We've all seen this one: The Vine of Jay Z's head pressed against performance artist Marina Abramović, the two of them circling each other in the Pace Gallery. It is a mind-wiping image, the kind of thing you can gape at glassy-eyed for half an hour and still have made no sense of. I have already watched it far more times than I will ever listen to the song "Picasso Baby". The awkwardness, the intensity, the locked eyes: It made me think of the dance sequence between John Travolta and Kelly Preston in The Experts.
It is also the most perfect Vine video I've ever seen: Just Jay Z and Marina, two rotating ballerinas in a children's music box. The Vine clips of the Pace Gallery event were the only window that we, the 99 percent of the populace, would ever have into the moment, and they felt like the only way to absorb the unstable energy of the room. The woman in the green dress on the scooter, the kid who almost fist-pounds Jay before changing his mind; Jay sitting next to a guy with a ZZ Top beard, politely watching a ballerina? How else to contend with images like this than in brief, dream-like flashes?
The Jay Z Vines were a pretty big moment for Vine, which is facing a consumer-choice moment: Instagram has introduced their own cheap, looping video software-- theirs goes up to fifteen. Instagram clips, so far, have a completely different feel than Vines, and it will be interesting to see which way the ensuing awareness war goes. I am not a credible source for horse-race predictions, but Vine seems to have saturated my corner of the big Internet cubicle, as well as the lives of bored American teenagers. Once you have those two demographics, it seems like you've more or less already won.
Rap, for its part, seems to have loudly chosen Vine: Schoolboy Q posted multiple Vines recently, all called "Fuck Instagram": "I don't need 15 seconds, baby! Just give ya boy six", he declares in one. And I agree. A 15-second clip just doesn't loop in the yammering, context-frying way that a six-second clip does. Something about those hard cuts seem to appeal to rappers– and so far the space is crawling with them, competing to have the best accounts.
Schoolboy Q is one of the funniest and most prolific Vine-ers: He posts videos constantly, and they usually cram the maximum amount of jump cuts that can fit within six seconds. They are jagged and unpredictable the same way his yelping, ticcy rapping is:
RiFF RAFF is another high-volume Vine user, and , as several before me have noted, they are almost certainly a better vehicle for his nonsensical, cheap absurdism than actual rap music:
Cam'ron has done great things-- see this, er, series of short films he made with his fiancé. The gregarious, hilarious Chicago producer Young Chop posts one every few minutes and started his account with dozens of goofy, often-devastatingly-accurate impersonations of other rappers.
Rap had a similarly instantly love affair with ringtone: Both media circled around a similar obsession with the tiniest bits of communication, the smallest possible snippet. If there is a cheap, fast, and catchy way for rap music to worm its way into your cortex-- it's probably already there.
