The 2013 Year In Review

Posted on December 31, 2013 in Articles

Charles Ramsey’s retelling was so casual, so flippantly un-PC, it went viral. Skyping, tweeting, updating its way from that run-down Cleveland front yard to Internet immortality within minutes.

And Charles Ramsey got the 2010s celebrity treatment—not so much 15 minutes of fame, but 15 million YouTube views. His interview auto-tuned instantly. His legions of newfound fans took to Twitter sphere: “Free burgers for life!” “Heroes eat Big Macs,” they tweeted. Sure enough, McDonalds served up free food for a year. And, Ramsey landed that inevitable, plush book deal, to be published Spring 2014.

For reminding us rescuers eat Big Macs, for reminding us heroism happens in Cleveland front yards, Charles Ramsey is Prose Before Hos’ hero of the year.

ENTERTAINER OF THE YEAR

Miley Cyrus introduced our parents to “twerking”. The Biebs napped on a couch in a Brazilian brothel, spat on people, and had his monkey confiscated by German authorities.

But 2013 was the year Kanye West ascended to the rarefied air of Twilight Zone status. This was the year Kanye cemented himself as Kanye Being Kanye. Where nothing was too outlandish, nothing to preposterous to rule out.

When the satirical newspaper The Daily Currant (think: a poor man’s The Onion) fabricated that Kanye West called himself “the next Nelson Mandela” after the South American’s passing this December, most readers believed it. When Kanye appeared to KO paparazzi in an Austin parking lot this November, we believed it again.

It’s not the craziest thing he’s said, many figured. After all, this was the year Kanye snagged a Kardashian (Kim), named his kid after a direction on a compass (North), declared himself “the nucleus” (?), and released “Yeezus”, his most bare-boned, minimalist—and, depending on whom you ask, his most acclaimed—album yet.

RUNNER-UP #1: Norwegian brothers Vegard and Bard Ylvisaker (“Vylvis”) for “What Does The Fox Say” on the premise, that, under the right circumstances, a song with lyrics so bad could be a hit. Worst of all, they were right. “What Does The Fox Say” became the most watched YouTube video of the year (308+ million views), even if the fox sounded just like a dog:

RUNNER-UP #2: Sharknado, the Syfy channel’s movie about man-eating sharks whirled into Los Angeles by hurricane (and the re-emergence—however briefly—of Tara Reid). Thanks to Twitter, it became the Syfy’s greatest hit, somehow eclipsing Syfy’s pantheon of other films including Sharktopis, Arachnoquake, and Ghost Shark.