Oh Word’s Rafi Kam makes some good points in critizing both Lynne d Johnson and Xiaochang Li regarding their thoughts on the success of Soulja Boy’s online marketing featuring YouTube.
However, in all fairness, Lynne’s post is a "look over here and start paying some attention" post while Xiaochang is a straight-up academic. She’ll work through it piece by piece and we can forage for useful bits along the way or gain deeper understanding if the work matures but it’s a mistake to expect her to produce anything immediately useful. That’s like hoping to find some ripe tomatoes or fresh flowers when you’re still clearing out the rocks from a new garden bed.
Unfortunately, after a promising introduction that successfully paints a clear picture, Rafi doesn’t offer much more than don’t target 13 year old white girls and there’s not much new here for "your average indie musician" who is "just looking to use the technology to get their music [to] an audience".
Honestly, if you just see technology as a distribution medium or a marketing tool, then you’re missing what’s going on and haven’t adjusted to the current media environment. And I would guess that Rafi would tell you the same thing if he wasn’t focusing on other concerns.
As Rafi notes, chartreuse does make some useful points around the targetting of 13 year old white girls, though leaving you to work out the details for yourself unless you want to hire him.
What do I have for you?
I’d say take a much closer look at the dance craze and try to understand what that’s about and how that fueled the Crank Dat phenomenon. Don’t just use it to sketch a pretty picture at the beginning before moving to the more comfortable issue of technology. Find out about dance. Think about the fact that people often equate dancing with not thinking, with being fully in the moment, with being fully alive.
But also remember Chuck D’s lyrics about reaching the bourgeois and rocking the boulevard.
Public Enemy was the best when their beats not only rocked but brought cutting edge sounds into the mix. And those that still wanted to think had plenty to work with.
If you really want to understand the Soulja Boy phenomenon, you have to go much further than how one works the web to one’s marketing advantage. You’ll have to consider actual fans and their actual experience of the music and the place of that music in their actual lives.
And if you really do want to target 13 year old white girls, then hit up Rafi or chartreuse, they seem to know a lot about the topic.
Related ProHipHop Coverage:
Hitwise Called Soulja Boy’s Success Back in May
Good post, especially the last half.
I agree that I did little to truly illuminate the why’s of the hit. I was still dismissing the mere technology notion at the post’s end when I could have moved into more specifics about why this dance over others.
I had some ideas about that subject during my commute in this morning so maybe there will be a follow-up post although I don’t think I have the time to become an expert on dance. I can do more amateur theorizing though. That’s a specialty of mine.
This might help further this topic along, Malcolm Gladwell discussing “Hit” prediction:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/2006/10/09/predictable
Rafi, researching dance is one of my legitimate areas of academic expertise and most of my peer reviewed publications and conference presentations focused on dance.
So, as a certified expert, I can assure you that you already know most of what you need to know to pursue these kinds of things.
You saw what was up with the kids with a clear eye and much of figuring out this stuff is simply about giving yourself time to watch.
Time is what we’re all so short of but, even given time constraints, you can relate your own experiences of totally rocking out to a song and how those kinds of songs affect you differently than other kinds.
I dug Onyx when they first came out because some of those songs made me literally just want to jump around. The mean mugging was silly and I laughed at them more than once but that macho dance music was great so I totally gave them a pass on everything else.
Rafi, you’re also situated within the lives of children. I see my nephews from time to time and we talk about related stuff but I’m not in or close to their world on a regular basis.
That family angle will give you access and opportunities to observe kids in ways that can really feed into your ongoing analysis. When something like seeing those kids dancing to Crank That happens, if the opportunity is available, one quick entry route is to simply ask the kids later about the song, why they liked dancing to it and so forth.
And you can do that without any special training.
Clyde, great post, and you’re absolutely right that the dance craze is central to understanding the phenomenon. My posts were more or less precursory and truncations of a portion of a much more extensive collaborative examination of Crank Dat as a media artifact which focused predominantly on the dance craze in a sociohistorical context. We focused especially on the ways in which new distribution platforms has shifted the way which participation in a dance craze works, making greater allowances for appropriation, remixing, mutation, and the emphasis of community alliances through the dance as something of a platform itself.
Sounds like you’re into some interesting work.
I’m having mixed feelings about the concept of a dance as a platform but it’s definitely something to think about.
I think of dance as more of a medium for the processes you describe but that immediately moves to a different metaphor.
Dance may not actually fit online metaphors very well due to the whole messy “embodiment” issue and a single dance that’s shared via videos functions rather differently than a platform like YouTube that creates a structural context for such “content”.
Humans are platforms for dances.
Clyde, sorry, I should have been more clear in my wording — I didn’t mean to suggest dance in general to be a platform, but the Crank Dat dance craze in particular. And I was trying to describe the fact that far from generating a coherent community, Crank Dat actually created a stage upon which different communities could represent themselves by generating different versions and mutations of the dance. For instance, when we did it here at MIT, we all ran out for lab coats, despite the fact that most of us don’t actually work in labs (at least not ones that requires coats). There was an overwhelming urge to embody the idea “MIT-ness”. This isn’t new, of course, but personalization of this level is crucial to the dance itself to a degree that I’ve never previously seen with other dance crazes.
Though I love to analyze trends like any good blogger, I am beginning to believe that most hits in media, especially in music and the web are unpredictable and patternless.
Perhaps Souljah Boy is a “Black Swan”, and we are trying to find useful lessons where there are none.
Peep: http://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Impact-Highly-Improbable/dp/1400063515
I mentioned on the Black Web 2.0 blog that I believe Mr. Collipark’s production is a much responsible for the success of the song, as the web marketing element.
So what is a new artist to do to get a hit? Hire Collipark or post a dance on YouTube? They’d be better off praying for a miracle.
the comment above was from me, Hashim
Hashim:
“I am beginning to believe that most hits in media, especially in music and the web are unpredictable and patternless.”
I would describe them more as nonlinear and complex, like most phenomenon in the natural world. What that means is we see a particular pattern, Soulja Boy’s popularity, but we can’t predict such success, therefore it’s unpredictable but that doesn’t mean its without reason.
But no one’s ever publicly revealed the data necessary to do a study that could tell us what really happened with Soulja Boy. We simply don’t have the evidence and haven’t done the research.
“Perhaps Souljah Boy is a “Black Swan”, and we are trying to find useful lessons where there are none.”
You can learn from Black Swans but people generally learn the wrong thing cause they don’t know what they’re looking at so that’s a very real danger.
But, on the topic of outlier data, that’s where you often see new trends develop, i.e., out on the edges and in unexpected forms.
Good luck sorting that out with the questionable data we do have and the lies and obfuscation of the music industry on top of that.
Xiachang, thanks for continuing the conversation:
“I was trying to describe the fact that far from generating a coherent community, Crank Dat actually created a stage upon which different communities could represent themselves by generating different versions and mutations of the dance.”
Still, that’s almost flipping the notion of platform, which is an interesting idea.
I need to find out more about how you or your milieu is using the term “platform” because my use comes mainly from the business/tech community and I know such terms often take divergent paths.
But if you are using it in a similar manner as stage, then the problem simply shifts because you’re actually talking about a network of multiple stages.
“There was an overwhelming urge to embody the idea “MIT-ness”.”
Like a viral contagion.
“personalization of this level is crucial to the dance itself to a degree that I’ve never previously seen with other dance crazes.”
The thing is, it seems like it’s YouTube that was the platform that allowed a dance contagion to move much more rapidly and visibly through a population than before.
Soulja Boy’s was the biggest to date and quite dramatic.
The metaphor of a contagious agent is even more useful if we look at the folks at the BET Awards when Soulja Boy performed:
http://www.vidrap.com/2007/10/soulja-boy-at-b.html
So it is the song/dance connecting a variety of staging areas and zones of activity, i.e., connecting multiple platforms into irregular networks.
That feels a bit closer to a reasonable description.
Great stuff to consider. I miss doing this kind of thing.
Clyde, I can be really unclear with my word choice, so maybe I can try again: What I think I mean by “platform” or “stage” is similar to the notion of medium, but I didn’t want to use medium because I think of that as a larger concept or an expressive form (dance, for instance) where as what I mean here is the particular instance(s) of “medium”-ness, in which the Crank Dat dance is a sort of channel or means by which individual communities perform themselves.
But I very much agree that the spread of Soulja Boy was viral in nature, but to think of it solely in those terms I think is incomplete. It tells us about the behavior of the spreading, but the behaviors and practices that enabled it. Or, to put it another way, it tell us how, but not why, and what that might imply about how we think about participation.
I hear you. Thanks for clarifying that and I don’t think the right terms are necessarily as obvious as some might think.
I agree the viral process is the how and not the why.
I would have to agree with the “all cranked out” statement. For some reason the south seems to have this monkey see monkey do approach to their music. Superman, Spiderman, Aquaman… Maaaan I am supa hero-ed out! Where is the originality? I’m in no way dragging the south in the dirt as I hear a lot of others do. As a matter of fact all props go out to Soulja Boy for proving that their is money in the power of youth and opening the door for a group that’s well deserved and long over due. I have been seeing Street Runnaz Click snapping and popping on stage since they were 15 years old and there’s not a question in my mind that after seeing the moves Soulja Boy is doing now, he had to be a student of Street Runnaz Click. These kids have been opening up for major acts all over the south to the mid-west doing the same dances Soulja Boy is doing today. I saw them for the first time over 4 years ago when all this crank dancing as it’s called today was no where in site. Truth be told, I think they owe a lot to Soulja Boy for re-opening the doors to the money. While Soulja Boy boasts on youtube and myspace videos about his $600,000 deal with Collipark Music who I heard was also considering signing Street Runnaz Click at one point. Word on the wire is that Street Runnaz Click just inked a deal with Ruthless/Sony worth twice as much as Soulja Boy did with Collipark Music. Once again, thanks Soulja Boy for allowing a higher standard of Southern act to be recognized. That’s the way it should be. In the words of D.J. Drama… “Pay Attention!”
Crank Dat is an international phenomenon with a strong base across the U.S.
“the south seems to have this monkey see monkey do approach”
Almost everybody is monkey see monkey do whether they know it or not. The South is unique but not in that regard.