{"id":352,"date":"2020-11-20T20:34:00","date_gmt":"2020-11-20T20:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gcolemanmn.wordpress.com\/?p=352"},"modified":"2023-08-25T11:19:48","modified_gmt":"2023-08-25T11:19:48","slug":"i-love-you-no-edit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/2020\/11\/20\/i-love-you-no-edit\/","title":{"rendered":"I Love You No Edit"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Originally published as part of the Digestable<\/a> newsletter<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A couple of weeks ago\u00a0Lee Dawson<\/a>\u00a0came out with the newest edition of his RuCaps series. These videos, hosted on Dailymotion like all quality content, are at their essence a remixed retelling of episodes of RuPaul\u2019s Drag Race.\u00a0\u00a0Drag Race, as many of you know, is a competition reality show where drag icon and\u00a0known fracker<\/a>\u00a0RuPaul Charles puts 12 or so drag queens through a series of challenges to decide the \u201cnext drag superstar.\u201d Lee Dawson\u2019s RuCaps are a labor of love, they often come out long after the corresponding episode has aired (5 months for the most recent episode) and often stretch beyond 20 minutes, almost half the length of the actual episode.\u00a0\u00a0Despite these apparent hangups, myself and many others (I swear it isn\u2019t just me) adore RuCaps, celebrating each new video and watching older episodes over and over.\u00a0\u00a0So what is the big deal and why do people care?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part of the reason Lee Dawson\u2019s videos are so excellent (and so long) is that there is so much content to use.\u00a0\u00a0Drag Race has 12 seasons, with five additional seasons of Drag Race All Stars and now Drag Race UK and Drag Race Canada plus a behind the scenes \u201cUntucked!\u201d episode for every normal episode of the show.\u00a0\u00a0That\u2019s over 200 episodes (not counting Untucked!) and over 150 queens.\u00a0\u00a0Lee mashes all of this content together with memes, content from Drag Race reaction videos, and other bits of the queer twitterverse.\u00a0\u00a0The result is something that rewards knowledge of the source material but is also so wacky and wild that it’s enjoyable even without having watched a single episode of the real show.\u00a0\u00a0A good way to capture this is by showing how Lee edits the workroom.\u00a0\u00a0Instead of pictures of RuPaul, Lee Dawson hangs various stills of content in the workroom\u2019s frames as a collection of Easter eggs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In the left image we have a gun meme of\u00a0@Chasiecon<\/a>\u00a0who often does voice overs in RuCaps, a memed still from Gaga\u2019s Vegas residency, and a screengrab of Drag Race guest judge Ross Matthew\u2019s Instagram live feed where someone has commented \u201cyou\u2019re gay,\u201d\u00a0\u00a0AND the skeleton on the ground which, who knows why that\u2019s there but I love it.\u00a0\u00a0Another example of Lee Dawson\u2019s densely layered style is the Lip Sync from the\u00a0newest video<\/a>\u00a0(it starts around 16:35 if you want to skip ahead).\u00a0\u00a0In the first 20 seconds you have\u00a0Crystal Methyd<\/a> singing\u00a0Sour Candy<\/a>,\u00a0Mayhem Miller\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0eye popping and much memed performance, and audio of\u00a0this infamous interview with Pearl<\/a>\u00a0(source material from around the 4 minute mark) all layered on the lip sync.\u00a0\u00a0And it works. It\u2019s funny, it\u2019s catchy, it\u2019s better than the real thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RuCaps are part of an internet video genre known as \u201cedits,\u201d videos where existing content, often reality TV, is cut, spliced, and filtered to heighten the absurdity within the source material and draw ridiculous new narrative lines.\u00a0\u00a0Edits are in many ways the great grandchildren of early absurd internet video content like\u00a0asdfmovie<\/a>\u00a0and creations from\u00a0MondoMedia<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0FilmCow<\/a>\u00a0whose DIY quality, incoherent plotlines, and self-referential humor took hold of the collective consciousness of high schoolers like myself in the late aughts. Equally important in the taxonomy of the edit are reaction videos, an expansive genre where some person or group of people reacts to, discusses, or reviews literally anything.\u00a0\u00a0Drag Race has its own ecosystem of reaction content from official series like\u00a0Fashion Photo Ruview<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0The Pit Stop<\/a>\u00a0to shows by\u00a0Nina Bo\u2019nina Brown<\/a>,\u00a0Katya<\/a>,\u00a0Miz Cracker<\/a>\u00a0and others.\u00a0\u00a0Reactions are popular because they allow people to experience things secondhand that they may not be able to experience themselves, allow folks to see their own reactions reflected in another person, and create a shared cultural experience, something that is often missing from our increasingly streamed media ecosystem.\u00a0\u00a0Edits from\u00a0ryxn<\/a>,\u00a0and\u00a0MuchDank<\/a>, and vernonator6497<\/a>\u00a0allow a piece of content to critique itself and make the editor’s reaction known through the way they splice and filter the source material.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One truly stellar edit I want to point out are the Ariana Grande centered video series created by\u00a0Johnny Neff<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0Using only screen recorded Photoshop and clips of pop song lyrics, Johnny draws absurd narratives of Ari and other pop stars\u00a0solving mysteries<\/a>, going down\u00a0Niagra Falls<\/a>, and working at\u00a0McDonalds<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0The characters Ariana and others play sometimes make reference to their public selves but are mostly so ridiculous that the character in the edit is all but divorced from any real life controversies, rivalries, and other celebrity trappings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a reason why reality TV is often the source material for an edit. Since the drama and plot in reality TV already comes from splicing together different pieces of dialogue and reactions it follows that content creators would experiment with the form to see how strange and convoluted these fabricated storylines can get.\u00a0\u00a0Drag itself being a simulation and parody of gender presentation and Drag Race being a parody of shows like America\u2019s Next Top Model only adds to the layers of construction and simulation that can be packed into an edit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This, I think is why Lee Dawson\u2019s RuCaps are important.\u00a0\u00a0There\u2019s still a dearth of widely available queer content and Drag Race is far from perfect.\u00a0\u00a0In addition to being a\u00a0de-facto methane tycoon<\/a>, he and the shows other producers also consistently makes problematic statement and decisions when it comes to Black and POC queens on the show as well as trans people and also\u2026. where are the drag kings hello? The RuCaps make use of the source material of the show and pieces of the queer internet lexicon to create an entirely new show that isn\u2019t held back by copyright law or executive network power structures \u2013 a show that is, in other words, worth watching.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally published as part of the Digestable newsletter A couple of weeks ago\u00a0Lee Dawson\u00a0came out with the newest edition of his RuCaps series. These videos, hosted on Dailymotion like all quality content, are at their essence a remixed retelling of episodes of RuPaul\u2019s Drag Race.\u00a0\u00a0Drag Race, as many of you know, is a competition reality… Continue reading I Love You No Edit<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[22,26],"class_list":["post-352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digestable","tag-culture","tag-queer","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=352"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":747,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352\/revisions\/747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}