Are Latin American YouTube stars just ‘vlogging’ a dead horse?

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Crowds at FILBo wait to meet YouTube star German Garmendia
Crowds at FILBo wait to meet YouTube star German Garmendia

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]aiting in the rain to get into book Fort Knox, during the first weekend of the International Book Fair of Bogotá – FILBo — I am surprised by the kilometre-long queue of mostly teenagers.

I then watch intrigued as a ripple of excitement goes down the line and a gaggles of youngsters rush to grab a glimpse of some passing celebrity. An actor? A singer?

No, it turns out that the star causing a stir is no modern-day Colombian equivalent of Mick Jagger but rather a young Chilean who posts daft videos on YouTube and seems to have acquired a following of 30 million viewers. Who would have thought it?

Perhaps not the Bogotá media, much of which rails at the “chaos and furore” caused by German Garmendia, who through the Internet has mobilised thousands of young fans to come to FILBo and buy signed copies of his newly-minted book of thoughts, Chupa el Perro.

His personal presence at the Corferias exhibition grounds caused “a near collapse,” wrote one commentator, perhaps with a touch of envy that the upstart vlogger has massively more pulling power than the rest of the mainstream literati put together.

Spurred by curiosity I go online. What is the secret ingredient that makes superstars out of pasty-faced kids filming home movies in their bedrooms? Certainly not talent, it turns out, but rather a mix of big egos, a certain puppy-eyed photogenicity, bad tattoos, irritating vocal tics, a possible diagnosis of ADHD and an ability to mug, maul, hand-wave and eye-roll to the camera like a dying Kabuki actor.

The resulting video with choppy editing drags out over 15 minutes with an intellectual content that makes Jackie magazine read like Nietzsche.

Sorry, I really do try to “get down with the yoof,” suspend disbelief, empty my brain of intellectual conceit and just sit back and enjoy. But I never make it to the end of a single vlog and am instead trying to reach through my computer screen to slap them in the face and say “stop it now.”

Take 20-year-old Sebastian Villalobos. He has reeled in 3 million subscribers with a flood of videos united by the opening catch-phrase (if it can be called that) of “Hello my name is Sebastian Villalobos” and vapid acts such as rolling pieces of food down his face.

This one lasts a mind-numbing 16 minutes and is followed by another clip of Seb stuffing biscuits in his mouth or spitting out water, all interspersed with beeps, clicks, banal graphics and rapid-fire editing cuts.

To add to the misery there are segments of real music spliced into the soundtrack — but only for a few tantalising seconds before Seb is back preening himself just inches from the camera.

Nicolás Arrieta is marginally more watchable, but only on the basis his videos last just 5 minutes and the irony that the “worst reggaeton” video clips he includes are often better than his own meagre fare which consists of shouting, pulling faces and waving tattooed hands in your face (which, if you think about it, you have to do very badly to be worse than a reggaeton video).

A common thread between top vlogs is slack production values. One video – of two people talking rubbish on a sofa – is out of focus. “We are sorry for the poor quality, the camera was out of focus, kisssssses,” the vloggers write on the caption.

I mean, did it never occur to them to re-record it in focus? Or were they worried they could never recapture the same rubbish again?

There is a glimmer of hope when I look at top female vlogger Paulina Galindo with Pau Tips, which opens with some nice graphics. The name suggests some actually useful videos.

My hopes are dashed though on the first vlog called “What Paulina has in her bag.” Though better presented than the previous vloggers, Paulina wastes 12 minutes of our life showing us the backpack, describing what it looks like (perhaps for the visually impaired, though I doubt she thought of that), telling us how chevere it is (a recurring word throughout the video) then showing and telling us the contents which are her phone, house keys, a bottle of water, make-up, her college books, her computer and “a pen in case I need a pen because people sometimes need a pen and they don’t have a pen but I have a pen…”

At six minutes in, Paulina is divulging the contents of her make-up kit, and at eight minutes it is the pencil case with, you guessed it, pencils and more pens, a rubber, some corrector fluid and a calculator.

The tip, it turns out (at 11 minutes in) is the not to mix your lunch box with your college books. Ba-boom.

But with the next vlogger on the list – Yuya – I am almost yearning for Pau’s Tips, underwhelming as they are but at least delivered with a modicum of constraint.

Yuya, by contrast, presents her health and beauty insights with wild-eyed verve and nervy hair-flick seemingly modeled on Heath Ledger’s Joker. On the plus side she does concoct her own beauty treatments such as bronzing cream made of moisturizer and cocoa powder, though by my calculation it is just as cheap to buy bronzer in the shop and less likely to make milo of the swimming pool.

After two hours of vloggers I am mentally frazzled. Watching tattooed adults use the F-word but behave like six-year-olds is somewhat unsettling, as is the constant intrusion of personal space combined with casual voyeurism and cloying fake innocence.

Pau Tips vlogs are fronted by ads for whisky. Does Paulina really believe just teenage girls watch her online going-to-bed routine?

So to be honest I still do not “get it.” I have a cup of tea to calm down and think it out. Maybe vlogging is not supposed to be high art or a grand stage, rather just an escape to reality, albeit a slightly alternate reality where people roll food down their faces, review the contents of each other’s bags, and wear chocolate skin cream.

And looking back, our own parents never really “got it” when we put on ripped clothes and jumped up and down to the Sex Pistols. I guess every generation comes up with something new to baffle the old. Vlogging sure baffles me.

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