celebrity gossip, academic style

I first saw links to what is now known as “The JK Wedding Entrance Dance” (or, alternately, “Best Wedding Entrance Ever”) on YouTube and Twitter about a week ago. Cute, likable, fun. I saw more links to it over the next few days, along the lines of the spread of the Susan Boyle footage from earlier this year. And while this clip doesn’t have as many overall views as Boyle (whose current tally is a staggering 92 million views — enough to put her in the top ten over most viewed YouTube videos of all time) it constitutes one of the swiftest aggregations of hits — 14.8 million in the two weeks since its posting on July 19th. In other words, its ‘virality’ was even more powerful than Boyle’s. Since then, the couple has appeared on The Today Show (recreating their dance with their wedding party) and created a website that enables fans of the videos to donate to the Sheila Wellstone Institute, which works to fight domestic abuse (more on that later). A quick news search produces hundreds of articles on the pair — from The New York Times to small regional papers, from industry blogs to international papers-of-record.

Of course, if you’ve yet to see the clip, you best do so below:

The phenomenal virality of the video is now being held up as evidence for a number of technological developments. First, recall that the video uses Chris Brown’s “Forever” as its theme. Chris Brown is a Sony Artist — and Sony, like Warner Bros., Columbia, and myriad other content providers, have bots and actual employees trolling YouTube for copyright infringements such as this one. Sometimes, as in the case of the Phillipine’s Prison Dancers (see here and here), they force YouTube to remove the video (or force the uploader to take off the music). As you can see, the first video, for Thriller, has remained in its original form — the music label as simply overlaid a link to buy the song at iTunes. In the second video, for Soulja Boy, the label, WMG, has forced the user to strip the song of its music and overlay it with another musical choice — in this case, classical music that is likely either in popular domain or that no one would think to challenge.

Now, the JK Wedding Entrance Video was ripe for just such a stripping. Indeed, according to YouTube sources, Sony was notified of the infringement. But someone in the company was smart enough to see the value of the virality, and simply overlaid the video with a link to buy Brown’s single (admittedly catchy, however repugnant I find Brown and his actions in real life) on iTunes. Embedding was initially disabled (which, for those of you unfamiliar with YouTube, meant that you couldn’t copy the ‘code’ of the video to embed it into blog posts, newspapers articles, etc.) which would have severely inhibited the spread of the video — but it was quickly enabled in the days following the initial spread .

Now, it’s being heralded — both by YouTube and its parent, Google, as well as several members of the press at large — as the sort of ‘success story’ that should encourage freer use of copyrighted material. The argument is pretty simple, albeit paradoxical: if you let something on the internet for free, people are more likely to buy it. Whether it’s books, articles, pictures, movies, or songs, this has been the maxim for the digital age that the old guard of established media have been pushing so hard against….despite the fact that the old way of doing things (selling hard copies — of CDs, books, etc.) is clearly no longer working.

Google even published a blog post, which I’ve excerpted below:

At YouTube, we have sophisticated content management tools in place to help rights holders control their content on our site. The rights holders for “Forever” used these tools to claim and monetize the song, as well as to start running Click-to-Buy links over the video, giving viewers the opportunity to purchase the music track on Amazon and iTunes. As a result, the rights holders were able to capitalize on the massive wave of popularity generated by “JK Wedding Entrance Dance” — in the last week, searches for “Chris Brown Forever” on YouTube have skyrocketed, making it one of the most popular queries on the site:

This traffic is also very engaged — the click-through rate (CTR) on the “JK Wedding Entrance” video is 2x the average of other Click-to-Buy overlays on the site. And this new-found interest in downloading “Forever” goes beyond the viral video itself: “JK Wedding Entrance” also appears to have influenced the official “Forever” music video, which saw its Click-to-Buy CTR increase by 2.5x in the last week.

So, what does all of this mean? Despite compelling data and studies around consumer purchasing habits, many still question the promotional and bottom-line business value sites like YouTube provide artists. But in the last week, over a year after its release, Chris Brown’s “Forever” has again rocketed up the charts, reaching as high as #4 on the iTunes singles chart and #3 on Amazon’s best selling MP3 list. We’ve seen similar successes in the past with partners like Monty Python.

Now, for Google, the PR potential is incredibly high — this may prove that their purchase of YouTube was well-reasoned, and that it can, indeed, turn a profit. And while I am fascinated by the claims that both Google/YouTube and other industry insiders are making as to the power of this particular clip, I’m even more fascinated by the content of the clip itself, in part because it illuminates much of what ‘we’ (mostly American) love to see in a viral video.

A few thoughts:

1.) It’s evocative.

It’s a wedding. Americans love weddings. They love midwestern weddings (like this one). Along those lines, the tropes are very familiar — everyone’s been in a church (I bet you 10 bucks this particular one is Lutheran) that looks like this. It thus reproduces feelings of intimacy, authenticity, and ordinariness — all things we like in our TV and, in many ways, in our YouTube clips.

2.) It has low production values — both aesthetically and the dance itself.

If this were glossy and gorgeous, we’d be skeptical. If the camera work was skillful, if it were in high def, if the sound were good, we’d think they had planned to post it onto YouTube, which makes it seem manipulative and conniving. As is, it’s just their fun little dance for their friends and family. The dance is also not intimidating in any way — these guys are crappy dancers like most of our friends. Their moves are unoriginal. No one is super gorgeous. Everyone’s goofy. They’re white, and dance in a stereotypically white fashion. If they were professionals, it might seem cooler — but it certainly wouldn’t have the same sort of broad appeal.

3.) It’s completely NON-provocative.

Again, the bad dancing is key here. Some might say their choice of a Chris Brown song is provocative, but the couple has attempted to inoculate such criticism by funneling any monies received into a domestic abuse resource center. The song itself, regardless of the Brown connection, is quite harmless — but not annoyingly familiar. The couple appears genial, affable, and completely surprised by their fame in videos, as evidenced in the Today interview below:

I mean look at this guy! He’s wearing an argyle vest and glasses! And as they attest, they rehearsed ONCE — the night before the wedding — a point that only further contributes to the feeling of spontaneity and authenticity. Unlike Susan Boyle, several of the top YouTube videos of all time involve such spontaneity — most often with children, who we view as the most spontaneous and authentic of all. (My two personal favorites are “Charlie Bit My Finger” (112 million views) and “David After Dentist” (26 million views))

There’s also a matter of joy. And this is something rather resistant to analysis. It’s the combination of the silliness, the spontaneity, the wedding, the aesthetics, the non-assuming nature of the ‘stars,’ and the overall ‘vibe,’ for lack of a better word. It’s what makes a video go viral — because it, like the poignancy and melodrama of Susan Boyle’s story, or the mundane childness of ‘Charlie Bit My Finger,’ is what attracts us to such videos. As was the case with the ‘cinema of attractions’ that predated narrative cinema, when droves came to watch short, ten to sixty second films of strong men posing, women dancing, trains arriving at the station or waves crashing against a sea well, it’s not the talent of the film, per se, but the experience it creates. Linda Williams would probably call the YouTube video — or at least the extremely viral ones — a type of ‘body genre’: along with the horror movie, the melodrama, and the porn flick, the best of these videos inspire bodily, visceral responses, whether joy, fear, tears, etc.

In sum, this post isn’t really about internet stardom per se — but what makes for a ‘star’ video. Apart from the exponential rise in the sources of such videos (and the addition of sound), little has changed since the very earliest days of cinema.