CursedBrudda, a twenty-something-year-old British lad, is tearing up the YouTube and Instagram food-content game. He looks like a rejected Channel 4 Skins protagonist (for being too on the nose), and with tats like an American mumble rapper his unapologetic deviancy is the crystallization of food slop entertainment.
Active for only a year, he already has a full plate of content for you to rot your brain cells with. My favourite, "Cursed Corner Shop" lets you witness him acquire, assemble and then engulf unholy combinations of convenience-store food.
Classic combos include (but are never limited to) a dubiously fresh prepackaged egg sandwich used as vehicle for canned fish and pickled meat married together with enough hot sauce to effectively fight white stereotypes. He never wastes it either, each abomination is double fisted down his willing gullet and licked clean, all the while maintaining perfect eye contact with the camera.
What he does, he does well, but it's nothing new. Countless influencers and content-creators do the same thing: muckbangs, insipid food reviews and deranged how-tos. All following the blueprint begun back in the day, back in 2010 when Epic Meal Time hit the magic formula of grotesque excess and spectacle eating.
Running in circles so that Zoomers may one day walk, they pioneered the formula and grew fat(ter) on it. Today their channel is as any other, short-form, long form, fucking podcasts and endless crossovers. The magic long gone.
What sets CursedBrudda apart from the others, apart from the fat-fuck Canadians is one key aspect.
He's honest.
Each short is narrated with a self-aware quipiness characteristic of British youth. He curses and makes vulgar innuendo over footage of him inhaling a chicken pot pie stuffed with cold mac-n-cheese from a can, slathered in hot sauce and unceremoniously fucked by red-hot Cheetos; all the while admitting how disgusting it is.
Heinous is closer to an accurate description, his acknowledgment of the deplorable nature of what we accept and consume is nothing short of performance art.
It's refreshingly bleak and addictively unappetizing and he knows it.
In contrast, the dinosaur Canadians would have hoped to convince you that their thrice baked, fried and/or otherwise entirely overcooked, recooked and partially reheated fast-food gastro-crime was the pinnacle of cuisine.
Theirs was a time where the term content creator did not exist. Where the marketing of Jack Daniels and the objectification of women was packaged as child friendly for having swear words bleeped out, and the coolest thing was bacon. Pulling thumbnail expressions that put even the most elaborate of Wojak memes to shame, the only impressive thing they really achieved was managing to be massively overweight and gaunt simultaneously.
Cursedbrudda is what they may have helped create but could never be. The perfected present where objectification is called empowerment and every joke and in-character over exaggeration is made with a nod to camera. An ever-expanding campaign of honest degeneracy, smug to the non-reality of social media.
Without any façade or pretence, CursedBrudda forces us to ask ourselves why we enjoy watching people gulp down shit as entertainment.
Then again, you wouldn't know the taste of it from watching a screen. Because that tastes like distraction and detachment. Like nothing. The good food too, the food that isn't shit that is.
Nothing.
The food is shit or will invariably become shit anyway. But you don't have to eat it. Endure an insatiable hunger while grubby thumbs swipe from blue light to blue waffle with the precision of an underpaid fast-food worker instead.
A hunger for content is a snake eating its tail in-front of a tripod and ring light.
Our culture isn't dead, it's just rotting. You can't smell it, and through a screen it doesn't taste like anything.
You just have to watch.
Or better yet: set-up your own camera and lighting, and join in. Satiate your hunger and be consumed in the pursuit of content.
At least then you can taste what's killing you before you die.