Earlier this month, Alanis Morissette helped confirm a long-held suspicion: It’s “Weird Al” Yankovic’s universe now, and the rest of us are just blogging about it. On the day after April Fools’ Day, the Canadian songstress posted a music video version of “My Humps” on YouTube, and the Internet went crazy. Alanis Morissette, the adult-contemporary bard of stone-fisted self-actualization, covering the official theme song of champagne rooms everywhere?
Within a week, Morissette’s “Humps” had been ogled more than five million times on YouTube, making it twice as popular as the Black Eyed Peas original on the website, and 20 times more popular than any other Morissette-related clip. (Her second most popular YouTube offering is the video for her 1995 megahit “Ironic,” with approximately 260,000 views.)
Given the painfully catchy beat and gleefully moronic lyrics of the original “My Humps,” a parody was inevitable—and yet where do you go with it? “My humps! My humps! My lovely lady-lumps!” chirps token lady-Pea Fergie, in a squeaky celebration of the ways that high-end, look-but-don’t-touch strippers exploit their exploiters. But while Fergie’s boasts are designed to convey sexy empowerment, the unfortunate combination of her helium-goosed voice and the least erotic euphemism for boobies ever makes it sounds like the Chipmunks doing a public service announcement for Breast Cancer Awareness Week.
No doubt realizing it would be impossible to make the song even dumber than it already is, Morissette pretends to take it seriously. Her version is nearly dirge-like, with sad-sack pianos and a vocal that sounds as if it were recorded at the bottom of a dark, damp well. “Whatcha gonna do with all that junk, all that junk inside that trunk?” she wails, inflicting existential angst onto what was once a playful dance-floor tease.
All that ass inside them jeans, Morissette suggests, all that breast inside that shirt isn’t emancipating this woman at all—it’s imprisoning her, trivializing her. Ironically (isn’t it?), the biological markers of womanhood infantilize the song’s narrator, reduce her to grotesque baby-talk. By decelerating lyrics like “Tryna feel my hump hump/Lookin’ at my lump lump” to the point where you actually have to listen to them closely, Morissette makes such lines sound even more like a talking chimp’s plaintive, terrified attempts to alert the world to the sexually abusive tendencies of its handler than they do in the original.
But that’s just part of the Morissette version’s charm. Along with tweaking Fergie, Morissette satirizes her own serious-artist pretensions as well. In the one scene in her video that doesn’t have an antecedent in the original, Morissette is crouched on the floor, her body enveloped in a slow-motion storm of feathers as she sobs hysterically and great torrents of mascara run down her face like the Mississippi in flood season. “You don’t want no drama!” she howls, but it’s clear that’s all she has to give—drama, drama, drama. So fervently introspective, so relentlessly vigilant about maintaining her integrity as an artist she can even suck every molecule of fun out of three minutes of pure pop-fluff mindlessness!
One could even go so far as to say that Morissette’s “My Humps” isn’t a skewering of Fergie’s version so much as a kind of wish-fulfillment. After all, there was a time when Morissette herself once aspired to the kind of dance-pop stardom that Fergie now enjoys. (Five years before she hit it big in America, Morissette was an opening act for Vanilla Ice on his 1990 tour.) And clearly she relishes the opportunity “My Humps” gives her to resurrect this aspect of herself and squeeze her hump humps into a pair of turquoise booty shorts.
Fittingly, Fergie’s response to her new doppelganger was to send her a gushy fan note—imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, after all—and a cake shaped like an ass. And, really, is there any more astute commentary on the video than that? “My Humps” allows the erstwhile pop tart to have her feminist cake and shake it too.
Still, it’s not just “My Humps’” unexpected rump-up that attracted five million views in a week—the video hits on more cylinders than that. Indeed, it’s a veritable primer for what plays on the web, and anyone seeking to reach millions for pennies should make a close study of it.
By now, of course, it’s no secret that like another shrill, shrieky, nearly extinct beast, the bald eagle, music videos, mostly abandoned by MTV in the late 1990s, have made a stunning comeback. At YouTube, more than half of the site’s Top 20 most viewed clips of all time are music videos of one sort or another. And visitors to sites like Yahoo! Music and AOL Music have been watching hundreds of millions of music videos per month for several years now.
What’s gone largely undiscussed about the music video resurrection, however, are the specific qualities of the videos that repeatedly prove to be the most popular. In the early days of MTV, it was all about crazy New Wave haircuts, matching suits and the absence of anyone who looked remotely like David Crosby from your line-up. Today, three key elements pop up again and again amongst the web’s most popular music videos: familiarity, humor and dorky white people dancing. Long before the advent of the web, it turns out, “Weird Al” Yankovic had already discovered the secret to success in the YouTube Era.
Familiarity is necessary because there’s too much content on the web. When thousands of music videos are always just a click way, why try to tempt viewers with something completely new? It’s a battle you’ll rarely win. Instead, use something familiar. The second most viewed clip of all time on YouTube features two teens lip-synching to the Pokemon theme song. The band OK Go scored a huge YouTube hit (more than 15 million views to date) with “Here It Goes Again,” a video which, as its title suggests, was remarkably similar to its first surprise YouTube hit. “Weird Al” Yankovic parodied “Ridin’,” Chamillionaire’s No. 1 hit single; after his video caught on at YouTube, Yankovic cracked Billboard’s Top 10 Albums chart for the first time in his 30-year career.
It’s no coincidence that Yankovic’s biggest hit to date is also his funniest video ever. After all, humor drives the Internet. You don’t need humor for online music video success—My Chemical Romance’s “Famous Last Words” video is the third most popular YouTube clip of all time. But when armies of bored office-workers first started using Usenet and e-mail as serious time-wasters in the late 1980s, it wasn’t histrionic poetry about how hard it is to be a sensitive emo kid these days that they were passing around—it was jokes about President Bush (the first one) and “20 Reasons Beer is Better than a Woman” lists.
Finally, you can never go wrong with dorky white people dancing. See, for example, any number of anonymous teens who’ve achieved YouTube micro-fame by lurching around their bedrooms and karaokeing their favorite songs to death. Or OK Go channeling the intricately choreographed spazziness of Napoleon Dynamite in “A Million Ways” and “Here It Goes Again.” Or Saturday Night Live cast members Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell giving gangsta shout-outs to cupcakes and Google Maps in “Lazy Sunday.” Or Alanis getting her frump on in “My Humps.”
Throughout the last few decades, many artists have flirted with various aspects of the Yankovic formula. The ironic cover is a punk rock staple. Eminem went multi-platinum on his punchlines, and who can forget the Torrance Community Dance Group and the dorky synchronized footwork they brought to the Spike Jonze-directed video for Fatboy Slim’s 1998 hit “Praise You”?
Only “Weird Al” Yankovic, however, has consistently employed the power of three key elements over and over and over again. No doubt the fear of being labeled a novelty act has kept other artists away from this strategy, but look at how well it’s worked for Al. At a time when artists are more disposable than ever, he’s fashioned a 30-year career off the backs of long-forgotten one-hit wonders. In the fast-paced, fickle, flavor-of-the-nanosecond world of the Internet, every artist’s a novelty act. Now that an artist of Alanis Morissette’s stature has seen the light, how many others will follow in her wake?