The song Live Your Life, by rapper T.I. features Rihanna just came out late last year. Rihanna does an accompanying vocal track produced by the beatmaker Just Blaze which consists of a sample of the tune Dragostea din tei, which has the “mai ai hee” harmony that many now cannot hear without an association to the internet phenomena of the numa numa dance. The song Live Your Life by T.I. has been successful in the United States, reaching #1 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Rihanna & T.I. collaboration featuring the numa numa chorus with link to music video
Rihanna’s refrain of the numa numa song which was originally by the Romanian group O-Zone seems sightly eerie in light of the phenomena of amateur covers of Dragostea din tei. The song inspired a number of parody videos distributed over the internet, the most famous and paramount original being Gary Brolsma’s popular “Numa Numa Dance” video in 2004. The “Numa Numa Dance”, first emerged on the flash site Newgrounds.com, and has since become so famous that it inspired thousands of parodies in an almost viral manner.
A flash cartoon that arose out of Gary Brolsma video which sparked thousands of parodies
The T.I/Rihanna song that many now cannot hear without an association to the numa numa internet phenomena is similar to the Soulja Boy dance and song, in fact in an almost opposite manner of spreading and popularity. In the music video for Live Your Life it ‘shows’ T.I before he made his fortune from being a hopeful rapper in a story-line which I quite confusing to grasp until you relize that it is playing the events backwards. Flashbacks periodically show T.I trying to get a record deal. T.I. in the end of the video is in the same shot where he is walking down the L.A. sewers, where he has been beaten up, but that he was successful in buying his way out of the original record deal, both with the money he made and by getting jumped out. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Your_Life)
This in itself is the sort of paradox which several artists have made a focus of their work. They often have a love-hate relationship with their patron: Their Record Label, which keeps them in a constant symbiosis with the established music industry. Artists often therefore spend a good deal of their efforts to be considered ‘authentic’ to their audience and often pursue an image that results in being almost rebellious in an attempt to critique the media system which is giving them the very fame which has given them a platform in the first place. Whether Soulja Boy or T.I/Rihanna have become validated through their use of association is debatable, but the fact that it adds a greater level of connectedness to fans has been noted. A full circle may in fact be observed in that Gary Brolsma is a great deal more recognizable than the members of O-zone, and he is actually in a band now which will be recording an album soon. The members of O-zone never were able to really break through into the North American music scene and they have since moved here, perhaps an interaction may occur, but this itself would be a manifestation of the vastly evolved expression of new media that we are observing now.
With the popularity of music television through the development of MTV during the 1980s, aesthetics and what it means to perform has since drastically changed. In Andrew Goodwin’s book Dancing In the Distraction Factory, the author analyzes in various lights what it is to be a performer in the industry. This book was written before the exponential popularity of the internet and unknowns now being propelled into stardom through their performances hitting the right key with a peer audience. However several of Goodwin’s points can and do apply to the the interaction between star and audience through different levels of medium, connection and interface. He asserts that it is in fact through the evolution of production practices that particular shifts occur in the representation of popular music. One of the key assertions is that we are moving in a more conservative ideological direction in popular music acceptance.
This has been debated, but for the purpose of this entry I cast a focus primarily of Goodwin’s assertion that pop stardom represention is a basis of consolidation. This can be broken down to the comparison of how music television has been a highly controlled version of events. Star-text is a phrase that he uses to express the way of which stars are personified, and it is only through the medium of impromptu interviews or actual planned insurgent attitudes that the artist can be portrayed in a light of stepping out of the star-text. This has been used as an opportunity for artists to critique the music industry itself, which has been done in a very tongue and cheek way in both the case of Live Your Life and Soulja Boy. The reason for these two music videos being noted as an interesting exception is that as Goodwin asserts, music videos often offer an affirmative vision through album covers and advertisements which “usually denies space for a critical view of the industry”. It is surprising then for these two music videos which attempt to do the opposite by breaking the hegemony of the music industry and are being circulated in the channels which mass-mediated meanings are broadcast, as well as by the more grassroots means of user generated sites.
This phenomena of soulja boy was started by 16 year old DeAndre Ramone Way who in April 2007 posted a video that he had done of a dance to a song which he had created, on to YouTube. The response to this was very similar to that of the numa numa dance where people would generate their own version of the song and dance, either through imitation or parody. Following this, in August 2007 DeAndre was signed to Interscope Records and did a video where he goes back and does an almost biographical look at the process of how his creation exploded into an almost viral spreading. The music video itself, although produced through the record label offers an almost idolizing the way that users made this artist famous, and in this way, are being rather humorous in an self-critiquing way, that is, he got famous without their production. Their eventual influence certainly boosted his gain from his creation, but the real result was a glorification of the original phenomena, where the record label’s music video is an ode to user-generated content becoming popular through inter-connectivity.
Soulja Boy with a link to the official video that was made
Both Soulja Boy and T.I./Rihanna tapped into the strength of feeling that has existed through amateur online videos spread viraly through amateurs doing covers and posting, with other video makers take and then re-post. This mutual phenomena was discussed in Michael Wesch’s study which he presented to the Library of Congress called An Anthropological Introduction to You Tube. From a new media point of view however, this is an amazing breakthrough in how our interaction with artists is evolving and art creation itself is being constantly broken down and re-worked, whether it be through corporately generated content through established artists with funding or through dedicated amateurs.
Sources: An Anthropological introduction to YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU
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