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By Root 831 0

was #3, #4, #7, or #8 (twice) on five of the charts, and was entirely left off the other two. “Quality”—if we define that to mean the independent group’s choices—did not seem to be entirely irrelevant: the top-rated song on their list, by a group called Parker Theory, made all eight of the “influence” lists and topped five of them. But of the other nine acts on the independent list, one was entirely shut out of the influence lists, and three made only two lists. On average, the top ten bands for the independent group made only four of the eight influence lists. Apparently they were drowned out, in the other worlds, by noise from the bandwagons.

The Mob Project was a self-conscious bandwagon—it advertised itself as a bandwagon, as a joke about conformity, and it lampooned bandwagons in doing so. But curiously, this seemed not to diminish its actual bandwagonesque properties. Indeed, if anything, the self-consciousness made it even more viral. The e-mails poured in: “I WANT IN.” “Request to mob, sir.” “Girls can keep secrets!” “Want to get my mob on.” In Boston’s first flash mob, entitled “Ode to Bill,” hundreds packed the greeting-card aisles of a Harvard Square department store, telling bystanders who inquired that they were looking for a card for their “friend Bill in New York.” By making a halfhearted, jesting attempt to elevate me to celebrity status, Boston had given the flash-mob genre an appropriately sly turn.

PEAK AND BACKLASH

The best attended of all the New York gatherings was MOB #6, which for a few beautiful minutes stifled what has to be the most ostentatious chain store in the entire city: the Times Square Toys “R” Us, whose excesses are too many to catalog here but include, in the store’s foyer, an actual operational Ferris wheel some sixty feet in diameter. Up until the appointed time of 7:18 p.m. the mobbers loitered on the upper level, among the GI Joes and the Nintendos and up inside the glittering pink of the two-floor Barbie palace. But then all at once the mob, five hundred strong, crowded around the floor’s centerpiece, a life-size animatronic Tyrannosaurus rex that growls and feints with a Hollywood-class lifelikeness. “Fill in all around it,” the mob slip had instructed. “It is like a terrible god to you.”

Two minutes later, the mob dropped to its knees, moaning and cowering at the beast behind outstretched hands; in doing so we repaid this spectacle, which clearly was the product of not only untold expenditure but many man-months of imagineering, with an en masse enactment of the very emotions—visceral fright and infantile fealty—that it obviously had been designed to evoke. MOB #6 was, as many bloggers pointed out pejoratively, “cute,” but the cuteness had been massed, refracted, and focused to such a bright point that it became a physical menace. For six minutes the upper level was paralyzed; the cash registers were cocooned behind the moaning, kneeling bodies pressed together; customers were trapped; business could not be done. The terror-stricken personnel tried in vain to force the crowd out. “Is anyone making a purchase?” one was heard to call out weakly. As the mob dispersed down the escalators and out into the street, the police were downstairs, telling us to leave, but we had already accomplished the task, had delivered what was in effect a warning.

Almost unanimously, though, the bloggers panned MOB #6. “Another Mob Botched” was the verdict on the blog Fancy Robot: “[I]nstead of setting the Flash Mob out in public on Times Square itself, as everyone had hoped, The Flash Master decided to set it in Toys ‘R’ Us, with apparently dismal results.” SatansLaundromat.com (a photo-blog that contains the most complete visual record of the New York project) concurred—“not public enough,” the blogger wrote, without enough “spectators to bewilder”—as did Chris from the CCE Blog: “I think the common feeling among these blogger reviews is: where does the idea go from here? . . . After seeing hundreds of people show up for no good reason, it’s obvious that there’s some kind of potential for