Literature and the Internet are 2015's star-crossed lovers.
For all intents and purposes, everyone who writes should be pumping out genre-bending, multi-media pieces. It's just where writing needs to go if it expects to survive.
The alt lit movement was a brief explosion of this idea but, unfortunately, very few of its artists really took off.
An exception to this rule is Steve Roggenbuck. Using collage-based Youtube videos, self-publishing, and colorful, creative misspelling, Roggenbuck created a wildly energetic body of work that, though initially confusing, is equally infectious.
These are my five favorite Steve Roggenbuck pieces, in no particular order.
5.
Roggenbuck's work is normally uncompromisingly joyous, so when I first heard the slightly melancholy and very lovesick tone of "Somewhere in the bottom of the rain" I was quite surprised.
This piece is very direct for Roggenbuck, and all the more emotionally powerful as a result.
4.
Witty observations on personal branding, responsibility, self-worth and the power of effort buried in Roggenbuck's normal stream-of-consciousness collages. A slow-burn, but well worth the slow pace.
3.
Another one of Roggenbucks's more downbeat pieces. He highlights a certain romantic relationship that comforts him and the impermanence of life, but most of this video is spent with streams of nonsensical words and stories about the daily minutia of life. The reasoning for this is rather brilliant.
By pairing up nonsense and descriptions of the ultra-mundane with very dramatic, constantly building ambient music, Roggenbuck is subtly bringing home his point that the little moments in life are just as beautiful as the not-so-little ones.
2.
Roggenbuck at his most frantic, optimistic, and thoughtful.
"One solution, humans with wings." Gorgeous.
1.
His magnum opus. It was only right to include it. The essence of his work boiled down to five minutes.
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