Resurrection

A coupla years ago I asked a very important question: what the hell happened to Jesse Camp?

Sometimes I worry that as a country we've forgotten about 1999 MTV Wanna Be a VJ winner Jessie Camp.  He was everything that's great about us as a people: tall, skinny, wildly incoherent, constantly baffled.  He was that best kind of homeless, down-on-his luck street trash white kid, ie he wasn't actually a homeless, down-on-his luck street kid but just paid a shitload of money to LOOK like he was.  As the Johnny Appleseed/Paul Revere of the Hipster, Jesse led the crusade to show others that while it's not cool to BE poor, it's cool to LOOK poor.  It is curious that while co-opting Jessie's "somebody just pulled me out of a toilet" look, today's hipsters insist on trying to sound like the smartest people in the room, therein eschewing Jessie's determination to sound like a non-functioning retard with no visible motor or language skills.

And here we are, 11 years later.  It's as if we've learned nothing from Mr. Camp and, worse, aren't interested in trying anymore. What the hell.  If you had told me in 1999 that one day this great Charlemagne of the Faux-Unwashed would be so forgotten so as to not even warrant a footnote on the history of pop culture, I would've been aghast, and said there's no way way in hell that would happen. Or, as Jessie would've said, "weeeeel, dweeze bit, dunno man, but i really like, well, dweeeeezi is!"

And voila! They found him. For some reason.