played Minecraft, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not extremely entranced by the crazy stuff people build with it. Also, if anyone reading this hasn’t taking the time to go watch The Last Airbender on Netflix, please close this tab and go do that immediately. I’d argue it’s in the top 10 of greatest TV shows ever made. The user behind the Minecraft project is named Flerakl and according to the Planet Minecraft page, they’re currently fleshing out the maps for:
Southern Water Tribe
Southern Air Temple
Omashu
Kyoshi Island
Ba Sing Se Palace
Firenation city
Great Gates of Azulon
Wan Shi Tong's Library
Eastern Air Temple
And they’re trying to get people top help them create buildings for Ba Sing Se and the Fire Nation.
Flerakl posted screenshots of their project to the Last Airbender subreddit last week. The most important question every had was whether or not the library went all the way underground. And the answer is yes.
This Recipe Is Unbelievably Disgusting, I Love It
And Finally, Looking For A Fun Twitch Show?
I’ve been doing a comedy show on Twitch with a few very funny people over the last few weeks. If you like Garbage Day, you’ll probably like it too. It’s all about the internet and memes and usually involves PowerPoint presentations. It’s called Hoobastank2 for some reason. We stream every Wednesday at 8PM EST. If you’re looking for a distraction from the debate tonight, come check it out!
P.S. here’s an incredible TikTok musical about a grocery store.
***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***
I spend A LOT of time thinking about how Youtube laundered preformative giving content for a new generation. My first contact with the format was Extreme Makeover Home Edition and, like...Publisher's Clearinghouse commercials.
Now you see a video of someone in a tight circumstance and the comments are full of kids tagging David Dobrik and MrBeast so they can come down and fix things (and make a video that racks up a guaranteed 5M views).
Like, what happens when everyone gets desensitized to that?