[MUSIC PLAYING]
Tumblr is a good place for inspiration.
I definitely support Tumblr.
There's the other side, where people are like, there's no
creativity.
It's just a reblog generation.
But what's wrong with having a visual identity that's based
on other people?
It's just curating.
Everyone's just being mini curators, in a sense.
I don't necessarily think that's bad.
I'm bad at eye contact.
I can get awkward.
But I'll try.
I'll try to keep it here.
[MUSIC - JEROME LOL & JOHNNY WOODS, "THAT LAUGHING TRACK"]
I was in college and taking a lot of social media classes
and media theory classes.
And Marcus and I met on a message board.
We both made music as solo artists.
And then it was just a fun experiment.
Let's try to collaborate on a remix.
And so we did a remix.
It was fun.
And then it kept going, had a snowball effect.
Why even stop?
People are enjoying it.
It was fun.
It came out of experimentation, I think, of
can we do an internet group?
Can this just exist online?
But it was cool.
We brought it into the IRL sphere.
And we played shows in Europe.
It was amazing.
It was really fun.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I was on this tour with some friends.
We'd played in Tijuana on a Saturday night.
So I had no cell service, nothing.
We were in Tijuana.
We got back to the hotel room in San Diego at 4:00 AM.
And I just look on Twitter.
Friends of mine are like, great job Rihanna, stealing
Jerome's visual aesthetic.
[MUSIC - RIHANNA, "DIAMONDS"]
I watched it.
I was like, yeah.
I get it.
I get why people are going to associate that with some of
the videos I've made.
But I wasn't particularly offended.
Thinking about the context more and more, I was like,
this is kind of fucked up.
But then also a side of me was like, why
wouldn't this happen?
Of course this happened.
This happens with everything.
This isn't the first time this has happened.
Do you not want it to get big?
I was like, this is actually cool.
This is the best looking Saturday Night Live
performance in my eyes.
I loved it.
But taking out of context, if you have like a 50-year-old
guy who's never seen that before, seeing that aesthetic
on Saturday Night Live for the first time, not understanding
where it's coming from, see it as being problematic.
But Buzzfeed or Buzzmedia, or whatever that site's called,
they used me as the example.
They could have used--
hundreds of artists have that same style.
It's not really specific to me.
Seapunk as a word was coined in 2011.
That was just a buzz word that people wanted to assign to
this whole visual aesthetic.
I think what people are talking about when they say
seapunk is this Tumblr aesthetic of early web 1.0
art, a lot of water visuals, and this bright
pastel-y color scheme.
But it's definitely referential to early web 1.0
stuff, GeoCities, Angelfire, stuff like that.
But I know I'm not doing it justice to the people who
really identify with seapunk, because I don't
identify with it.
But they, I know, have their own belief system, which you
can read about on the internet.
Now people like know what you mean when you say seapunk
aesthetic, or whatever.
But it can be a little frustrating.
[MUSIC - LOL BOYS, "123"]
This 123 video I did was like this song, kind
of this club song.
But then the visual representation of the song
kind of made it into a more interesting thing.
[MUSIC - LOL BOYS, "123"]
I don't believe in nostalgia, romanticism.
I think you have to take that stuff.
And just placing it in this day and age makes it, I guess,
taking it out of context, making it fun.
And even if people think it looks shitty, it's
beautiful in a way.
That style, I think there's a certain kind of beauty in it,
just on an aesthetic level.
It's nice to look at that kind of stuff.
Maybe it is because it's nostalgic.
But it's still make sense in a modern context.
[MUSIC - LOL BOYS, "123"]
I really like screenshots of just funny things that happen
online, whether it's a pop-up ad or just ads in general.
If you take that out of context, it's like someone
designed that.
Someone designed a pop-up ad.
And so to put it just on your Tumblr without it being
annoying, it just gives it a new life, I think.
Skrillex had seen--
my management had showed him my website,
showed him my videos.
And he really liked it.
He said he he wanted me to do something.
He had this website he wanted to do it.
He's just like yeah, make it anything you want.
It can be like old GeoCities style.
It could be whatever you want.
We did the whole thing in two nights.
It was an amazing experience, and super fun.
It was fun.
We were doing it for Skrillex.
A lot of people got mad at that, too.
You sold out.
No.
But it wasn't like we did that and there was this art
direction team.
He was talking to us.
It was a direct dialogue.
And he understands the whole thing.
This is Santee Alley.
This is where you can find Twitter chains, Angry Bird
chains, a lot of chains, internet things.
Do you have any 3D hologram cases that change?
That's like the club look of 2013 right there.
[MUSIC - LOL BOYS, "CHANGES (FT HEART STREETS)"]
Kind of with the last EP, the EP changes and it was kind of
like the crux.
We were really happy with it.
It was the pinnacle of what we thought we could do as this
internet group.
[MUSIC - LOL BOYS, "CHANGES (FT HEART STREETS)"]
I had an idea of doing a screen shot video,
kind of like that.
I love that people lip sync on YouTube, and
that's a whole sub-genre.
That's such a niche.
So I wanted to take that, and place it in like this is an
official music video with people doing it.
And then the whole like meta thing of making it on top of a
desktop came to me after.
So then yeah, those people, I just sent out a mass email of
musicians and friends I had, seeing if they
were down to do it.
I was stoked, very happy with the response.
It was cool.
It was really fun to do.
It's fun to collaborate.
They are just as much directors in the
music video as I am.
Because I didn't know what I was going to get back.
I said listen to the song.
I didn't even say for how long do have to do it.
I said listen to this song, and record
yourself reacting to it.
So some people lip sync.
Some people don't.
I sent them the lyrics.
It was super fun.
It was a collaborative thing.
I plan on doing that with my next videos, to do something
that's collaborative with other artists.
[MUSIC - LOL BOYS, "CHANGES (FT HEART STREETS)"]
I think anything that's on a computer, if you see it on
your screen, it's on your computer.
Even if it's on the internet, it's still on your screen.
So I think you own it.
That's part of why computers and the internet is great.
Because it's modular.
You can just take whatever you want.
That's kind of the whole thing.
If you view the internet as kind of this collaborative art
project that keeps-- everyone is just
stealing from each other.
And it keeps getting crazier and crazier and crazier.
I'm OK with that.
That's a fun thing.
It makes it exciting.
[CHATTER]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I think the persona I project as Jerome LOL is more of--
it's humor.
It's funny.
But it's still me.
I'm still that every day.
But more and more I thinking of it in the third person.
I am more careful with what I'm posting online.
That's kind of the beauty of the internet, though, is you
get to choose what you want to broadcast to people.
The more I'm getting into it, especially since I've gone
solo, the more I view it as this third person thing, which
keeps me sane for sure.
Because I'm not always a crazy internet person, I guess.
It makes you super self aware, I think.
The first time you use Facebook, you have the option
of, what's your profile picture?
Even choosing your profile picture, that's a statement of
how you view yourself.
It's a very self reflexive, self aware activity.
It's insane, now little kids are doing that.
I feel like everyone is becoming self aware in the
past few years.
It's just going to keep getting more
and more hyper aware.
I've been on vacation where I have stepped away, but I
really don't like it.
I don't think it's a physical addiction.
Definitely it's not.
I don't get sick.
And I don't have physical withdrawals.
I'm not throwing up if I don't check my email.
It's an obsession, more than an addiction, I think.
I'm obsessed with the internet.
I need to see what's going on.
I need to be connected with those people that I like.
And I don't want to miss anything.
I'm addicted to the internet completely.
I'm on it way too much.
But maybe not way too much.
I enjoy my time on the internet.
I have stepped away.
I have gone on vacation and been away from the internet
for five days.
It's refreshing.
You come back and then you realize, I don't need all this
bullshit, really.
But then right away when you get back into it,
you're back in it.
So I think it's healthy once in while, to get away.
And to know that you can get away.
And it's not the end of the world if you miss a few emails
here or there.
If it's a day where I don't have anything to do and I'm
just in the studio, probably 11 hours.
Yeah, I spend about 11 hours a day on the internet or in
front of a screen.
[MUSIC PLAYING]