To understand why a video of a man skateboarding along the smooth byways of Idaho Falls, drinking cran-raspberry juice, lip syncing to Fleetwood Mac has gone viral, we must first understand, the elusive Whole Mood.
If you were to search the hashtag #wholemood on instagram at say, around noon on a Sunday in December 2020, you would find 23,700 posts, most by women, using the hashtag #wholemood, for the most part, aspirationally.
That is: most who think they’re delivering a whole mood, are in fact just delivering a selfie in an outfit.
Maybe it has something to do with the forced nature of most selfies that keeps the vast majority of self-proclaimed #wholemood posts from living up to their hasthag.
If that’s the case, what does it take to achieve Whole Mood? What makes one’s Whole when one is a Mood? What elements take a scene that is, at best, part of a mood, and expand it until it is worthy of the title of Whole?
Sticking your tongue our and giving us the finger is a Whole Mood, one that Limp Bizkit wore out over the matter of a couple months in the summer of 1999.
Urban Dictionary actually does a pretty good job at summing it up, “when a (facial) expression, picture, or mannerism sums up your entire life at the moment” and then use this Wolf of Wall Strett clip with the caption “(forced laughter)”.
They are correct. This gif of DiCaprio is a successful Whole Mood, the last words in that Urban Dictionary definition are key: at the moment.
A Whole Mood is a moment in time, a single (though sometimes complex) emotion, perfectly captured on film (moving or still). But it’s more than just any moment in time.
Within the DiCaprio gif “Forced Laughter”, we see all the elements needed to achieve Whole Mood:
- A person with a very distinct look.
- A facial expression, or reaction, that perfectly sums up an emotion.
- A scene with high production value goes a long way (in this case, a marina with million dollar yachts).
You can’t just have someone politely smiling on a red carpet. In that scenario you have high production value and a distinct look, without the distinct emotion we can identify with.
Example: these pictures of Taylor Swift are not Whole Mood.
If this first photo was a mood it would just be something like, “doll woman looks forward blankly”.
As a white, straight male whose gender matches his sex at birth, I am unqualified to make my next statement but: Rihanna, queen of many things, feels like the queen of the Whole Mood.
This is a sentiment I am inspired to convey, most likely, because of this tweet from PRADAXBBY
rihanna is a whole mood this summer pic.twitter.com/2kCAHAWsp0
— ✨ (@PRADAXBBY) May 4, 2019
Of all the pictures on this tweet, the “Drinking While Snorkeling Look” is the most quintessential Whole Mood.
Notice that, yes Rihanna is giving us the finger – a shortcut to mood used by many – but notice the other elements of Whole Mood that are present: high production value with the snorkeling gear, tattoos, rings, and (of course) the being Rihanna part, all of this coupled with a facial expression that is expressive and, importantly, natural, unforced.
This isn’t a housewife in her kitchen taking a picture of herself with her middle finger up trying to look edgy.
This is Rihanna in a true moment of not-giving-a-fuckness, probably flicking off the paparazzi who are intruding on her vacation, taking invasive pictures they will undoubtedly be rewarded handsomely for.
And then of course you have:
Granted, this is an intentional photo shoot for Harper’s Bazaar.
But the professionals involved in this picture know how to create a Whole Mood, how to make an entirely staged scene feel authentic, artistic enough to hide its artistry.
In Rihanna Takes Out The Trash (a title I have given it), we see the ultimate power of Whole Mood: the ability to make the real, surreal, to create a cinematic moment out of real life, and vice versa.
What does all of this have to do with Fleetwood Mac?
The Virality of doggface208
Fleetwood Mac has been popping up in unexpected ways in the last couple years.
In 2018, The Washington Post wrote about the viral video that put “Dreams” back on the charts.
In early March, a popular Instagram fan page for the Golden Girls, @_forevergolden, posted a short clip of the squad entering the college’s Jack Spinks Stadium before a game and dancing to the 1993 R&B hit “Stay.”
It was an old clip, from the team’s opening game in September, but a pseudonymous meme-maker on Twitter found the footage about a week later, layered the Fleetwood Mac song “Dreams” over the footage of the women dancing, with a jokey caption about people who say that the 1970s rock band’s music is so boring that “you can’t even dance to it.”
Source
Here’s a clip of the dance troop Golden Girls so we’re not just referencing them without credit.
They are, by the way, a Whole Mood in and of themselves.
In this year, 2020, better known as The End of The Before Times, Moses Sumney’s version of “Go Your Own Way” is on Xfinity Mobile’s currently running TV spot.
Props to his Jim James-esque approach for making one of the most insufferably overplayed songs in all of American Boomerism sound fresh.
But the media that set 2020 on fire, the video that took Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” to the level of Whole Mood for the second time in 2 years, is @doggface208‘s video of himself, phone in hand, gliding along some off-ramp on a skateboard, drinking cran-raspberry juice and, when the lyrics hit, “It’s only right that you should/ Play the way you feel it” lip syncing along, Andy Kauffman like, for a single sentence.
Below, Inside Edition talks to Nathan Apodaca (doggface208) whose video (originally viral on TikTok) inspired this article and, arguably, cemented the Fleetwood Mac come back trend with, as he says, “over 2.3 million views in 7 hours”.
Why did this video go viral?
First, because the 20-some second video is a Whole Mood, befitting all the criteria outlined above:
- You have production value in what is basically a smooth tracking shot along a highway.
- You have a person with a distinct look. Apodaca has a shaved head which reveals a feather tattoo that appears to reference Native American or Native Mexican culture. He is inexplicably drinking a very specific juice straight from the bottle.
- You have a scene that sums up a feeling.
That last point – the feeling being summed up – is what takes a bit of an investigation to describe.
The Generations That The Fleet Has Reached
No one wanted to be in Fleetwood Mac less than Stevie Nicks.
At least, if any of the other members wanted out (and if the rumors of Rumours are to be believed, they all did), they didn’t do it the way Nicks did: by pestering Tom Petty to let her into The Heartbreakers. (Petty’s response? “There’s no girls in The Heartbreakers”)
Multiple times in the the band-documentary-to-end-all-band-documentaries Runnin’ Down a Dream Nicks talks about how she liked The Heartbreakers music more than her own.
She needn’t have been so dismissive.
What Fleetwood Mac did so successfully can be understood by their re-rise to semi-prominence in the late 2010’s. A band with the rhythm section of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, arguably the smoothest white guy duo in the world of pop rock, that sets a perfect left-of-center stage for Stevie Nick’s somber, seductive vocals (themselves both an empty cathedral and capable of filling one) has a broader appeal than I think most of us think.
Boomers
2020 is a time when Boomers are in their golden years.
Now, Boomers never got tired of listening to the music of their generation: Classic Rock stations in my youth didn’t know a Fleetwood single they didn’t like.
So of course Boomers would welcome back the Mac at any time, easy explanation.
But, it does mean that in the next 20 years, this moment in time we’re experiencing couldn’t exist the way we’re experiencing it today: with the original generation alongside its descendants, the people that grew up listening to Fleetwood Mac rehearing it for the first time with the people they forced to grow up listening to Fleetwood Mac.
Generation X
Now, I can’t speak for Generation X, but Nathan Hubbard seemed to sum up that generation’s embrace of music you wouldn’t expect them to embrace. when he spoke with Bill Simmons in August about Taylor Swift’s Folklore.
But this record, she’s basically made like a dad indie rock album and everybody’s embracing her because there’s plenty of space on dad indie Rock Island. Come on in. The water’s warm like, oh, my God, Taylor, you actually obsess over The National and Pony?
Nathan Hubbard, on The Bill Simmons Podcast in August
What Hubbard describes is what I’ve been thinking of as the Bon Iver On Twisted Dark Fantasy Effect for the last decade.
Kanye’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is inarguably a classic: maximalism perfected, it was everything its title said it was. Kanye gave himself to us on that record, at the cost perhaps, of never being able to get it back.
But my reaction at the time – to the universal acclaim, to the 10.0 in Pitchfork – was that Bon Iver’s inclusion on the record was the straw that made the record a media darling, the final, subtle finger on the scale.
MBTDF was loved by everyone, including the people who are paid to write about music: educated, upper middle class white men aged 20s-40s.
Dad Indie Rock Island is a good enough of a name for this group of aged hipsters, certainly one less wordy than Guys Who Liked My Beautiful Twisted Dark Fantasy More Than They Ever Would Have If Justin Vernon Hadn’t Been Featured On It.
The point is: white guys love when other people like things we think of as our own, white guy stuff.
Within the warm waters and open arms of Dad Indie Rock Island (which is sounding more and more Epstein-like the more I write it) lies a cultural assumption – dangerous as they come in 2020: White guys think people who look certain ways won’t like the things they think of as White guy things, even if they never say or realize that they think of those things as White guy things.
What attracts so many like myself to Cran-Raspberry Dreams (a title I have given it)? An older man who appears to have Hispanic or Native American ancestry, or both, enjoying not only skateboarding (a my thing), but Fleetwood Mac (a super my thing).
But what we White guys miss about Fleetwood Mac when we think of Fleetwood Mac as a very us thing, is all the things about Fleetwood Mac that make them universally appealing.
What we on Dad Indie Rock Island miss by thinking Nathan Apodaca wouldn’t lip sync to Fleetwood Mac is what all stereotypes blind their holders to: the truth.
In this case, the truth illuminated is the rhythm section of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie being slick as hell.
Generation Z like Fleetwod Mac because….?
No one knows why Gen Z does anything.
They made TikTok and Jake Paul popular and now we all have to live with it.
I’m being facetious because I don’t feel qualified to speak for the youngest Millenials and all members of Gen Z.
That said, can what attracts someone to Khalid, attract them to Fleetwood Mac?
Nicks’ mumbled fray on the opening verse of “Dreams” (or the deathly, “she is dancing…away…from you now” on “Gypsy”) aches in ways conscious and sub, we float in and out of meaning as she slides between intelligibility and un.
That spaced out, wavy, sometimes muttering vocal over a grounded, driving drum beat is what Khalid does to the Nth. And Mick+McVie is as close as 70s rock is every going to come to a quantized drum machine.
Listening to the opening riff on “Little Lies” and tell me that’s not a Khalid sample waiting to happen.
Millenials
So why do elder millenials like Fleetwood Mac?
We white ones grew up in the households of a generation who grew up with Fleetwood Mac: we lived through a lot of nostalgic replays.
But honestly I don’t think I really appreciated Fleetwood Mac until my 30s. (Or maybe, there was a side of Fleetwood Mac I was shown by a friend a while back, a side of their music I lost along with the bandmates, and large parts of myself, to my 20s, a side I found when I recovered from my personal-Me Decade).
By my 30s I had enough distance from my youth, from the relentless spins “Don’t Stop” got the first 18 years of my life, to discover the Mac on my own.
And it isn’t until your 30s that you want music that’s both laid back and uptempo, that grooves while it chills you out, that talks about complicated relationships with something more than a pop sound bite (though Fleetwood Mac certainly has their fair share).
It wasn’t until my 30s that I wanted to go to parties where I could hear my friends talk.
In my 20s we all just yelled over speakers that damaged our hearing, and wondered why we didn’t form more lasting relationships.
The 4 Generations and The 4 Macs
Fleetwood Mac is diverse enough to stick in the ears of little kids with their pop-forward stuff, and sneak its way into the worn out hearts of people their parents ages with its more subtle hits, the ones that linger for years.
There are 4 types of Fleetwood Mac songs, a single song of theirs could contain multiple types, but those are:
- Edgy-ish Riffs Mac. Think “Seventeen”, “The Chain”, or the opening to “Rhiannon”. Basically, in a statement that makes more sense than it should, “Edgy-ish Fleetwood Mac is like if Light Rock did Hard Rock”.
- Christine and Buckingham Mac. Think flowery acoustic guitars and pop choruses, this is the Fleetwood Mac I thought of when I thought of Fleetwood Mac growing up: “Say You Love Me”, “Go Your Own Way” and “Don’t Stop”.
- Abba-Inspired Mac. “Everywhere” or the chorus on “You Make Loving Fun”, where the band shows its polish.
- Finally, the Back Beat Mac, the Mick and McVie Mac. This is the side that appeals to the 30-something me, and to, I can only assume, the currently aged Generation Z. This is your “Gypsy”, your “Dreams”, the intro and verses to “You Make Loving Fun”. It’s sparse, cool, and perfectly proportioned.
- Honorable mention for “Landslide” which exists in none of the other categories and is actually its own whole thing.
The feeling that the viral video of a man lip syncing to Fleetwood Mac imbued, in a year of divisive tumult, at the end of decade of divisive tumult, was freedom and inclusion.
Freedom: we’ve all been trapped in our houses and apartments so long it looks amazing to see someone out there, carefee and loving life, making a music video of themselves drinking juice and skateboarding through the spacious American West.
And the Fleetwood Mac part? Inclusion. It was exciting as a white guy on Dad Island to see a person who looks like Apodaca sing a song I grew up with. But more importantly, we all got to have a fun moment together with a band that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.
Epilogue: Stereotypes and Living With Band Mates
And so, if stereotypes blind us to the truth, it helps to have people in your life who look different than you and have a different background.
Dontrell Hickbottom was someone who helped me understand the truths in music.
We were in a band together for a good portion of our 20s, even living together, as a band, for 2 straight years.
If you want to know what it’s like to be in a 5 way marriage with a bunch of dudes, start a band and live with them.
Outside of the gigs and the procrastinated practice sessions, one of my favorite things about being in a band – and perhaps its most lasting impact on my life – were the conversations we had about music, the documentaries or the concert films we watched together.
I was able to see music from their perspectives, and we all shared a profound respect for musicianship.
None moreso perhaps than Trell.
He was not only a metronome on the kit (a metronome with a swagger), his taste in music was so broad it actually changed how I understood music.
Black Church Bands, Hall and Oates, drum lines, and 70s Rock (Steely Dan, Fleetwood Mac), along with Soul and Hip Hop, all had a place in our home (closer to a halfway house at times) because Trell brought them there.
From Alabama by way of Chicago, Trell was the southern Black guy in a band of midwestern White boys, who bonded over their nights performing to empty rooms and the guitar solo on “Concrete Jungle”.
“One of the smoothest rhythm sections ever” he types as I reach out to him about this article because as I write, and listen to “Gypsy” on a week long loop, I remember he actually turned me onto Fleetwood Mac, or turned me onto a side of Fleetwood Mac I didn’t get growing up in a White boomer household.
If it wasn’t for Trell I wouldn’t understand the interplay between Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, or how that connected to a Quads drum roll, or the beat drop in “In The Air Tonight”, and I wouldn’t, perhaps most importantly, be able to tell you anything about why Doggface208 singing along to “Dreams” made us all lose our minds towards the end of a year that should’ve left us not a single mind to lose.
Best view i have ever seen !