Coined by Village Voice writer Maura Johnson in writing about the movement that is fly-by-night web sensations such as Rebecca Black and whatever else gets a million hits an hour despite either sucking or having no actual artistic integrity to speak of.
READ HER ARTICLE
The article in which Johnson coined the phrase was based upon the recent Lance Bass (of Backstreet Boys, or was that N'Sync?) boy-band project, Heart2Heart, which seems to have been created solely for the purpose of creating a brief web tsunami for being playfully lame.
Their song, "Facebook Official", is about relationships making the jump from nothingness to the sort of viability that leads a person to update their relationship status on Facebook. It almost makes Rebecca Black's "Friday" look positively deep and thought-provoking by comparison.
To further validate the "genre" known as "trollgaze", Pitchfork writer Tom Ewing waxes poetic about the genre's potential staying power, admitting that the music itself is completely disposable:
"It's not built to exist in a record shop, a TV channel, a collection, or even an mp3 playlist. Its natural habitat is the stream-- that ceaseless flow of information we access every time we use social media. Trollgaze is something you see sandwiched between other status updates, tweets, or posts, fighting for attention with every other picture, stray thought, polemic, or advert. Its button-pushing crassness and ambiguous motives make it an evolutionary nightmare: music perfectly adapted for life in the stream."
READ HIS ARTICLE (ON HER ARTICLE)
Gotta say, doesn't look good for the music industry if the music people wanna listen to (or watch while bored at work) doesn't translate to anything you'd actually wanna own.
Interesting from a detached, end of civilization as we know it POV. Kinda scary from the viewpoint of having to live here while these crazy ADD/ADHD kids make a mockery of everything.