Watching youtube but you're meditating on the intersection of music, memory, and violence.
Online history/meme enthusiasts have discovered what it was actually like to fight and die in the past.
In an society subsumed in internet culture we have grown used to a new language of symbolism in meme imagery. This is, of course, not a new or interesting observation, anyone with a passing knowledge of “meme-culture” can tell you about Pepe Le Frog, Virgin vs. Chad, whatever, whatever is used to express some sentiment in as short and digestible way as possible. Arguably the most effective is the “Wojak”, an eternally customizable, blank slate avatar that can express every range of emotion. While wojaks are most notorious for settling online disputes, its presence in online history hobbyist forums has given the wojak an odd role in the processing of historical memory and legacies of violence.
On August 10, 2021, a new YouTube channel named “HistoryFeels” was created. It’s purpose according to the description is to make “historical Wojak meme videos”, aka short videos with a wojak representing a historical soldier set to music from the time and jarring audio of gunfire, explosions, and screams meant to create an immersive “historical” experience (every video has the same title format, for example: “The Stars and Stripes Forever but you’re landing on Omaha Beach”). About a year and a half later, the channel has gained 151,000 subscribers and a cumulative 22 million views across 58 videos. The subject matter is both varied and yet very focused (only four videos are not explicitly military related: “Space Oddity but you’re onboard Apollo 13”, “Push it to the Limit but you’re a Miami Vice cop on a drugs bust”, “Where is my mind? but you’re reconsidering the ATF’s actions at Waco” and “Bluegrass Banjo but you’re piloting the Killdozer through Granby”), each video expressing a different point of view for a different time period, giving the viewers the chance to either chat about their interest or reminisce on memories in the comments. A particularly common thread in these ruminations are memories of ancestors who participated in the conflicts, for example, under the video “To Arms in Dixie but you’re leading Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg” you can find comments such as:
“As an Alabama man who’s ancestor died at Gettysburg, this hits hard.” (60 likes)
“My great great grandfather and his brother both died during Pickett’s Charge, the most incredible thing is they actually made it to union lines and overtook the first line after being blown to absolute pieces over a mile of getting shelled.” (202 likes)
“My 4th great-grandfather, Wingate Hall Woodley, fought on the side of the Confederacy as a second lieutenant. He was also a veteran of two wars against the Creek Tribe, and fought in the Mexican-American War. I don’t know much about him, but he seemed like a badass.” (312 likes)
“Had family on both sides at Pickett’s Charge. This goes fuckin hard.” (602 likes)
One thing that might strike an observant viewer are the perspectives included in these videos, or rather the ones which are not included. While the channel goes over events all across history, about half of the videos are set in either World War Two or a 20th/21st century conflict. Within the modern conflicts, half are from the American perspective, and within the World War Two videos about five of the fourteen videos are from the Axis perspective, including two of the channel’s most-viewed videos: “Die Grenzwacht hielt im Osten but you’re surrounded at Stalingrad” (1.2M views) and “Battatoi/抜刀隊 but you’re leading the Banzai charge at Saipan” (1.6M views). Looking at the other eras and events, there is a similar pattern. Half of the pre-modern videos are the perspectives of crusaders. Videos featuring Vietnam or the War on Terror are all from the American perspective. The one video on the Civil War is from the Confederate perspective. Almost half of the World War One videos are from a German perspective. In the channel’s entire catalogue there are only two videos set in Africa: “The Soldier’s Song (Irish Anthem) but you’re under siege at Jadotville” and “Rhodesians Never Die but your patrol car hits a land mine in the bush”. In a channel dedicated to immersing yourself in a historical experience, that experience is mostly western, “white”, and imperial/colonial in nature. However it is not necessarily (some are) a glorification. The wojaks used by the channel are a flavor of the same character: he’s weary, he’s emotionless, jaded, despairing, certainly never happy. He reflects the common trope of the traumatized soldier, participating in the violence but without any sense of glory or honor. At his happiest, the wojak is simply the original, blank slate model, a completely interchangeable cog surrounded by a cacophony of violence and death. If we look closer we can see a specific experience within the larger experience: fighting a losing battle.
Beyond all, this is mainly a sonic experience. The titles of songs begin the title of every video and they act as a foundational emotional core for the video to explore through a variety of means. “California Dreamin’” is lush and evocative of warmth and yearning, but when you’re pinned down by insurgents in Fallujah, its juxtaposition takes that yearning and turns it into a hopeless dream of escaping the hostile warmth of the desert and an attack against the lies of the politicians that got you there. A similar pattern is seen in other videos. “White Rabbit” is used to amplify the surreal and extreme violence of the Vietnam War, the starving French soldiers in Russia sing a story about onions, and the SEALs’ chaotic nightime raid on Bin Laden’s compound is set to “Dancing in the Moonlight”. In all of these, comedic juxtaposition is used for emotional payoff. On the other hand, other songs reinforce the theme of the video, such as “The Last Post”, an elegiac military tune used for the nihilistic end of the First World War, or simply patriotic songs that evoke a great struggle such as “Hava Nagila” for the Yom Kippur War, “To Arms in Dixie” for the Confederate army, or “Rhodesians Never Die” for the Rhodesians who did in fact die.
The other part of this is the intense noise that the viewer is subjected to along with the music. Bullets whizzing by your head, the blades of a helicopter getting closer and closer, the marching of thousands of starving soldiers, the iconic BRRRRRRRR of an A-10 in the distance, etc. In some of the videos these sounds completely override the music, a jarring sensation for sure, if not enjoyable to listen to; in others the author clearly attempts the harmonize the sounds of music with the sounds of battle (“Surfin’ USA but you're a Seawolf skimming the waves in your Huey and wipeout” stands out in this role). No matter the sound mixing, the clash of the sounds of war and the sounds of music create a single product of historical memory: you have a time, a location, a person, and a feeling. A single dream of the past that you can repeat over and over, almost as if you were there (and listening to music for some reason).
Watching these videos evoked strangely familiar feelings, feelings that did not make sense until I remembered visiting the 9/11 Museum at Ground Zero. What begins as essentially an art gallery in a huge underground chamber (the art being twisted pieces of metal or concrete) soon turns into a single hallway exhibit that wraps around and takes the visitor on a minute-by-minute timeline detailing the 9/11 attacks and the events leading up to it. Once you get to the first plane, an audio barrage of explosions, screaming, police-radio, falling debris colors the rest of the exhibit. What is a contemplative, quiet experience becomes loud, abrasive, and certainly immersive. In a review for The Washington Post, the reviewer uses the museum, or “a dark place, where a tape loop of death and destruction is endlessly playing on every television screen in America” to decry the trend of “experiential” exhibits where audiences are meant to undergo a ritual of “subsuming educational material in an emotional narrative, punctuated by over-scaled, emotionally fraught objects, amplified by every architectural, cinematic, literary and religious tool available.” While this ritualized exhibit takes 1-2 hours to complete, and $1 billion to construct, internet audiences can get these same emotional payoffs with only 3 minutes of their time and minimal effort from the creator.
In both of these cases we can see historical memories of violence being constructed and meshed together with our own cultural memory, connecting the links between music and conflict, the foreign and the domestic, which our brain normally separates. What the 9/11 Museum and HistoryFeels have in common is a rejection of reflection and the intrusion of noise into silence. While memorials have traditionally been silent and contemplative places to share in grief and memory, HistoryFeels has packaged every emotional trigger and superficial analysis into short, consumable pieces of memory-as-content, ideally the kind of content where you can remember how cool your ancestors were during times of incredible violence.