Let’s dance … a short story about Youtube video buzz
Do you know Soulja boy? Born DeAndre Chad Ramone Way, he is a 17 years old rapper from Chicago. This summer, he stayed at the head of the billboard hot 100 during 7 weeks. The phenomenon is now arriving in France … put your sneakers on!
The success of SouljaBoy is interesting because of it is based on a Youtube buzz. He recorded a video of a specific dance on his track “Crank that” that was viewed by more than 12 millions people during 2 month. The single was also listened more than 29 millions times on his Myspace page. The dance is not really difficult to learn and that’s the key point to explain the buzz: everybody can (try to) do the same and quickly Youtube was inundated by thousands of video recorded by fans imitating Soulja Boy.
As it’s a video buzz, let’s look at some ones:
the official video clip
a fan’s one
The buzz was also possible because Soulja Boy makes a “light” version of Crank which is a kind of Rap music from the South of US. Soulja Boy’s lyrics are not as explicit as the lyrics of the leaders of the movement like Lil’Jon and seduced a large panel of people. The dance is a little boyish too. For information, at the beginning Crank is a mixing of “crazy” and “drunk” …
As I said in the introduction, this Soulja Boy trend is now coming in France but it is not the first “dance video buzz” here: it was the tecktonik. Young dancers recorded their best dances and put those videos on Youtube. I won’t show you any videos of that dance because of it is awful but in the tow cases the buzz was created by really young peoples; the oldest are teenagers in most of the time.
Those two new dances have their own groups visible on the homepage of Dailymotion; it underlines the success of this kind of “dance buzz”.
And to add some more fun, I swear that I’ll record a video of me dancing the Soulja Boy’s crunk if Bob give me a 20/20 at the Oral exam!
It's easy there is a video lesson … a kind of e-learning ;)
At last, you can visit the official website where there are a lot of videos. You could see stars like Natalie Portman trying to crunk ! Someone told me that a video of Bob crunking is also online on this website ….
by Rémi D.
