Black Marks on Wood Pulp

This will be my last post for a few days – I’ve been a little more prolific than I’d first expected, but there’s just so much random (or, miscellaneous, you could say) stuff that comes up in my life that doesn’t have much use on BMOWP that I needed to put it somewhere. I don’t want to hog up the site, so you’ll hear more from the other real contributors instead of my self-promoting ass.

Once a week, at most twice. I’m going to spend the rest of my Misc.Asst. time promoting the site to the hundreds of blog directories in the world. I promise.

Don’t hold me to that, though.

Anyway, you know this site’s about nothing in particular when I bring up Jesse Camp.

Thanks to an opinion piece in The Onion about Jesse Camp — “I Don’t Wonder What Jesse Camp Is Up To These Days” – I decided to do some hack reporting via Google to see what Jesse, a forgotten soul from my first year of college, has been up to.

What I found surprised me.

First, Jesse Camp has been immortalized by someone’s Angelfire.com website – in fact, this is the #1 site, according to Google, for Jesse Camp. My visit to Jesse Camp’s World taught me many interesting things about the former “I Want to be a MTV DJ” winner:

- “Jesse’s Bday is november 4, 1979 – he’s a scorpio.”

- “Jesse loves to draw and paint.”

- “He’s sooo tall and skinny (about 6’4 and 90 lbs, or so they say) that the MTV wardrobe people have trouble finding him cool clothes to wear.”

- “During his first times on the air, Jesse missed his cue because he wasn’t listening to his earpiece.”

I feel like I really know him already. I wanted to learn more, but unfortunately the aqua blue background and multiple Jesse Camp pictures started giving me a headache, so I left the site.

Knowing his desire to be in movies, it was no surprise to run across his Internet Movie Database profile. Camp was in two movies (a cameo in Brittany Spears’ Crossroads, and Skinwalker, a movie by Rob Howard). To see that Camp scored a Rob Howard film was impressive – I loved Cocoon, and A Brilliant Mind was, well, brilliant!

Wait. That’s Ron Howard? Oh. Never mind.

Another site, I Love Jesse Camp, presents to us a list of links that have become broken in the eight years since Camp’s relevancy waned, and the author and creator urges us to “go out and buy his self-titled album, Jesse Camp And the 8th street Kidz, because it is the best album in the world!”

Of course, I had to check the All Music review of Camp’s album. Let’s just say it didn’t get five stars.

There may be more irritating fringe figures in the history of rock & roll, but none are worse than Jesse Camp. A spoiled suburban rich kid who decided that acting as if he were mentally retarded would be wickedly funny, Camp rode MTV’s manipulations into quasi-stardom, including such ridiculous highlights as gracing the cover of Spin magazine. Since he had wormed his way into celebrity, only one thing was left — have him produce something of substance that would sustain his fame. Hence, a recording contract and his debut album, Jesse & the 8th Street Kidz, a record that sounds as if it was released in 1989.

Awesome.

I found one more crazy fan site, My Shrine to Jesse Camp, which seems incomplete. Consisting of one page, My Shrine lists a lot of great Camp stats:

Real Name: Read
Occupation: Read
Birthday: Read
Birth Place: Read
Sign: Read

I don’t know what is meant by “read,” but Jesse seems like a very well rounded person!

Finally, the official word in everything Jesse Camp: The Wikipedia page.

Of course, if you don’t like Jesse, you can just go here.

Jesse was a true star, a star that we’ll never get back, I fear. We miss you, Mr. Camp. You and all of the 8th Street Kidz. Your unending posing and oft-misunderstood voice will never be replaced.

(Thank God.)