Climbing Cringe Mountain
Term 1: Fame Labyrinth; Module 2
Thesis: When seeking to make good content or enter the households of your desired audience, it is essential to climb “cringe mountain.” The tools necessary for the ascent can change for each person, but the journey will always be the same if you want lasting success.
There’s Always Gonna Be Another Mountain
In a recent episode of Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang1, Joanna “JoJo” Levesque discussed the choices she made in her early teens when it came to her career (which she writes more extensively about in her memoir, Over the Influence, referenced in the below transcript). The pair asked JoJo about making music today in comparison to when she was a teenager - she had her first hit at the age of twelve.
JoJo: I’m like embarrassed that I like did songs that I didn’t love, but I understood why I trusted… executives that were like ‘this is gonna be a hit,’ and I was like, I just think I’m supposed to have more hits, so I’m just going to do what you tell me to do.
Rogers: Well the interesting thing though…[The executives] happened to be right the first time…For “Leave (Get Out),” in the book you discuss how you first heard “Leave (Get Out)” even as a twelve-year-old and you’re like, ‘this doesn’t feel like me and I don’t get it,’ and then you record it, you put your thing on, it literally immediately pops off. So then it’s… it becomes a core belief. These people do know best.
JoJo’s first two hits (“Leave (Get Out)” and “Too Little, Too Late”) were the product of two things: undeniable talent and a team. However, when the artist’s voice and integrity becomes lost in the shuffle, the audience will lose their interest. JoJo began to blindly follow management because of the initial success of these first two songs. What followed is a career that may have been reduced from what it could have been. “Leave (Get Out)” and “Too Little, Too Late” are often the only songs you have on your nostalgia playlists. In a world where we have unlimited access to music streaming libraries and the radio plays nearly everything under the sun, it is hard to be an artist without fighting for your vision and trusting your instincts.
JoJo didn’t go through the process Rogers and Yang call, “Climbing Cringe Mountain.” With two hits quickly under her belt, the audience asked “what’s next?” and didn’t like the answer. Now, I (selfishly) hope they listen when Jojo releases her next round of music, one that she seems confident will ring truer to her as an artist.
Always Gonna Be an Uphill Battle
When speaking about the then recent nomination of Kamala Harris as the Democratic Nominee, Rogers said of the response to her campaign on the July 24th episode of Las Culturistas:
“You have to sometimes climb up a huge hill of cringe and once you can scale that hill which is you know, it might be your judgment on yourself, it might be your judgment on what you’re doing, it might be everyone saying what you’re doing is cringe, on the other end there is… you slide down into happiness and Nirvana.”
To which Yang responded, “I know about working through cringe, climbing a cringe mountain.”
JoJo may not have climbed cringe mountain, but you certainly know other celebrities who have. There’s Dua “Go Girl, Give Us Nothing” Lipa and her pencil sharpener twist at the bottom of the mountain, and at the top is pop star Dua Lipa with her mesmerizing Houdini dance. Still sinking her ice axe into the facade of mortification Everest is the pink-haired Ashley Frangipane and waiting for her at the top is Halsey rehearsing for the VMAs. Persistence is key to success, but so is trial and error. Sometimes, as in the case of Dua Lipa, your audience will let you know where you have erred.
It Ain’t About How Fast I Get There
I have a rotation of innocuous questions to ask at dinner parties or on a long road trip. One of these questions goes along the lines of: would you rather post something on TikTok and have it go viral, or, post something and have it flop but have people you know see it?
The answers vary a bit, but the majority of people want the quick fame or success of the first option. How do you follow that first video though? Many times it’s with a cheeky “I did not expect this to go viral!” or a further unpacking of the short clip in what is colloquially referred to as a “story time.” But rarely does true success come from a fifteen second video. While some manage to make lightning strike the same place twice, others struggle to keep an audience engaged. Oddly, the chance for success is often larger in the latter and less desirable option: fail many times to succeed eventually (hopefully) in equal measure.
But what is it that decides if your climb to success is in the end, well, successful at all? Is it timing and luck? Discomfort and error? Consistency and discoverability? I argue it's a little of all the above, paired with the maximum threshold of perceived authenticity (because who is ever one-hundred-percent honest on the internet?).
No, I’m Not Breaking
Authenticity is at the heart of every success story online. It is important to give your audience credit. Allow them to be the Holden Caulfields of the world, parsing through the phonies until they find someone they deem honest in their content. This can look like anything these days. It could be someone sharing an embarrassing story that finds the viewer wondering if they’ve ever had an original experience. It might be someone crying over something that we want to send support toward. It can be as simple as an excellent storyteller, someone who begins to feel like your friend FaceTiming you as they unwind their tale.
Authenticity paired with a team can be lethal. No, it didn’t necessarily work in the case of Jojo, but it did help Amber Young, the pop star in Isabel Banta’s debut novel, Honey, stand out in a sea of young hopefuls.
Amber had to climb a cringe mountain of failed girl groups, embarrassing songs, and outfits she’d never wear. Her lifejacket was plucked up by manager Sonny out of the wreckage of the failed girl group ship she may have otherwise gone down with, but her first music video was a cringe fest. Her first album? A complete flop. But staying true to your vision and what you want can get you places if you can survive the growing pains and failures it took to get there. To fail in the public eye can be extraordinarily rewarding in the end – even if it maybe robs you of some of that authenticity along the way.
“I wasn’t good enough—what a mortifying thing to discover about yourself.” - Isabel Banta, Honey
I Can Almost See It
It’s a true climb up the aforementioned cringe mountain. Audiences don’t often see, or when they do - appreciate, the persistence and discomfort it takes to become the person you see multiple times on your feeds and timelines. But after trial and error, the cringe the collective may feel toward a person can dissipate when they reach the top. Any leftover wincing you do when someone like Addison Rae starts getting brand deals might be yours alone now. She certainly feels the weight of your comments less when her management emails her the next offer.
This summer saw the rise of the “Apple” dance on TikTok. It’s the winning combo of virality: easy to do movements paired with a song popular enough to gain traction and become a hit in the process. The dance was created by TikToker and actress Kelley Heyer, who posted the first iteration on June 16th, 2024 - seven days after the release of “brat.” The dance took off quickly, with celebrities from Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones to Kerry Washington making videos to the song. Two days after the dance was posted, “Apple” hit the global charts, and it’s no question that Heyer’s dance helped Charli XCX’s intergenerational trauma bop make this leap up in popularity (peaking at #8).
But when Heyer took to TikTok to ask if a brand would be willing to help send her to the MTV VMAs, she wasn’t greeted with unanimous support. “Apple” was nominated for best trending video and Heyer wanted to be there to celebrate. After all, she had helped raise excitement for the song. One commenter disagreed, writing on a now private video, “I don’t think u deserve the fame after your dance went viral….” Heyer used this comment to create a response video, stating:
“You know things are working when people think you’ve just popped out of nowhere…And then one day someone on the internet will come across you and they’ve only seen the one thing that suddenly you’re very known for, and they’ll never see or never know all the other stuff I’ve done. And that’s just the way it is.”
Heyer lists all the roles she had to take on to help further her success, positions like creative director and manager. And it’s true. Heyer, an actress, has been a creator on the app since at least 2022 (the date of her first video). While she doesn’t have many videos prior to the creation of her “Apple” dance, Heyer has stated that she has privatized videos to remind herself that “I have control over my page.” So while there aren't a lot of very obvious behind-the-scenes examples to cite, it doesn’t mean that Heyer hasn’t been quietly scaling the mountain for longer than her audience may realize.
You’ll Never Reach It
But what happens if the mountain you’ve climbed is as hollow and fake as the Matterhorn at Disneyland? When the sherpa you follow is just as unqualified as you? Danni Sanders learned this the hard way in the 2022 film, Not Okay.
Danni lies for a little intrigue and recognition from her crush (who among us might not lie for Dylan O’Brien though?). She posts photoshopped images of her in Paris from her Brooklyn apartment, maintaining a false reality that she is writing in France. However, when Paris is targeted by terrorist attacks, Danni’s lies are forced to grow beyond anything she could have imagined. She hangs onto the edge of the cliff with all she can, but the weight of the front is too much. This is where authenticity matters just as much as delivery and persistence. If you let down your audience, it can be hard to win them back.
Gotta Keep My Head Held High
Ultimately it is up to each person how much of themselves they can offer up to the public with no discernable reward. There are creators that come across my page intermittently that I have never seen grow to the levels of the top influencers or artists but keep going. There are some (cough cough, a certain redhead) who seem to know no bounds of personal unraveling in hopes of professional gains. And in the shadows, I know there are creators about to strike it big or fall by the wayside without my ever knowing their name.
But that’s the allure, surely. The idea that a little bit of time putting yourself on the internet could land you somewhere you might not have imagined possible.
Study Questions
Theorize the essentials for your trek up Cringe Mountain, what’s in your cringe kit? Skin as thick as Britney’s glitter suit? An Alix Earle ring light? Evaluate the effectiveness of your items for a successful climb. And do you think those who never make it to the summit are missing something essential?
Critically assess at which point on the climb up Cringe Mountain one must face the mortifying reality that they’ll never get an Hermes bracelet from a Tarte PR box and they’ll have to buy everything themselves like a plebian. Is it before or after you run out of water?
Evaluate the reigning monarch of “Cringe Mountain,” scaling it with grace? And who’s forever stuck on the switchbacks, blisters from their Adidas Sambas, who should just call an Uber down? Analyze their intersection.
Rogers, Matt, host; Yang, Bowen, host. “Gas Me Up, Lil Bro! (w/ Joanna “JoJo” Levesque).” Las Culturistas, Spotify, September 11th, 2024.
I’ve been thinking about the premise of “cringe mountain” for months! Thank you for putting it on my heart.