Over the summer, all of us at the NHQ became obsessed with Charo, née María Rosario Pilar Martínez Molina Moquiere de les Esperades Santa Ana Romanguera y de la Najosa Rasten. “DANTHE… Jooth ay leetle beet klohther!” was on everybody’s lips, and all of our eyes on her glorious tits. Reading her Wikipedia article was a revelation in and of itself, but YouTubing her rarer appearances made her all the more alluring.

Not only was Charo NOT just the blonde bimbo of whom I had only the vaguest childhood recollections (Hollywood Squares), she was a musical prodigy whose career began when she was “discovered” by Xavier Cugat, that irresistible Spanish bandleader whose work was most recently re-popularized by Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar Wai in films such as 2046, In The Mood for Love, and Days of Being Wild. After watching the next video, you too will realize why we find the winner of the award for Cugat’s most vivacious fourth wife (she was just 15 when he married her at age 66) equally irresistible (she’s the first guest, so don’t skip ahead):

WOW now that’s some RAW TALENT! Ain’t no way around it. No true space cadet could ever have the mellifluous motor control and pure power of expression to which we sensual creatures are all beholden. Likewise take note of one of Colombian pop princess Shakira’s earlier appearances in American-made media.

Besides the obvious similarities of Spanish and the Sex Appeal, in these videos, both Shakira and Charo are also presented (are they presenting themselves?) in ways that highlight their talents as musicians: both women are wielding guitars (Charo throughout, Shakira mostly towards the end). The fact that both are singing in their native tongue is not to be overlooked; these songs were originally written in Spanish, and are therefore inevitably more poetic than what would later pass as popular music. For both women, this would mean singing English-language songs whose only merits are the unexpected level of amusement one derives from appreciating their absurd vapidity. See below:

Not only is the music less musical (I’d like to see someone try and argue Shakira’s coquettish wolf howl as superior to her robust natural singing voice), but their visual presentation is much more contrived and hyper-sexualized, and much less unique to the performers themselves. Charo was a classically trained Spanish guitarist and flamenco dancer, as evidenced by only her earliest televised appearances. You would never know, though, after seeing her jiggle and giggle her way through The Loveboat theme. Likewise, Shakira is a former musical prodigy and accomplished multi-instrumentalist, capable of expressing so much more than one might imagine after watching her writhe and thrust her way around a cage (a life-sized geode, a crowded club, etc.) with…

…on her lips. Also capable of processing complex intellectual activities, such as studying history at UCLA, or speaking at Oxford University about her work as an educator and philanthropist. But you might not notice, what with all that other stuff coming out of her mouth on the radio and in her videos. The same could be said of Charo.

However, it wouldn’t be fair to find fault with either of these women for merely riding the great [single] white [male] wave of convention (cowabunga, dude!) to stardom… Rather, we make and appreciate the distinction between the before and after, taking special care to celebrate what once was and is no longer. What once was María Rosario Pilar Martínez Molina Moquiere de les Esperades Santa Ana Romanguera y de la Najosa Rasten is now just “Cuchi-Cuchi.” In the beginning, there was Shakira. In the end, there was Charo. What does it matter? It’s all the same to us if it’s all the same to them.

Rand Sevilla is a graphic artist and also a graphic musician. I don’t know how many bands he has (a dozen, perhaps) but one of them is this outfit called Club Sashay. Recently Rand was pimping a web snatch of his own design to Vicemag via Twitter. It’s called YYAAHHOOOO.COM. It won a prize. It’s an Internet nasty website mashup. Go there to see what it’s all about and then come back and read an interview I had with Rand about the Internet.

Johnny: What are you up to with yyaahhoooo?
Rand: YYAAHHOOOO.COM is an extention of a earlier efforts in experimental HTML called “Maury Povich” available here: randsevilla.com/povich [Whoa!]. I like manipulating language to create irrational experiences. We took a bunch of mushrooms in the desert at this music festival (Manimal) and got on this dialogue about bands like Wavves and Lovvers and Miike Snow. So Peter from Beast Cop and I decided we should start a band called Tom Pettery Presents YYaahhoooo.com. I don’t know if the band will ever happen but the opportunity to take YYAAHHOOOO.com as a domain named seemed great so I grabbed it.

The act of typing in a URL is coordinated by the sequence of the letters: your fingers touching the buttons is the space where your meat makes zeros and ones. Typing in YYAAHHOOOO.COM has this interesting double rhythm that is appealing, too. Its like datdat datdat datdat datdatdatdat dat dat dat.(sic)

J: Is everything in there shit you found, or is some of it your own, like the faces?
R: The gestures are mine but the content cannot really be claimed. The faces are from a blog that lasted for about 2 days called LOLBROS. The profile photo of the authority figure is already funny, but when you make the faces completely and shoddily shitty I crack up. The other stuff is all copy paste copy paste code collages and media arrangement, not dissimilar to the sculptural stuff I used to do when I had room to do it. I really believe that proximity creates identity and that you can create a lot of questions just by putting two signifiers next to each other. I like Haim Steinbach’s work a lot; and what he was trying to do with the banal in a hyper consumer environment, I’m trying to do with the banal in infornographic environment.

J: I know you have a penchant for the grotesque Internet. What do you think about the insane shit one can find in/out there?
R: As having been a person diagnosed with mental illness I don’t know if Insane is an appropriate characterization. I know that will seem a contradiction when you see my next post that says “THIS IS INSANE!!!!!!!”, but that’s just Internet hype. The Internet is the human brain melting into one giant pulsating mass, an überhuman blob. I sometimes feel like the Internet is the pink slime from Ghostbusters II that boils under NYC, and other times I think the internet is the logical extension of the collective unconsciousness and will move us from being messy piles of DNA. The Internet as a whole is grotesque. Its the pinnacle of technology that can be used to appeal to the basest level of human experience.

J: What about the creators of extreme, grotesque content. What kind of people are they? Why do you think they do it?
R: Its always been about sharing. Content creators want an audience. I know I do. We extend our interests and desires in the internet in the hope we will make contact with someone who understands, or at least “gets” what you are about. Would furries, pedophiles or Christians access the Internet if there wasn’t a relevant and related body of content and community available? Unlikely. Internet is augmented consciousness where we aren’t limited to sharing by conventional media. I don’t have to describe a picture or movie I made, I can show you. We all want to have a legacy and the easiest way to do that is insert our code in the pile. The dark and sticky pile.

J: Do you consider yourself apart from the grotesque, or a part of it? Just visiting?
R: Totally part of it, you can’t just visit. I think a lot of people don’t realize is when you are on the Internet your computer is spewing information on other computers and other computers are doing the same. Its a good thing human STDs haven’t figure out a way to travel through the network.

J: Do you have some ideas about what it all means, culturally speaking? To me it’s a scream. I think Internet has been a big long healthy scream so far. Or a “movement” (“shit”)(with a scream). Like culture is exorcising decades of not being able to govern its own entertainment, information and interactivity. Internet as steam chamber.
R: I know I just gave you a bunch of rhetoric about what it means but, when I take a step back, the Internet is still in its infancy. No broadcast medium has really hit the hundred year mark. That’s only two generations in people time. I’ll consider the Internet grown-up when it effectively merges the Newtonian world with the quantum world, that is to say [when] all information, including time and spatial perception (memory, emotion) exists everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. The analogy you gave of the Internet being a shit scream already points to how language, our organic lexicon, is merging with the technical lexicon. The ideas precede the reality–be it flight, 9/11, or Singularity. The ramification of this is that we will not be human anymore and so shit like google, Huffington, and even YYAAHHOOOO.COM will be a remnant of an ancient civilization primitively carved from binary processes, rendered in 2 dimensions.

The Internet is a Monolith.

J: Are you now or have you ever been a member of the somethingawful.com forums? 4chan?
R: I lurk 4chan and Encyclopedia dramatica because it feels like hanging out in the back of the bus with all the bad kids.

I can’t really say to much else otherwise I’ll be breaking the rules of the Internet**.

Randsevilla.com