In tandem with the American debut of COVID-19, a video featuring the band Puddle of Mudd covering Nirvana”s “About a Girl” went viral. When singer Wes Scantlin realized his performance was not well-received, he attempted to scrub the video from the Internet, but it was too late. It reached a captive audience with nothing better to do.
Ultimately, Puddle of Mudd’s video didn’t garner as many views as the woman who licked an airplane toilet seat, but it came close and for the same reason: The American Dream. This is not the ideal dream historian James Adams intended when he coined the phrase upon which this country purports to thrive, but a modern version: a shot at the 15 minutes of fame predicted by Andy Warhol.
Except, Warhol never said this.
There are conflicting narratives regarding who is responsible for highly misquoted remark. A Swedish museum director claimed to have added the phrase to the program supplementing an exhibition of Warhol’s work. When the man responsible for compiling the program noted that the material provided by Warhol didn’t include the quote, he confronted the museum director, who allegedly replied, “If [Warhol] didn’t say it, he very well could have. Let’s put it in.”
Photographer Nat Finkelstein insisted the quote originated when Warhol, swarmed by fans, shouted, “Everyone wants to be famous!” and that he retorted, “Yeah, for about fifteen minutes, Andy.”
Even news publications that cater to the intelligentsia attribute the “15 Minutes of Fame” quote to Warhol, and they likely know he wasn’t the one to say it. Because we don’t care that it wasn’t Warhol who said it. You won’t impress anyone at a party with this anecdote. However, he didn’t say it elevates the quote to a status higher than truth: the self-referential.
Andy Warhol was an artist who was more famous for fame than he was for his art if the two could be divorced. That he didn’t utter this famously misattributed quote about fame spins in an infinite loop. Not to mention, the truth would render the quote false. It’s unlikely you’ve heard the name of the Swedish museum director. What could Pontus Hultén possibly know of fame? But Andy Warhol—he engineered it. It isn’t that we prefer the cover version in this case. We accept it as the unoriginal original.
In 1962, Marilyn Monroe performed the most recognizable song ever sung in English. Yet the version of “Happy Birthday” she sang for President John F. Kennedy is iconic. It’s everything a cover song ought to be: a reinterpretation that honors and transforms the original without a trace of envy.
Presumably, actor Peter Lawford was referring to Monroe’s tardiness when he introduced her to the stage as “the late Marilyn Monroe”, but when she died three months later, history was revised to suggest he’d predicted her death—and a cover-up. What actually occurred that evening, viewed in hindsight, was suspicious enough. Journalist Dorothy Kilgallen described Marilyn Monroe”s performance as “making love to the president in the direct view of 40 million Americans.” She did that to the same unsexy song our grandmothers sang over six burning candles stuck into a made-from-scratch cake. Certainly not the first cover song ever performed, Monroe’s version of “Happy Birthday” stands in contention for its archetype.
Warhol didn’t perform originals, either. His work oughtn’t be reduced to replicas of soup cans, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll condense to that, along with his paintings of the replicated publicity photo of Marilyn Monroe. If he wasn’t the one to predict the desire for 15 minutes of fame, his work still depicted an unforeseeable future. The same year Marilyn Monroe sang “Happy Birthday” to JFK, Warhol painted a diptych in which 50 quarantined-like Marilyns appear as if they’re on a Zoom call.
Social media engagement in America increased 61 percent during the lockdown phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. When users weren’t on Zoom for work, school, or a remote happy hour, American thumbs scrolled the screens on their phones. TikTok added 12 million American users in March 2020 alone. The app existed four years before the pandemic, but it maintained relative “innocence” compared to giants like Facebook and Twitter and offered a refreshing dose of positivity in contrast to what the media relentlessly referred to as “these uncertain times”. Not even good news came without the caveat. So, your city’s mayor signed an executive order allowing restaurants to deliver alcoholic beverages during the pandemic? You had these “uncertain times” to thank for that.
Marketing teams scrambled to update television commercials as existing ads were instantaneously rendered obsolete. Their products and services targeted a species whose natural habitat was traffic in crowded subways, grocery store lines, concert venues, and suburban shopping malls. Advertisers could no longer provoke us with familiar stressors.
Stripped of the assumption that the planet was under human control, we were raw and delicate as larvae. Peddling wings and fancy exoskeletons would have been poor form. Corporations gently entered our cocoons through the television screen, all with the same approach: the sound of a piano – just three or four somber notes, too sparse to form a melody – and then a hand peels back the curtain to the nearby window revealing empty city streets juxtaposed against The New York skyline. A stranger in an adjacent building holds a handmade sign to their window: Everything will be OK! A child roller-skates up and down an empty hallway. In another scene, a young woman bends over the kitchen counter, studies grandmotherly cursive on an index card, and begins to knead a boule of dough.
Brands tucked themselves discreetly behind platitudes of gratitude for healthcare workers, our “heroes on the frontline”. For now, they said, we’re putting cereal sales aside to offer this comforting voiceover. Yet, a pandemic shutdown “staycation” is presented on the television screen. In a dimly lit room, a couple camps out on their couch, watching a movie while spooning something—it could be anything—from the bowls perched in their hands. You thought cereal was just for breakfast? Not during these uncertain times.
Corporations posited they’d put capitalism on hold. Uber’s PSA thanked riders for not using their ride-share service during the pandemic shutdown, although there was nowhere to go. Burger King offered their Whopper recipe so we could make our own Burger King-like burgers at home. McDonald’s in Brazil chose to separate the brand’s golden arches as a gesture of solidarity, but the metaphor flopped. The familiar seam of our reality had come apart. The image was too literal.
When William S. Burroughs said that “language is a virus”, he meant it literally. Burroughs wrote this in 1962, the same year Marilyn Monroe covered “Happy Birthday” and Andy Warhol painted 50 shades of her face. Back then, the definition of “literally” was limited to its original meaning: without exaggeration or inaccuracy. However, the word has some history of being used to emphasize exaggeration.
For example, Mark Twain (ne’ Samuel Clemens) described his famous character Tom Sawyer as “literally rolling in wealth”. Henry David Thoreau and F. Scott Fitzgerald also used the word hyperbolically. In everyday speech, however, “literally” was still used exclusively to indicate objective actuality, which is why Twain could effectively employ it as satire. (Back then, satire also still had a job.)
Now, more often than not, “literally” is synonymous with its opposite, “figuratively”, and therefore, it means nothing at all. It’s a filler word, similar to the peppering of “like” in Valley Girls‘ speech. It’s more fun to blame Gen Z for the undoing of “literally” than to accuse Mark Twain of messing it up—hell, it’s probably most fun not to be uptight about it at all – but the word “literally”, literally exists to thwart ambiguity. In these uncertain times, a friend grieving a breakup might describe the pain by remarking that she is “literally about to have a heart attack”, and we won’t know whether to put on a rom-com or call 911. Language is a virus, and people could die.
New words and phrases sprung to meet the needs of these uncertain times. “Social distancing” wouldn’t have made sense to extroverts before COVID-19, but within days, we followed its instruction not to stand too close to anyone outside our households.
The “New Normal” was exhaustively invoked, though not as an existence achieved but as one promised, suggesting we would adapt. Adapt to what? Juggling conference calls while teaching The Louisiana Purchase to your third grader under the desk? Swimming in waterproof masks, bikinis reinvented as three-piece suits? Regular visits to the parking lot of what used to serve as a football stadium but now functions as a drive-thru window for vaccine shots?
American anti-vaxxers quickly adopted the British term “jab” for getting the vaccine. There’s some evidence a Russian disinformation campaign may have been responsible for this, that they used a translator familiar with British vernacular to relay propaganda dissuading Americans from getting the COVID-19 vaccine. Those who subscribed adopted the term “jab” as a pejorative. Intentional or not, it’s an effective linguistic tool. “Jab” intuitively sounds like a malicious act for which only a fool would volunteer, while “vaccine” remains innocuous, medically responsible, to be followed by a lollipop.
New provocative phrases quickly became earworms. The mouthful, “out of an abundance of caution”, was a dark horse hit in the English language without a hook, but it was played in constant rotation by political leaders queuing up to self-isolate after they had been exposed to the virus. But nothing was abundant about their caution—this was the basic instruction ordered by the CDC. If it ever registered as practically heroic to do so, “abundance” quickly decomposed after overconsumption.
Like the COVID-19 virus, the language virus mutates. New variants resist meaning with increasing efficacy, destroying words from the inside out. Letters survive, but only as sounds. Even these uncertain times lost their charge and became merely a neutral descriptor for the present. After the Paleozoic Era came the Mesozoic, followed by the Cenozoic, and here we are—home sweet home—in These Uncertain Times.
Puddle of Mudd’s Nirvana cover was among the first avian chirps at the dawn of this new era. If Marilyn Monroe’s rendition of “Happy Birthday” was lovemaking, Wes Scantlin’s Nirvana cover, according to one YouTuber, sounded “like Kurt Cobain if he was being sodomized with a cactus.”
Scantlin responded to the criticism, “Jealousy is toxic.” He is right, if inadvertently. It is not jealousy but envy that ruins a cover song. Straying too far from the original is an act of envy disguised as entitlement. Musical hubris. An example of this is any cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” that’s been hijacked for Easter or Christmas, stripped of its sexual innuendo and secular lyrics, and force-fed a wooden cross and crown of thorns until it vomits up a Christian devotional song.
It’s worth noting that Jeff Buckley’s cover of “Hallelujah” is exquisite. Similarly, singer-songwriter Greg Laswell’s cover of Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” unexpectedly transforms the pop feminist anthem into a sorrowful and empathetic ballad, accomplished without altering the melody or changing a single lyric. Recorded late stage in life, Johnny Cash’s rendition of “Hurt” by industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails reveals the reflective, brutally vulnerable lyrics lay beneath Trent Reznor’s embittered, self-destructive tone, proving originality isn’t achieved by doing something new but by being authentic when you do it.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is a cover song butchered by envy in the form of mimicry, and this is where Scantlin went wrong. He set out to prove he is “literally” the late Kurt Cobain and failed at something even worse. Wes Scantlin’s painful impression of Cobain might be his best attempt to be himself.
Presumably, there’s a story behind Puddle of Mudd’s choice to add the superfluous “D” in “Mudd”, but I won’t look it up. If I did, I’d have to tell you the truth, and we’d miss this gorgeous example of that which distinguishes viral from famous: Scantlin is the jab, while Warhol is the vaccine. Warhol’s repetitive images are the antidote to blindness, inactive imitations of familiar objects that inject the originals back into vision. All Wes Scantlin accomplished was to steal someone else’s grunge and turn it into his mud with an extra “D” at the end, which sonically offers nothing. Visually, it’s the clunky, pseudo-subversive aesthetic sold at Hot Topic stores for the ephemeral pop culture-obsessed.
At the tail end of every normal, a new abnormal awaits. On average, a TikTok video has three seconds to capture viewers’ interest before they scroll on. Regardless of whether a viral video sparks joy or outrage, its lifespan usually lasts about a month. Viruses copy and mutate, and then they are replaced. What’s scandalous one day will eventually be quaint. We vote with our fingertips and transmit by clicks who will host our attention next.
So you see, we are the virus, nominating who lives 15 more minutes and who instantly dies. We are the fans blustering the girl’s white dress higher, and then we shun her for revealing too much. We forget about the girl. Out in the sky, a woman crouching in an airplane bathroom has turned her camera on, and when her tongue makes contact with the toilet seat, a new star is born.