Everything at That Frequency

The summer of 2010 was the summer of the Double Rainbow—that YouTube video of a man in Yosemite sobbing with joy at two overlapping rainbows, so overwhelmed by what he was seeing that he could barely form sentences. Someone auto-tuned his sobs into a song. I played it more than I should have. That specific flavor of unhinged, weeping sincerity felt like the accurate register for the season.

Everything that July was running at that frequency. Kristen Stewart was photographed approximately nine hundred times with the exact same expression on her face regardless of context—premieres, airport arrivals, apparently someone trying to tell her a joke—and the expression never moved. It was hypnotic in a way I couldn’t explain and couldn’t stop thinking about. Meanwhile Lindsay Lohan was in some fresh disaster every other day, the kind of tabloid spiral that made you feel briefly, guiltily grateful for your own obscurity.

The big cultural news was that Beavis and Butt-Head was coming back—Mike Judge had thirty new episodes in production. Some returns feel like desecrations. This one felt earned. I was unreasonably excited about it in a way that probably said something unflattering about the state of my cultural diet that summer.

There were Japanese fashion magazines being scanned and uploaded across obscure corners of the internet, whole archived issues, the Olsen twins turning up in them with a frequency that suggested they’d conquered every market on the planet simultaneously. I downloaded several. Couldn’t read any of them. Didn’t matter.

The song the whole summer kept orbiting, the one that reorganized everything around itself, was Bang Bang Bang by Mark Ronson & The Business Intl. I played it until I couldn’t hear it anymore and then played it again. That’s the thing about a certain kind of perfect summer song—it doesn’t stop being good just because you’ve broken it.