Stress-Testing Cam Newton's Memetic Potential

A Cam Newton Cookies Blog

A series of welcome messages:

• Happy New Year. Not much has happened—love that everyone agrees that December doesn’t really exist from a cultural standpoint, we just spam lists and predictions instead. I think it’s fun, things don’t have to always be going on, it’s nice to slow down. New year’s resolution: slow down, buddy.

• Saw Avatar 3, loved Avatar 3…not going to go long on it because there’s a lot there and I’m wary of biting off more than I can chew. I’ll leave it at this: it’s endlessly fascinating to me that the most commercially successful director in history has been dreaming about these gigantic blue cat people for like thirty years, and the exact historical moment at which motion picture technology allowed him to actualize his vision happened to be the same historical moment at which he would feel compelled to give one of his characters the bussin’ haircut. Everything else—whale court, the Na’vi ISIS ketamine subplot (really interesting deep politics lens for anyone willing to carry the torch), teenage Sigourney Weaver kissing the soulful white boy with dreads—pales in comparison to the fact that there’s a water Na’vi who looks like Lil Mosey. What a movie.

  

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• Marty Supreme—awesome. Saw it on Christmas Day with the family, which reminds me of a bone to pick: people on the Internet should stop talking about their parents like noble savages. There’s some intense libidinal investment located in the Twitter/Letterboxd class that likes to imagine they’re too esoteric for their parents to understand them or the media they use to slap together an identity…it’s antisocial. You don’t need to check with Internet strangers about whether your parents can see Marty Supreme or “erm” your way around hanging out with your parents. It’s okay—they’re adults. Anyway, sick movie, love that it implies that Mamba Mentality predates Kobe, which is a Twin Peaks: The Return-level vision of historical evil. Wish I saw Kemba and T-Mac as Harlem Globetrotters but I was having too much fun with the seal. Love the movies.

• Shorting It Was Just An Accident as a final-twenty-minutes merchant.

• Nets defense is randomly elite, Michael Porter Jr. is running an Eddington-style all-star campaign, Egor Dëmin ends up in double-digits as a matter of course, and Nolan Traore is eating his David bars. What gives? Who’s to say. Where I’m at right now is that I believe the Brooklyn Nets can do anything they put their minds to. Situation to monitor: Cam Thomas’s hairstyle. He’s going through something.

• Read a few great books recently, won’t go long here, planning something more substantive. One note I can’t overlook, though: Yasmin Zaher’s excellent The Coin features a blurb from Slavoj Žižek that’s pretty imprecise and prioritizes her identity as a Palestinian author moreso than, in my opinion, any aspects of the marvelous book itself. Begs the question: did Z read the book, or is this a classic vibe-based-never-saw review in line with, like Joker? Which is funnier? Again: who’s to say.

• Main event today on the most important memetic development of the past month:

A brief exploration of the Cam Newton video podcast meme gold-rush

The most important development in the sporting world linguistic domain: someone out there decided, at some point over the last month-and-change, to start watching the Cam Newton video podcast. Already, clarification is needed. I’m talking, of course, about the instantly-iconic edit of Cam Newton’s impassioned rant about Buffalo Bills wide receiver Keon Coleman’s work ethic and entitlement, set to Future’s “Solo." It’s the sort of cultural development that creates an immediately observable seismic imprint, like “Johnny B. Goode” or the Timmy Thick-Harvard experiment tweet. Perhaps due to the fact that it occurred during the barren wintertime, the Cam Newton Cookies video triggered an immediate, gold-rush-style pilfering spree: everyone under the sun has had their Twitter history searched for the keyword “cookies,” people are scouring Newton’s “4th & 1” video podcast for the next big clip, in general it’s a precarious time to mess up as a young person. When Zohran says something inadequately radical about Maduro’s abduction someone is going to quote tweet the press hit with a video of Cam Newton mockingly saying “yeah, I love cookies.” This is how culture moves now: fast.

So, first, some groundwork. “4th & 1” is but one of at least two Cam Newton video podcast properties. Where “4th & 1” appears to center around sports discussion—specifically, if its viral clips are any indication, discussion of young football players’ shortcomings—his other project, “Funky Friday,” merits some discussion as well. “Funky Friday,” an apparently pop culture-centric video podcast, appears to get 6-to-7-digit views on each of its expertly-titled clips. My preliminary scan of Newton’s YouTube account just now reveals genuine innovations in the clickbait-titling sphere.

Don’t need to belabor the point, but, wow. Newton’s social intern is a three-level scorer. From thumbnail to thumbnail, you get everything: the breathless gravity of “Natalie Nunn: Don’t Speak On My Family” (accompanied by the thumbnail’s slight elaboration, “Don’t Ever In Your Life Speak On My Family”), the honeypot-style “Natalie Nunn Explains What A Real Baddie Is,” and the series of utterly brilliant Jemele Hill-centric thumbnails “Did I Fumble Her? Perhaps I Did,” and “They Told Me To Take The Obama Photo Down.” A lot of the grousing about AI in culture misses the point, in my opinion. I’m not scared that artificial intelligence will replace, like, the people who made Marty Supreme—I’m scared that it will replace the person who put such deliberate care into these thumbnails. This is what it’s all about. There also appears to be a recent full-length episode with Jussie Smollett that I’m just not touching here, but go check it out for yourself.

Point being, Cam Newton is working to put shit out there, and by all accounts he appears to be pretty successful at it. Good for him: I love that he dresses like a Tubi supervillain and I think he’s the sort of personality that American culture is richer for having created. And yet—and yet. The philosophy Newton’s team seems to prize for viral growth seems incompatible with what happened on the cookies front. I’m inclined to think of most out-of-left-field-immediate-sensation memes as a psy-op or a savvy marketing campaign. Here, I’m comfortable ruling that out. I sincerely believe that Newton’s team has had nothing, whatsoever, to do with the Keon Coleman video colonizing my brain. The whole thing seems sophisticated beyond their paygrade. What we have, instead, is a non-GMO, grass-fed viral sensation. In this day and age? A treat.

So what, then, makes the video work? The short answer is: basically everything. You’re greeted with a generational Cam Newton outfit: checkered button-down and block-green tie underneath a green bomber jacket and accompanied by a signature Newtonian white bowler hat that looks not unlike a baseball designed by the Zodiac Killer. His initial warning—“folks ain’t going to keep being patient with you”—is lent immediate gravity by virtue of his unbreaking eye contact with the camera. But like good writing, this clip becomes what it is by virtue of sharp editing. The decision, about five seconds in, to omit what the editor presumably and incorrectly believed to be an unnecessary clause, is what begins to make the clip unforgettable. “That playful person,” Newton muses, “that the Buffalo city by storm…in his first interview.” It just works, and it’s worth celebrating. It’s like when you’re playing Jenga and at a certain point the tower starts to resemble a futurist sculpture. It’s a miracle.

The top-line things in this video—the cookies of it all, the dancing, the yellow jacket—don’t do it for me as much. For others, they do. That’s how blockbusters work: people come together to enjoy something because there’s something in it for everyone to enjoy. It’s why I loved One Battle After Another. And like One Battle After Another, the cookies video simultaneously works on multiple levels of simultaneous brilliance. Take, for instance, Newton’s straight-man, relegated more to the background in this clip than he is in the original text, where he’s afforded more equal footing. This dude makes the clip, there’s no meme without him, it just wouldn’t work. The “yeah yeah” to move Newton off the cookies bit, the “come on now” to rile him back up, the coup de grace “I bet you better catch that ball.” Jazz heads talk about session drummers; we get him.

You don’t need me to tell you why this video took off like wildfire. Do you really want someone to make the big-picture societal diagnosis? That we’re all out of grace and patience to give? That the video resonates with a deep-seated ennui with the cutting-edge techno-capitalist promises that kicked this century off and have brought nothing but ruination upon society? That we’re, to borrow from Howard Beale, mad as hell? Come on now. Maybe in 2025—not today. How about this: it works because it’s funny and mesmerizing. If it’s not too late, Cam Newton should be one of the sirens in Nolan’s Odyssey.

I’ve felt that all of the subsequent products of the Newtonian content race have left me flat, but in due time I warm to each and every new edit. The video where Newton practically screams “how you look! will keep you in a jersey. But not for long…” is just good public speaking. Newton is compelling, precise, and strategic; he reserves his most absurd flairs for when he needs them most. They should cut half of law school and force attorneys-in-training to watch this guy instead.

The day will come, of course, when we’re all tired of this shit. JD Vance is going to say “cookies,” or the Nazis behind one of those gray-check government Twitter accounts will use it to justify some insane act of dehumanization. The world’s gross and technological communication is cooked. Blogs, perhaps, are all that we have left. And yet it’s also true that at some point there will be someone out there who steels themself against a grueling but ultimately necessary task by saying, in their head or aloud, “I bet you better start doing your job,” and whether they were being sincere or ironic will in that moment cease to matter, because one way or another they will have said it, and it all would have started because Cam Newton was trying to build a media empire upon the back of Keon Coleman, and to me that’s pretty beautiful.