There's a lot to love about silly Internet memes and fads, and one reason is that they can dig up something old and make it cool again. Music is no exception: anything from a '70s rock anthem to a '90s one-hit wonder can be given new life if the YouTube or 4chan hordes get their hands on it.
The complication is that, thanks to the rise of user-generated content, a song can suddenly become in-demand again without any kind of official marketing push (like placement on a movie soundtrack, for example). And that's an interesting issue for the music industry: When a song from decades ago starts to hit the ears of a generation that might not have been exposed to it before thanks to a grainy video of a tone-deaf guy eviscerating it at an open mic night, does the record label with the rights to the song embrace it as free publicity or flag it as unauthorized content?
One thing's for sure. The sheer amount of content on the Web makes it tough for anything to break through from obscurity into the mainstream. But when something hits it big, it gets really big. You can go ask the guy we put at the top of this list.
10. "Say It Ain't So," Weezer
Weezer, which was doing the nerd-rock thing way before it was cool, is no stranger to revivals: considered by much of the mainstream to be a '90s novelty act after its hit single "Buddy Holly," the alternative-rock band bounced back in the early '00s with songs like "Island in the Sun" and "Beverly Hills." More recently, the band enlisted YouTube stars to star in its video for last year's single "Pork and Beans."
But Weezer got an additional push of digital buzz when its songs proved to be some of the most popular on video games "Guitar Hero" and "Rock Band." The 1994 song "Say It Ain't So," in particular, has seen a resurgence in party playlists all over. On one hand, it really is one of Weezer's best tracks. On the other, a dark and painful song about addiction and domestic abuse has officially made the leap to drunk frat-boy karaoke staple. So it goes.
9. "Take On Me," A-Ha
Speaking of karaoke, "Take On Me" will always have a place in pop culture as the song that's impossible to sing at a karaoke bar without botching it beyond belief--even a decent singing voice will make those high notes of the chorus sound like fingernails on a chalkboard.
But it hit the viral video circuit when some enterprising online comedian rewrote the lyrics so that they say exactly what's going on in A-Ha's odd music video for the song. The "Take On Me: Literal Version" video has been a moderate hit, and thankfully, the singer manages to hit the high notes without too much trouble.
8. "(Don't Fear) The Reaper," Blue Oyster Cult
To be fair, this 1976 song never really disappeared from the classic-rock airwaves, and the reason that it's on this list technically has to do with television, not the Web. A 2000 "Saturday Night Live" sketch starred Will Ferrell as a fictional member of Blue Oyster Cult (the cowbell player) and guest Christopher Walken as a record producer who seemed to think Ferrell's instrumentals weren't forceful enough.
But thanks to the proliferation of the aforementioned "SNL" clip online several years later, it's now almost impossible to extricate "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" from Walken's insistence on "I gotta have more cowbell!" and the phenomenon has gone from forgotten TV catchphrase to full-out Internet meme.
"SNL" network NBC has been notoriously protective when it comes to unauthorized clips of the Walken sketch (and anything else it's aired) circulating around the Web, and an ambitious project to make the entire comedy show's archives available online hasn't yet gotten off the ground. Until then, scattered pirated versions are available--as well as hilarious high school talent show re-enactments, coming from a generation that probably never knew of Blue Oyster Cult before it was associated with "more cowbell."
7. "Heartbeats," The Knife
This one's sort of cheating, since "Heartbeats" wasn't a huge hit to begin with. But it's a fascinating story about the way media can make its way all over the Web: Late in 2006, The Knife was a little-known Swedish indie band that had been around since the late '90s when another artist's recording of their 2004 song "Heartbeats" became a viral hit. Acoustic singer Jose Gonzales had covered the track for his album "Veneer," and it rose to popularity as the soundtrack of a commercial for Sony Bravia televisions. The Bravia ad, which depicted hundreds of colorful bouncy balls descending on San Francisco, was never televised in the U.S., and therefore received most of its buzz from clips on YouTube and elsewhere across the Web.
Fans of the Gonzalez song soon learned that it was actually a cover; the Knife started getting extra momentum, and now the band is a favorite of edgy music bloggers and DJs all over.
6. "Flagpole Sitta," Harvey Danger
This Seattle-based band put out several well-received albums but only hit the mainstream with "Flagpole Sitta." Almost a decade later, digital comedy powerhouse CollegeHumor taped a video in which the entire office (mostly a bunch of twentysomething hipsters) lip-synced to the song in a single take.
The wildly popular video also spurred a fad of other "lip dub" videos among the Web's young and camera-happy. As for CollegeHumor, the beer-pong-friendly office became the subject of a fictionalized miniseries on MTV earlier this year.
5. "YYZ," Rush
This instrumental track, originally released in 1981, is one of the most difficult songs to play in "Guitar Hero" and now "Rock Band," so it's become a sort of a geek milestone. That was only enhanced when a video of a really, really, really enthusiastic guy nailing the song in "expert" mode became a huge hit on YouTube.
Called "How Guitar Hero Was Meant To Be Played," the video has chalked up more than 6 million views and features a guy named "Freddie" getting off a motorcycle, stripping off a leather jacket, introducing himself with "What's up, Internet?" and having a friend equip him with the guitar console. If that's how "Guitar Hero" was meant to be played, I know lots of people who are doing it wrong.
4. "Don't Stop Believin'," Journey
This song is a classic, no matter what. And its use in the final episode of "The Sopranos" only solidified that. But it deserves a spot on this list because of an embarrassing incident that (at least temporarily) associated it with the dissolution of happy-go-lucky Web 2.0 mania in the aftermath of last fall's financial collapse.
Here's what happened: A bunch of young dot-com entrepreneurs all went on vacation together to an estate in Cyprus, and filmed a poolside "lip dub" video much like the one orchestrated several years earlier by the CollegeHumor team behind the "Flagpole Sitta" video. The single-take video of twentysomethings cavorting in bathing suits to "Don't Stop Believin'" was clever and well-done, if a little silly. Unfortunately, this happened to be October 2008, right when things were getting really bad on Wall Street. Gossip blogs lambasted the creators, and the video was eventually pulled.
About a month later, MySpace enlisted L.A. nightclub regular DJ AM to work the turntables at its party at the Web 2.0 Summit confab--a large-scale party that had undoubtedly been put together pre-recession. When he played a remix of "Don't Stop Believin'," there were more than a couple of sheepish looks on the dance floor.
3. "You Make My Dreams," Daryl Hall & John Oates
There aren't a whole lot of bells and whistles in the music video for this 1980 pop song by Philadelphia duo Hall & Oates: it's pretty much just the two of them bouncing around against a black background with their backup band. Which, of course, made it the perfect video in which to embed "Keyboard Cat," a ubiquitous Internet clip of an orange tabby cat jamming away on a keyboard. Bonus: the cat is wearing the same color T-shirt that John Oates sports in the "You Make My Dreams" video.
The digital revival of "You Make My Dreams" may have been stunted, however, as YouTube pulled the audio from the clip due to the fact that it doesn't have the proper licensing agreement in place with Warner Music Group, which owns the rights to the song. It's a testament to the complications that can arise when a unauthorized use of a decades-old song suddenly thrusts it back into mainstream pop culture.
"You Make My Dreams" might've just gotten an extra kick from outside the Web, though: the song has a notable role in the romantic comedy "500 Days of Summer," which was released this month.
P.S.: The Keyboard Cat video is still up on Funny or Die.
2. "The Final Countdown," Europe
This 1986 song by Swedish rock band Europe has always been notorious for its corniness, making the cut on lists as varied as "Most Awesomely Bad Songs Ever" and "Run For Your Life! The 50 Worst Songs Ever (as well as, to its credit, VH1's "Top 100 Hard Rock Songs" list). It also had a regular role in cult sitcom "Arrested Development" as the theme song used by Gob (Will Arnett) for his magic show.
But "The Final Countdown" achieved new notoriety on the Web when a video of an abysmally bad cover version by a band called Deep Sunshine started to circulate on YouTube. Geek community site Fark co-opted the song as a sort of in-joke, and it's racked up well over a million views.
Comments on the video range from "LOL can someone please tell them that they suck?" to "my ears are bleeding" to "I'd do anything to see them live."
1. "Never Gonna Give You Up," Rick Astley
Of course this was No. 1--really, what else could we have picked? The only thing sillier than the lyrics of this 1988 song is the music video for it, in which British pop singer Astley spends a good deal of time wiggling his hips in a trench coat. For some reason or another, the video became central to an online prank called "Rickrolling," in which mischievous Web users in forums, blogs, Twitter posts, and instant messages would send over a link to something they claimed was a highly anticipated video (usually a movie or video game trailer) but linked to the Astley video instead.
The prank grew so mainstream that at the annual Macy's Thanksgiving parade last year, Astley was enlisted to surprise spectators and TV viewers by coming out of a float singing (OK, lip-syncing) "Never Gonna Give You Up," effectively Rickrolling the entire country. Around that time, many people concluded that the Astley revival had more or less worn out its welcome. (It should be said that one of the co-writers of "Never Gonna Give You Up" wasn't too thrilled that he wasn't making much money off the YouTube fame.)
But the Rickroll really hasn't gone away: recently, a German DJ posted a "mashup" video that proves just how eerily the lyrics of "Never Gonna Give You Up" synchronize with Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Ladies and gentlemen, the miracles of digital media.
This post was updated at 9:19 AM PT on Thursday to reflect the correction issued by the New York Times.
Wow, we all fell for this one.
An NBC affiliate in Spokane, Wash., reported Tuesday that one of the Web's most popular viral videos of late was a fabrication, in a prank that fooled the national news media and plenty of YouTube loyalists.
The video, called "College Basketball Game Gets Rick Roll'd," purports to show a timeout in a women's basketball game between Eastern Washington University and Montana State University interrupted by a performance of the '80s pop hit "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley. The 1987 tune has become the subject of an online phenomenon called "rickrolling," in which a Web user is tricked into clicking on the link to the song's music video. Real-life rickrolling--randomly playing the song as a means of surprise or disruption--has turned into a popular offshoot among pranksters.
The basketball game video is hilarious. But it's not real.
The New York Times ran a story about the video earlier this week, and creator Pawl Fisher seemed to indicate to Times reporter Evelyn Nussenbaum that the video was authentic. But he backpedaled after the NBC affiliate KHQ-TV contacted a number of people affiliated with the university who seemed to indicate that no such prank had gone on, and it seems like his claims of authenticity to the Times were really just another layer of pranking.
Here's what appears to have happened: A guy dressed up as Rick Astley, identified by the Times as Davin Perry, really did run around the EWU basketball arena, lip-syncing to the song. But the bizarre interlude did not actually disrupt a timeout in a game, according to EWU representatives quoted in the KHQ-TV story. Video of people dancing to the music, as well as game footage, came from several other EWU games. Learning the truth was, to say the least, an epic disappointment.
The Times issued a correction to its story on Thursday: "The stunt, which involves a person lip-synching the 1980s hit song 'Never Gonna Give You Up' while dressed as the British singer Rick Astley, was performed before the start of four separate basketball games, and the pranksters distilled the performances into a YouTube video," the explanation read. "The March 8 game, between Eastern Washington and Montana State, was not interrupted by a performance."
On the bright side, the media attention was likely what triggered Astley, now 42, to break the silence about his revived popularity and give the Los Angeles Times an interview.
Surprisingly, the video's popularity was not accompanied by the usual level of scrutiny and skepticism that many "too good to be true" YouTube clips are subject to. Perhaps it's a sign of how online video is no longer an unfamiliar new medium that inherently draws suspicion.
Or maybe it was just a giant Rickroll.
On Friday morning, YouTube announced the second annual iteration of its YouTube Video Awards. What? Awards?
The video-sharing service, owned by Google since 2006, awarded accolades in categories like "Adorable," "Creative," and "Comedy" to original videos hosted on its site that were uploaded in 2007, as voted on by users. The prizes, per YouTube, are "bragging rights, a trophy, and a special invitation to an event later this year."
Okay, so the videos are kind of amusing. The "Adorable" category winner is a video of a baby who falls over every time he laughs (wonder what'll happen when his friends find out about that in 10 years), the "Creative" winner is that "Human Tetris" thing you've seen a million times, and the "Music" winner is none other than that "Chocolate Rain" video that everyone was watching last year.
But the culture of YouTube doesn't really lend itself that well to awards. YouTube, for better or worse, is a cultural hub rather than strictly a creative outpost; there's plenty of cool, original content there, and it's no surprise that Google would want to highlight the good stuff rather than the goofy prank videos and pirated content that propelled it to the upper echelon of the Web.
Content on YouTube, however, doesn't necessarily become popular because it's high-quality or original--just look at the Rickroll phenomenon, an '80s music video that has been seen millions of times because people get a kick out of tricking their friends into watching it. Or the current hot clip, a British public service announcement with a hilarious twist.
Or, for that matter, this week's number-one YouTube video: Barack Obama's most recent speech.
NEW YORK--Will it blend? This innovative ad campaign sure did.
A lot of Madison Avenue types have packed into midtown Manhattan's upscale Mandarin Oriental hotel for the annual OnMedia NYC conference, a sort of Silicon-Valley-meets-the-ad-industry event. The conference, which started Monday and ends Wednesday, is presented by new-media trade publication AlwaysOn. At the end of the day on Tuesday, AlwaysOn founder Tony Perkins announced 2007's "Best of Broadband (BOB) Awards," a hand-picked list of the top Web video ads that achieved viral success and actually worked.
Gimmicky? Of course. But after a day of panels and interviews, with plenty of talk of monetization and ROI and user engagement and the attention economy and just about every other ad-industry cliche you've ever heard of (as well as some you haven't), it was quite refreshing to watch a bunch of YouTube videos representing ad campaigns that actually worked. Actions, after all, speak louder than words.
Among the winners were winners of user-generated ad contests like Frito Lay's "Crash the Super Bowl" competition; faux-amateur clips like Ray-Ban's "Never Hide" ad; too-edgy-for-TV spots like one of Unilever's Dove "Campaign for Real Beauty" ads; and naturally, "Will It Blend?" The YouTube video series from blender manufacturer BlendTec had been created without the help of an extrenal agency, and had already built up quite a fan base when it published the notorious "iPhone in a blender" video.
The full list is here. But what I'd like to know is, for every one of these runaway hits, how many equally creative Web video ad campaigns flop? I'm still a believer in randomness on the Web. But then again, I can't see any way that a guy putting an iPhone into a blender and hitting the "smoothie" button couldn't have been a huge hit.
Corey Delaney, you're making us all look bad.
Last week, the Web became all too well acquainted with this Australian teenager and the sunglasses he refused to remove. On a Melbourne-area newscast, an anchor interviewed Delaney, 16, about the bacchanalia he'd hosted at his parents' house while they were out of town--and the $20,000 fine the police served to him. He responded with the most obnoxious flavor of awkwardness imaginable. Within due time it was all over the likes of YouTube, leaving the viral-video hordes to wonder if it was real. (It was.)
Within days, the world's most annoying Australian partier was appearing on T-shirts.
(Credit: BustedTees)What happened? YouTube fame, Facebook groups in his honor, fan Web sites, a BustedTee emblazoned with his likeness, and rumors that reality show producers wanted to hire him. We haven't seen a lemons-into-lemonade tale like this since Paris Hilton parlayed a sex tape into international stardom in 2003. Corey Delaney, like so many of today's social-media-friendly teenagers and twentysomethings, knew exactly what he was doing.
We're the Naked Generation, and we've forged quirky shamelessness and the potential for viral buzz into weapons for success. In just a few short years we've become experts in self-branding, using the tactics of celebrity exhibitionism with a heaping dose of clever irony as a means to propel ourselves to the top. We've accepted that pointing cameras at our faces is geeky and awkward, but that's all right, because we embrace all things geeky and awkward.
But every generation of trend-setting youth hits a moment when it devolves into self-parody. We came dangerously close with the too-Ivy-League-to-be-true Aleksey Vayner and his YouTube resume last year and came even closer with the "Halloween fairy" incident, in which a young man in the finance industry was caught red-handed faking a sick day when Facebook photos involving cheap beer and a Tinkerbell costume showed otherwise.
That brings us to young Corey. I talked about the Aussie exhibitionist with Ricky Van Veen, co-founder of CollegeHumor, one of the Naked Generation's hubs of both literal and figurative nudity (and sister company to BustedTees). "(Delaney) embraced it from the start," Van Veen said of the video. "He knew he was going to be a celebrity because he was awkward on that TV interview. There's no in-between, no uncertainty where it's like, 'should I embrace it?' He knew he was a celebrity before he even became one."
As we've seen recently, the avowed transparency that has shaped Generation Y can veer into a staged act. Corey Delaney might seem to be offering brutally honest answers to the news anchor, but he's not fooling anybody. And it's tacky. The party host's stab at instant fame makes the exhibitionist antics of videoblogging Star magazine columnist Julia Allison, Chris Crocker's much-parodied "Leave Britney Alone" tirade, and every self-centered "lifecaster" look like a night at the opera.
Of course, we're still trying to figure out what to do with the potential for self-propelled viral fame. Look at the difference between two of online videos' first big stars: the Internet fame of the "Star Wars Kid," who first emerged on the Web in late 2002 as the result of a nasty high school prank, resulted in lawsuits and therapy. Two years later, Gary Brolsma's "Numa Numa Dance" video spiraled into a much bigger success than the teen could have imagined, and what happened? Media appearances, stories in The New York Times, and video contests sponsored by StupidVideos.com.
Sometimes being shameless can get you in trouble.
In between was 2003, the year of the Paris Hilton sex tape. It was also the year of Old School, when the drunken faux-pas of Will Ferrell's "Frank the Tank" became fraternity legend. ("We're going streaking!") This was the year that being Naked, whether intentionally or unintentionally, didn't just become acceptable; it became social capital. Last year, 18-year-old Caitlin Upton, better known as Miss Teen South Carolina of viral-video fame, parlayed her apparent lack of brains into a modeling deal with Donald Trump's agency. Bet those "U.S. Americans," as she put it, aren't laughing at her now. OK, maybe they are, but their ridicule is making her famous.
Some naysayers (you know, from older generations) continue to tell us, that our breed of ambition won't cut it in the working world. The Corey Delaney video reopened all sorts of nasty monologues about the obnoxious narcissism of Generation Y and how all these darned under-30s are going to have to grow up and turn off their cell phone cameras, stat.
That's not true. Corporate recruiters for historically not-so-creative companies are turning to virtual worlds and viral video sites to find their next great minds (Aleksey Vayner notwithstanding). They know we've got potential, and they're hoping that our success in generating mass buzz through social media will translate to the boardroom. If we can make ourselves look good and pull in a following, they reason, we can do the same for their companies.
But sometimes we could use a little bit of self-consciousness. We learned that lesson from the Halloween fairy. Call it crowd theory, or Wikipedia theory, or whatever you want to: If you live your life on the Web, the Web will find out when you're faking it. It didn't work for "Bree," the Lonelygirl15 video blogger who captivated millions with her stark honesty on camera, only to be outed as a scripted actress. And it won't work for Delaney. When the first photos surface of the self-styled slacker out of character, he's toast. Actually, he's toast already. We're all sick of him.
"Being earnest, I think it's going to make a comeback soon," Van Veen told me. "You can only pile on so much irony until you've lost what you were talking about."
It is a truth universally acknowledged that one-time pop darling Britney Spears' performance at the MTV Video Music Awards earlier this month was a total and utter trainwreck.
Chris Crocker's 'Britney manifesto'
(Credit: YouTube)But, as viral video fans soon learned, some crazy guy with a YouTube account didn't agree. He promptly put up a clip of questionable sanity in which he lay in bed, sobbing, begging us haters to "Leave Britney Alone." The video has racked up nearly 8 million views on YouTube, reaching a degree of overkill that's made many of us hope the buzz will fade away quickly or give way to some other irritating pop-culture sensation.
But don't hold your breath. That impassioned young fellow is Chris Crocker, a 19-year-old from Tennessee whose 15 minutes (seconds?) of fame just might not quite be over: Variety is reporting that a television production company, 44 Blue Productions, has inked a deal with him for a potential TV show. It's not totally serendipitous, as the entertainment site explained that Crocker has actually had a sizeable MySpace following for some time now, and that he's been on 44 Blue's radar for almost a year.
"(The show is) going to pretty much be the 'Chris Crocker experience,'" 44 Blue co-founder Rasha Drachkovitch told Variety. "We consider him a rebel character that people will find interesting. He's going to be a TV star." In other words, they're catering to the Perez Hilton demographic.
Is nothing sacred anymore?
This vid's been making the viral rounds in my Twitter friends list and such, accompanied by claims of "greatest prank ever" and what-have-you. Personally, I think it's clever, but I can't seem to believe that people actually fell for it--and the camera angles and quality are suspiciously professional, not hidden-camera caliber. Still good for a few laughs, though.
- prev
- 1
- next
