Circulation, Sociality, and Sound in Viral Media Paula Harper
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Unmute This: Circulation, Sociality, and Sound in Viral Media Paula Harper Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Columbia University 2019 © 2019 Paula Harper All rights reserved ABSTRACT Unmute This: Circulation, Sociality, and Sound in Viral Media Paula Harper Cats at keyboards. Dancing hamsters. Giggling babies and dancing flashmobs. A bi-colored dress. Psy’s “Gangnam Style” music video. Over the final decade of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first, these and countless other examples of digital audiovisual phenomena have been collectively adjectivally described through a biological metaphor that suggests the speed and ubiquity of their circulation—“viral.” This circulation has been facilitated by the internet, and has often been understood as a product of the web’s celebrated capacities for democratic amateur creation, its facilitation of unmediated connection and sharing practices. In this dissertation, I suggest that participation in such phenomena—the production, watching, listening to, circulation, or “sharing” of such objects—has constituted a significant site of twenty-first-century musical practice. Borrowing and adapting Christopher Small’s influential 1998 coinage, I theorize these strands of practice as viral musicking. While scholarship on viral media has tended to center on visual parameters, rendering such phenomena silent, the term “viral musicking” seeks to draw media theory metaphors of voice and listening into dialogue with musicology, precisely at the intersection of audiovisual objects which are played, heard, listened to. The project’s methodology comprises a sonically attuned media archeology, grounded in close readings of internet artifacts and practices; this sonic attunement is afforded through musicological methods, including analyses of genre, aesthetics, and style, discourse analysis, and twenty-first-century reception (micro)histories across a dynamic media assemblage. By analyzing particular ecosystems of platforms, behavior, and devices across the first decades of the twenty-first century, I chart a trajectory in which unpredictable virtual landscapes were tamed into entrenched channels and pathways, enabling a capacious “virality” comprising disparate phenomena from simple looping animations to the surprise release of Beyoncé’s 2013 album. Alongside this narrative, I challenge utopian claims of Web 2.0’s digital democratization by explicating the iterative processes through which material, work, and labor were co-opted from amateur content creators and leveraged for the profit of established media and corporate entities. “Unmute This” articulates two main arguments. First, that virality reified as a concept and set of dynamic-but-predictable processes over the course of the first decades of the twenty- first century; this dissertation charts a cartography of chaos to control, a heterogeneous digital landscape funneled into predictable channels and pathways etched ever more firmly and deeply across the 2010s. Second, that analyzing the musicality of viral objects, attending to the musical and sonic parameters of virally-circulating phenomena, and thinking of viral participation as an extension of musical behavior provide a productive framework for understanding the affective, generic, and social aspects of twenty-first-century virality. The five chapters of the dissertation present analyses of a series of viral objects, arranged roughly chronologically from the turn of the twenty-first century to the middle of the 2010s. The first chapter examines the loops of animated phenomena from The Dancing Baby to Hampster Dance and the Badgers animation; the second moves from loops to musicalization, considering remixing approaches to the so-called “Bus Uncle” and “Bed Intruder” videos. The third chapter also deals with viral remixing, centering around Rebecca Black’s “Friday” video, while the fourth chapter analyzes “unmute this” video posts in the context of the mid-2010s social media platform assemblage. The final chapter presents the 2013 surprise release of Beyoncé’s self-titled visual album as an apotheosis to the viral narratives that precede it—a claim that is briefly interrogated in the dissertation’s epilogue. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures ii Acknowledgements iii Introduction: Viral Musicking and Unmuting Musical Virality 1 Chapter 1: Musical Loops and the Early Internet 43 Chapter 2: “Bus Uncle,” “Bed Intruder,” and Musicalizing (as) Mass Surveillance 123 Chapter 3: Reviling, Remixing, and Recuperating “Rebecca Black – ‘Friday’” 164 Chapter 4: “Unmute This”: A Vernacular Microgenre in the Platform Assemblage 202 Chapter 5: BEYONCÉ: Viral Techniques and the Visual Album 235 Epilogue: Megaphones, Echo Chambers, and Grabbing ‘Em by the Pussy 273 References 285 i LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Two examples of the “Socially Awkward Penguin” meme .......................................... 19 Figure 2: Cartoon “They Should be Segregated Off to Themselves and Made to Sing these Songs to Each Other,” The Baltimore Sun, 12 August 1923: 8. ...................................................... 34 Figure 3: Still of Dancing Baby animation ................................................................................... 56 Figure 4: Still of The Hampster Dance site .................................................................................. 78 Figure 5: Examples of “Satanic Hamster Dance” .GIF stills, featuring red eyes, blood-dripping fangs, and pentagrams ......................................................................................................... 100 Figure 6: Still from The Jesus Dance site, June 2004 ................................................................. 100 Figure 7: Stills from “Badgers” animation—the titular badgers and a mushroom ..................... 108 Figure 8: Still from “Badgers” animation—a snake ................................................................... 109 Figure 9: Initiating page of ytmnd.com ....................................................................................... 114 Figure 10: “Bus Uncle” video on YouTube, May 2006 ............................................................. 133 Figure 11: The Gregory Brothers “BED INTRUDER SONG!!!” on YouTube, August 2010 .. 157 Figure 12: Original “Rebecca Black - Friday” video on YouTube, March 2011 ....................... 171 Figure 13: Still from the music video for Katy Perry’s 2011 single “Last Friday Night,” featuring Rebecca Black ..................................................................................................................... 200 Figure 14: Still from Vine video of Shiba Inu dancing to Toto’s “Africa,” November 2015 .... 207 Figure 15: Still from @Marutaro The Hedgehog, “Soniiiiiiiiiic” Vine video, November 2016 213 Figure 16: Still from Vine video of Kanye West dancing (to Rugrats theme music), August 2015 ............................................................................................................................................. 214 Figure 17: Still from Vine video of baby sloth losing its balance, September 2015 .................. 215 Figure 18: Still from Vine video of “Birdyoncé” strutting towards the camera, June 2015 ....... 217 Figure 19: “Surprise!” Instagram post by @Beyoncé, December 2013 ..................................... 236 Figure 20: Stills featuring pageant trophies in the music videos for the BEYONCÉ tracks “Pretty Hurts,” “Drunk in Love,” and bonus track “Grown Woman” ............................................ 258 Figure 21: Images of Beyoncé’s family and friends in BEYONCÉ music videos—sister Solange Knowles in “Blow,” husband Jay-Z in “Drunk in Love,” daughter Blue Ivy Carter in “Blue,” Destiny’s Child groupmates Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams in “Superpower” ...................................................................................................................... 260 Figure 22: iTunes digital store imagery from December 13, 2013 ............................................. 271 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Writing this dissertation has been a revelatory process—and, at various times, also a seemingly- impossible process, a mundane process, an exhausting process, an indulgent process. It has also been a thoroughly collaborative process; this dissertation would not exist without the love and labor of a vast number of people, some of which I have the delightful opportunity to give recognition to here. There aren’t enough words of thanks in my vocabulary for the incomparable Ellie Hisama. She is a legendary advisor and a tremendous human being. I would say that I aspire to be like her as I grow as an academic, but I also harbor suspicions that she might be some kind of beneficent supernatural being; I’m not sure it’s possible to match her kindness, her brilliance, her generosity, or her fearsome capacities for organization and multitasking. It was an immense privilege to have the wise and kind members of my committee attend thoughtfully and seriously to this dissertation: Ana María Ochoa Gautier’s huge-yet-incisive questions, Brian Larkin’s deft provocation of some of the work’s latent connective threads, Ben Steege’s guidance towards a stronger articulation of my own voice, and Kevin Fellezs’s urgings towards expanded considerations of genre, chronology, and scope. More broadly, I am deeply indebted to a wide array of faculty and scholars who have helped to shape my teaching, thinking, listening,