S I M P S O N S W A V E Is Literally A Joke

S I M P S O N W A V E by Palm Treat

Simpsonwave is a Joke That Music Journalism Isn't In On

I have never been one to read published rags like Rolling Stone Magazine or NME, although it is secretly one of my life goals to somehow end up in an issue of Rolling Stone Magazine. There is even that stupid song from the 70's about being on the cover of the Rolling Stone, or at least there is in Almost Famous.

All of that jibberish aside, it occurs to me that it might actually be easier than I had previously imagined to get into Rolling Stone Magazine. I guess I shouldn't call them out specifically since a quick Google search didn't turn up their name in this embarrassing journalism faux pas, but if they were slightly less clueless they would also be doing their own flawed research into the subject. I'm talking, of course, about the joke that is Simpsonwave: the accidental joke on the music journalism industry that caught on instantly and which music bloggers and the like (see: theverge.com) have been feverishly reporting as though it is a real thing, I guess because of the fear of missing out on the next big thing.

No one wants to be the one to overlook the next Van Gogh, I guess, and in the digital age this fear of missing out (FOMA) has been amped up by the insular echo chamber of social media to insane levels. Insane to the point of representing a music genre suggested as a joke by an admin in a Simpson's Facebook meme page as the real deal. Google search it and it seems to be everywhere overnight: YouTube channels, every music blog ever, there's even a sub Reddit for it (/r/simpsonwave/). A Google search of the term makes it seem like a thriving and vibrant underground community that has exploded right under the noses of music snobs everywhere, literally overnight.

So, how does a pop artist like myself who slangs posters and websites for a living have any insight into a supposed music genre carelessly reported over and over by those smarter and more in the know as hard core fact, here to stay, sign of the times… wave of the future? Because I know who started the joke. I was there when he started the joke, I am also an admin in said Facebook meme group.

So how is that people who talk about music for a living are unable to drill down to the bottom, even a drill a little - hell, you don't have to drill very far - to figure out that a bunch of shitposters have pulled one over on them? I can only pose the question because I have no fucking clue, but it looks like my dream of being in Rolling Stone Magazine died while David Bowie's corpse is pretty much still warm to the touch. (But incredibly before Keith Richards)

By the way, you can shop for Palm Treat's dope art at palmtreat.design

The Itchy & Scratchy & Palm Treat Show

Meta on top of meta: Breaking the 4th wall

Everyone's Favorite Show Within a Show Within a Show

According to Matt Groening, the inspiration for the Itchy & Scratchy Show was Tom & Jerry. He has said that in his youth he and his friends would excitedly talk about if Tom & Jerry featured ultra-violence instead of cartoon violence, and would invent gruesome alternate senarios. This childhood banter stuck in his mind and years later when he created The Itchy & Scratchy Show as a clip show within the Krusty the Klown Show and he was finally able to bring this concept to life.

As a child I watched The Tom & Jerry Show and it also occurred to my childhood self that the injuries they inflicted on one another ought to be much more severe than they were depicted on the show. I never made the connection between Tom & Jerry and Itchy & Scratchy until I read about the connection.

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Where Do You Come Up With Your Ideas?

Early Palm Treat design for a 4 inch vinyl sticker.

The Origins of Palm Treat

"Frankly, I am not sure where my ideas come from. I have been inspired by everything from passing images in my mind to brief glimpses of reflections in shop windows… anything that generates that initial flash of excitement. When I was developing the early ideas that Palm Treat's art is based on (distorted features, multiple sets of eyes, appropriated cartoon imagery) I was inspired by Facebook's early advertising failures. I read a study about how ineffective their early ad attempts were, in short no one was intentionally clicking on them. In the study I read they paid for something like 30,000 targeted views for a survey or some such thing and received something like 2 or 3 clicks that immediately bounced. I've worked as a web designer and this is an unimaginably terrible respsonse to online advertising.

The image that inspired Palm Treat.

What interested me wasn't so much the dismal performance of the ads in that experiment, but an ad that they cited that did have a very high click rate, at the time I believe it was the most successful (possibly only successful) ad that had up until that point been run on facebook. It was an image of a woman's face with an extra set of eyes and an extra mouth, and the copy asked the viewer to count the features on the face. For some reason this advertisement really caught the attention of those early Facebook users when countless hundreds of other attempts had failed, spectacularly.

This made a great impact on me, I spent days thinking about the ad and marveling at how such a simple and stupid idea was so incredibly effective when so many other advertisements had failed. I knew that our brains are configured to recognize facial patterns above all else, and that faces are very good at getting our attention, but I was endlessly facinated with how such a simple variation to the human face seemed to short circuit the brain's attention. Or maybe not short circuit our facial recognition, but more hyper activate it. Somehow a face with multiple sets of eyes triggered an incredibly strong response and a great amount of interest. It was as though our human eyes were magnetized.

As a designer I let this idea sit in my mind for the better part of a year. I knew that there was something significant or at least profitable to be done with this idea. The difficulty was figuring out how to implement it into an interesting type of art without just painting a bunch of portraits with too many eyes. Which I wasn't exactly opposed to, but it just seemed as though there must be a more effective or clever use of it.

I have always had a great interest in pop artists like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jasper Johns. I grew up on cartoons and loved how they straight up stole the cartoon imagery of their childhoods and turned it into large scale art, many times without altering it outside of the dimensions and medium. I was particularly inspired by Roy Lichtenstein's gigantic comic book panels after seeing some in person as a young child, they seemed so environmental and epic in their large scale, they were exciting. I feel that excitement is the most important factor in any type of art, arousing enthusiasm for a particular feeling or way of being.

So I ultimately landed on combining my favorite childhood cartoon, the Simpsons, with my new idea about facial distortions and repetitive patterns. I also felt that the Simpsons was a strong source to work from as they are the most popular and widely recognized cartoon characters ever conceived, I liked the idea of playing to the largest common demoninator. So, I printed out a few pictures of Bart Simpson on some shipping labels at my job and within a few minutes saw endless possiblities in exploiting the economy of form used in cartoons. Not just the Simpsons, but all cartoons… everything for that matter. It felt like sampling an image into a techno beat, it was enlightening.

From that initial discovery, I set out Photoshopping, tracing, re-drawing, hacking and cutting up everything I could find. At this point I have created years worth of source material. I have a lifetime of trippy pop art pasted together in Photoshop documents. At this point, its just about putting our stuff out there for as many people as we can find to put it in front of