Lauren RabainoGo grab your camera; it’s time to make moves. I’m gonna be famous; watch me blow up YouTube.
You, my friend, can be a celebrity. And you don’t have to go get plastic surgery like Fergie, Ashlee Simpson, or Heidi Montag from “The Hills” (don’t ask me how I know that). All you need is a webcam and a dream … at least that’s what Internet video addicts think.
With the advent of YouTube and MySpace, we’ve seen countless videos of people doing the dumbest things just for the sake of attention.
What’s really amazing is how unoriginal most of the videos are. So Alicia Keys releases a new song that’s thoroughly annoying, where her voice sounds on the verge of cracking and the piano part never changes. Who thinks to themselves, “The world needs to hear me sing that song.” Right, I forgot, we live in the time of “American Idol,” where if you can barely sing (like Clay Aiken), you can get a record deal and a one-hit record.
For real, type in “Alicia Keys Song” on YouTube and you have at least five videos of people trying to sing her songs. It’s like people forgot that there’s a place for this, where they serve liquid earmuffs in the form of cold beer that keep us all protected from your flat notes. It’s called a karaoke bar. Then again, the same idea could be applied to my home, all I need to do is go to the fridge and get a beer – that sounds like fun. I could just sit at home watching amateurs sing Alicia Keys songs and drink until they sound good. This would be cheaper than the karaoke bar, but then again, the downside of being at home is that I can’t subject these same people to a rendition of “What’s Love Got To Do With It” with my roommate. True story, it happened, and I am proud that I still know a lot of that song’s words from my childhood.
Worse than the singing is the rapping. It seems like for every entertainment news event, there’s a rap making fun of it. Now this would be really cool if the people posting these videos could actually rap, but instead we get dudes in silly costumes spitting out offbeat lyrics that sound like nursery rhymes. “People thought it was funny when William Hung sang because he couldn’t sing. People are going to love us rapping, even though we can’t rap, and it will be double funny because we’re rapping about Brangelina.”
Then there’s the rap parody. People need to accept that parody is an art. Being that a man named Weird Al Yankovic is the foremost artist in the genre makes it harder to argue that it’s an art, but really, there’s no chance anyone else can make a rap parody as good as “White and Nerdy”
or “All About the Pentiums.” Nevertheless, there are hundreds of Soulja Boy parodies online. Really, world? The real song is bad enough. We don’t need “Soda Boy,” or “Crap Dat Caca Man.” (I have to admit, there is a gem within all this caca and it goes by the name of “Kosher Boy.”) Now if only there was a way we could stop wasting our time waiting for “Yank Dat Cameltoe” to either be funny or less offensive.
Wait! There used to be a system by which your stupid video had to be proven as entertaining before others could watch it. That system was very high-tech and known as “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” Sometimes I wish Bob Saget would narrate all of the videos I watch online. That would be heaven drizzled with syrup and candied pecans.
So if you want to get viral, put up some videos and get original – we can hear you sing Alicia Keys at the karaoke bar. If you’re going to rap, be sure you can rap. And don’t try to make a parody about something like poo or soda; I don’t care how funny the TRENDASAURUS thinks the word “caca” is.