28 January 2022. Influencers | Meatloaf
Meet the Singhs—India’s new ‘family influencers’. The late Marvin Lee Aday and the 20th century gesamtkunstwerk.
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1: Meet the Singhs
There’s quite an alarming report at Rest of World on the emerging Indian category of ‘family influencers’.
What started on TikTok, which is now banned in India, has moved to Instagram and YouTube, where relatives — brothers and sisters, mothers and daughters, and grandmothers and grandsons — are making content together. But behind the happy faces on social media, the reality of content creation involving families, and particularly children, can be complex and fraught with risk.
The story starts with the Singh family, one of the leaders in this sector. The numbers are prodigious:
With six YouTube channels, five individual Instagram accounts, three Facebook pages, and two accounts on MX TakaTak, they have a total social media following of over 18 million. Their YouTube videos — which offer a peek into their day-to-day life, almost like Keeping Up with the Kardashians on a budget — have been watched over 8 billion times. Each week, the family produces 75 Reels and 35 video posts for Instagram, and 35 Shorts and 20 full-length videos for YouTube, featuring everything from short films and vlogs to dance videos.
And that’s not all. They have deals with brands, and even their own line of merchandise. There’s one drawback: when they say ‘family’, they mean ‘family’. As well as the parents, the kids are also on display all the time.
Photo of Ramneek Singh by Saumya Khandelwal, for Rest of World.
Ramneek Singh used to run the family’s car dealership business before he stumbled into the world of social media. His wife, Puneet, was more sceptical. But when he finally coaxed her into taking part in a video, and she was deluged with texts, she changed her mind. They earn ‘six figures’ in Indian rupees every month from their influencing business, and have taken on staff to help.
They have exclusive content production contracts with YouTube Shorts and MX TakaTak. In November 2021 alone, the family did more than a dozen brand promotions, including for kids TV channels Discovery Kids and Nickelodeon, online education portals Byju’s and Unacademy, and consumer brands. Ramneek has quit his business and spends his entire time managing the social media influencers in the house.
The result is that all of family life is content. When the Rest of World journalist Yashraj Sharma went to the house to interview them, they wanted to vlog his interview with them—a request that he declined.
And because everything is content, everything is also analytics. Ramneek starts checking the analytics data 30 minutes after a video goes live. When the numbers aren’t good, it affects his mood for the rest of the day.
It’s too soon to know what the impact will be long-term on the kids. Sharma talks to a couple of experts who have concerns. (There are apparently some Western countries—not named in the piece—where putting the children in the show would not be permitted).
Shriram Venkatraman, a digital anthropologist who has studied the phenomenon of influencer familes, tells him,
When parents are the producers, the whole act is synonymous to sending your kid to school and saying, ‘score at least 80% or above.... Now, on social media, these kids have to perform every evening. This is like sitting (for) an exam every day.
Rashi Laskari has counselled several content-creator parents and families. She says it can have serious consequences for the dynamics of the family—and therefore for the long-run psychological health of the children:
When spending time with the children becomes the job, the family fails to create memories that go beyond ‘content,’ and the children grow up to feel more alienated.
But it may have short-term effects as well. A YouTube video of the Singh’s eldest child, Anaanya, dancing, was deluged with paedophilic comments. The children have mobile phones, but they don’t have social media accounts—as a form of protection.
2: The late Marvin Lee Aday and the 20th century gesamtkunstwerk
I feel that I may have been neglectful in not mentioning the death of the heavy metal star Meatloaf a couple of weeks ago. Fortunately the columnist Rakewell—in the perhaps surprising location of the art magazine Apollo— has stepped into the gap.
I suspect that he or she had got their tongue firmly inside their cheek as they wrote this short column, but maybe not. Anyway, they couple Meatloaf’s career with the Wagnerian idea of the gesamtkunstwerk—“the bringing together of all the arts in the theatre to reach an apotheosis of performance.”
As Rakewell says:
in the 20th century there is one artist who has consistently shown how theatricality, design and music can come together to create a body of work that far exceeds the sum of its parts.
Meatloaf’s first record, Bat Out of Hell, which went on to sell 43 million copies, was originally intended to be a musical, Neverland, written by Jim Steinman.
The combination of fantasy artwork and a heavy metal aesthetic with music that might be described as Broadway Punk defined Meat Loaf’s career. The hellish iconography and the enormous sound of his masterpiece unleased an emotional intensity that returned his audience to the passions of their youth. It would be impossible to enjoy the music without envisioning the Meat Loaf aesthetic; they are inseparable and the perfect expression of all the art forms coming together.
Once you get to that point, you might as well double down, and in the next paragraph Rakewell decides to put all of their chips onto the table:
This is perhaps the artist who has most successfully brought together art forms to create a work of such originality it transcends its origins. Is Meat Loaf, in fact, the defining artist of the 20th century? And if he didn’t achieve this accolade with his first album then please look to the next great works in the trilogy.
That would be Bat Out of Hell II and Bat Out of Hell III, of course, also written by Steinman. And if there are any disbelievers still out there, Rakewell points towards the video of ‘I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)’. As s/he says, “Chandeliers tumble, gothic arches are destroyed by motorbikes, baroque paste-jewellery appears – the loneliness of lovelessness is given its full expression.”
My own best memory of Meatloaf comes from a late night showing of the film of The Rocky Horror Show, one of those where people turn up in costume. Spoilers, but his character, Eddie, gets served up in a meal to the hapless Brad and Janet in the spooky castle. At which—right on cue—the hardcore fans at the back chorused,
Oh no, not meatloaf again.
Notes from readers: I had a couple of readers suggest to me that I’d been unfair to BlackRock’s Larry Fink when I quoted Pew data in response to his claim in his 2022 Letter to CEOs that “Employees are increasingly looking to their employer as the most trusted, competent, and ethical source of information.” The latest Edelman Trust Barometer, which I’m planning to cover next week, suggests that employers are more trusted than Pew found.
My former colleague J.Walker Smith also reminded me of a familiar research finding: that general categories (“business leaders”, “politicians”) always score worse than known quantities (“my employer”, “my MP”). Which isn’t to say that everything is rosy here. Walker adds:
The thing I point out these days is a clash of interests. Employees are coming back post-pandemic focused on managing their lifestyles (and mental health). Employers are coming back trying to preserve, not write off, their existing asset base (leases, work processes, training of staff, support resources, partner contracts, etc.). It’s ‘human’ vs. assets: a misalignment of interests.
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