On Meth
The Story of Dan Meth,
Bard of The Internet People
by Bill Burnett
Every now and then technology, history, and personality converge to produce the quintessential voice of an era. Mark Twain, for instance, came of age at just the right place and time to hop aboard those Mississippi riverboats and become the chronicler of an emerging America. Jon Stewart is a more modern example. As an obscure comedian, he found a vacant chair behind the desk at a fake news show on cable TV, one year before George W. Bush was appointed President of the United States. That timing, and the greater freedom provided by a cable comedy network, made Stewart a central figure in the political culture of our time.
And now there's Dan Meth, a crazed cartoonist from the 'burbs of New York, who has arrived on the scene just as a new video-based Pop Culture is being born on the Internet. It's a match made in...well, someplace really weird. But it works! Meth's maddeningly catchy "Internet People"—which debuts on Channel Frederator on Thursday, September 6th—is destined to become the touchstone for the YouTube generation. Set to the pulse of Micah Frank's music (and featuring the horn sectionof Bruce Kapler and Al Chez from Paul Schafer's CBS Orchester on David Letterman's Late Show) Meth captures and celebrates our shared Internet experiences over the last half-decade with cartoon caricatures that are somehow funnier than the original footage. I dare you to watch it just once—or to get all the references after even three viewings.
The song is a listlieder, reminiscent of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" but spiritually more akin to Don McLean's "American Pie". Why? Because like McLean, Meth is stopping half-way up a mountain, to look back at a catalog of Pop Culture events that accumulated almost without our awareness—events that have drawn us all together into a new community.
Meth has been part of that community for some time, gradually gathering fans and momentum with quirky, funny, animated pieces he's made for an eclectic list of Internet clients. That list includes the rock group The Hives, the computer dating service Nerve, The New Republic, Fortune Magazine, MTV, and a Kosher food wholesaler.
Between these rent-paying projects, Meth has been honing a unique brand of cyberspaced-out humor. His medium is flash animation and music. His method is to get together with his friends and jam, verbally, for about an hour. Dan and his pals take a topic—such as "What did James Brown really mean by the term 'Sex Machine'?" and goof on it till they drop. Then Dan cuts all that raw craziness down to about one minute and makes a track. And then he draws a cartoon, straight into his computer. Sometimes it's a song-based cartoon. Sometimes it's a vignette. Usually (but not always) it's about music. And always, always, it's totally ... totally. It can't be described. You have to see it—and hear it—for yourself.
And soon you can! Dan's about to have his own series —The Meth Minute 39— on Channel Frederator, Cartoon Central for the Internet. In addition to "Internet People" you'll get to see thirty-eight more of the strangest minutes in animation history. One a week. Starting this September.
That's good news for Internet people everywhere.