The latest internet phenoms, all have one thing in common, despite their musical styles appearing like night and day. One is a shirtless rapper from Los Angeles, that has gathered a lot of die-hard fans, over one video, in which he tops himself. The other is a 13 year old girl, that cannot sing, sings badly written songs, in which she details the interesting tidbits of her day, events such as eating cereal and waiting for the bus stop. The last, is from these shores, a young girl from Birmingham, bragging about how sexually prolific she is, this being made more sensational by the fact she is 17 years old. Now what has made Tyler, The Creator, Rebecca Black and OG Niki overnight YouTube sensations, is nothing to do with their musical talents, in Rebecca's case, its her actual lack of it, the three of them have achieved internet notoriety because something about their song/freestyle has been so outrageous.
Tyler, because he appears fully clothed at the start of the video, rapping about everyday things (threesomes with triceratops) by the end he has eaten a coakroach, his eyes have turned black, and for his finale, after taking off his shirt, revealing many gold chains, the young rapper ends up hanging himself. Rebecca Black's laughable but bankable
'Friday', people check her video to actually laugh at her, not realising they and countless others are racking up millions and millons of views (over 100 million in fact and two million downloads for the song), which naturally results in a bidding war, because hungry label execs are in search of a YouTube monster they can make a lot of money off. I'm talking Euros, Dollars, Pounds, Yen heck even Cedi's. OG Niki, the young girl from Birmz, now has a verified account status on Twitter, usually stated on the profiles of mega celebrities or tweeting politicians. Word around the online watercooler is, that she is holding several meetings with important people in the industry, her rise to fame might be the most shocking, a girl bragging about her sexual exploits is nothing new, but being so graphic and talking about taking on six men, I am pretty sure this is brand new. Not even the Notorious K.I.M. or Ill Na Na herself (that's Foxy Brown, for the uneducated) were talking about things the way OG Niki does.
A still from the shockingly bad yet humorous video. Check out the grammar as well.
Which led me to thinking, if an aspiring artist wants a whole load of YouTube views, and to be a #hash-tag trending topic on Twitter, they might have to shock us, not blow us away by musical talent. Even look at a certain Ms. Minaj, before people started listening intently to her, the talk was whether her asset's are real or not, and how everybody wants to hit it, many girls included.
The real shame is not that OG Niki and Rebecca Black may end up being exploited and scribbling newly developed signatures on many papers, not knowing what they are signing on the dotted line for, but as of writing this, I am watching a Cyhi Da Prynce interview on
The Monique Show, someone with great potential, but may not realise it, because he could be too 'ordinary' for us to tweet or update our Blackberry's about him. Tyler's line about picking Steve Wonder as a running back in American Football is pretty darn cold, but the drones off Tyler 'fans' who had only heard or seen him when the
Yonkers vid dropped, but now rep Odd Future (his team) like they have been with them during the Myspace age, really annoys me. If the video wasn't out there, most of them probably still wouldn't have heard of him.
Peep the Tyler vid if you haven't (above), and you know where to go see Rebecca and the young OG. (YouTube folks, those videos are not being embedded anywhere around here).
Finally, any aspiring artists out there should intentionally make a bad song, have a video with a lot of T+A, or just be outrageous, that's the quickest way to gain the most amount of follwers or views on the ol' Tube. Maybe Tyler, Niki and Rebecca aren't so night and day after all, perhaps they met in the afternoon, and with plans to make the netboyz go crazy. I believe, it can be claimed they have. And then some.
