»

Columbia YouTube.com celebrities deal with fame

By Kiran Kaur

Published May 7, 2008

YouTube.com, in all its glory, might be an ideal outlet for “not funny!” videos of a little boy’s concern for his bleeding brother, Missouri governors deciding not to run for reelection, a unicorn named Charlie, important things like that. But when MU students post their productions on the popular video sharing Web site, watch out. It’s the stuff celebrity gossip blogs are made of.

Take Leslie Rogers, for instance. The MU sophomore, out of sheer boredom, decided to make a video of herself one day in April, jamming to “The Final Countdown” using lip-synching mastery and a Guitar Hero guitar.

“It was late at night, and I wasn’t ready to go to bed,” Rogers says.

Good thing she didn’t. The video made it from the Mark Twain residence hall on the MU campus all the way to perezhilton.com, the famed celebrity gossip blog.

“I was getting video responses like, ‘Dude, you’re on Perez Hilton,’” Rogers says.

Furthermore, the video link popped up both on ebaumsworld.com and Internet Superstar, increasing the number of views on the video and propelling it toward what would be considered a YouTube success; it now has more than 250,000 views.

Rogers was prepared for the negativity but not the popularity.

“I expected some jerk who was going to say something bad about me,” she says. “I never thought it would get that popular.”

Popular would be an understatement. Perez Hilton is known for his A-list Hollywood low-downs and is practically a household name; at least, any household that has a member of young generation in it. However, Rogers did not know of the gossipmonger who would one day be showcasing her video on his highly-trafficked Web site, saying she had absolutely no clue who he was before her video was on his site.

“Not entirely sure it was in the best intentions or not,” Rogers says of Hilton posting her video. “I like to think he thought it was funny or something.”

Although the video was meant to be taken in an entirely humorous manner, Rogers had to deal with some backlash along the way. Negative comments have appeared on the Web sites with the video. In addition, Rogers wrote to ebaumsworld asking to take the link off, but they have not yet done so and the video remains. Rogers now moderates all of the comments that are posted on YouTube, or just ignores them entirely.

“Some of the things they were saying about me were really, really bad,” she says. “If there’s anything that’s out of line, I’ll remove it and block the users. I don’t want these people to think it’s OK to say those things, because it’s not.”

Even though the possibility of removing the video entirely exists, it would not do much good.

“There would be no point in me removing it,” Rogers says. “Someone made a point of telling me they’ve saved it, so that they can put it back up if I’ve removed it.”

But Rogers maintains a good nature about the situation, and even plans on making more videos, in addition to the 17 she already has on her YouTube account. She just knows how to be more careful with it.

“I’ll put up videos with other people instead of me, so that they’re not just focusing on me,” she says.

Her intention with every video she posts is nothing in a serious manner.

“Every video I make has some kind of humorous aspect to it,” she says. “Because I don’t like doing it straight-out serious, it’s boring.”

So what makes a YouTube video so favored? Music skills might seal the deal. Another MU student-produced video has enjoyed great success because of just that. Much like Rogers’ “Final Countdown” parody, it involves one classic song, with some minor tweaking and personalizing.

MU junior Tyrone “DJBeatz” Williams likes to crank dat Soulja Boy to his own track, “Crank Dat Crackhead”.

The YouTube video, which boasts more than 270,000 views, features Da CrackaZ, a Break Time gas station and a lyrical remake of “Crank Dat (Soulja Boy)” assuring you that “This ain’t the Soulja boy, this ain’t the Spiderman.” The singers talk about a drugged lifestyle and put in elements of the original Soulja Boy in their music video.

The inspiration for the video stemmed from a competitive desire to do something different.

“I was watching a whole bunch of crank dat’s, and I realized that I needed to do something better,” Williams says.

He said his lyrics are centered on what happened in season two of the Dave Chappelle show, focusing especially on character Tyrone Biggums, who is a crack addict.

“I was Tyrone Biggums for Halloween this past year,” Williams says.

The video was shot in one day, over the course of five hours. The people in the video are all friends of Williams. Although they had doubts, they went ahead and executed the plan.

“I think people were kind of skeptical,” Williams says. “But we just went down to Brady Commons and started doing it.”

Like Rogers, they never expected the video to escalate to new heights. But after three months of sitting on it, they managed to create a YouTube sensation and corroborate to the fact that sometimes, just plain humor and originality can lead a simple YouTube video to great success.

“It was something different,” Williams says. “I liked it, it was pretty funny to me.”