Music Retrospective - Why “the Midnight Beast” Charted with a Parody in 2009 and Why It Wasn’t Weird
In 2009, a small YouTube channel uploaded a video parodying an obnoxious pop song. One thing led to another and it was being played on commercial radios on the other side of the world. The original artist of the parody (Ke$ha) shared it across her social networks, and soon it was featured on the front page of mtv.com. The track was professionally released and it climbed online charts.
Bear in mind, this article is written from a pop perspective - so any comment on the artistry of the songs mentioned are not referenced in comparison to any jazz giants or classical geniuses. I’m only comparing the pop songs mentioned to other pop songs of the time.
Reflecting on this track now, this seems like a strange period in popular music. While the mastering of the Midnight Beast song had a surprising level of commercial potential, it doesn’t seem like a professional release. The subject matter is crude, the film clip is poorly shot and the main release was on YouTube - while it was distributed across different networks, YouTube seemed to be the main source of traffic.
This is interesting because today there seems to be a lot of discrepancy between YouTube and a lot of old media (like television and radio). Even though charting music and YouTube seem to go hand in hand, it’s very rare that an artist will gain a lot of traction from their YouTube presence alone. One big reason for this is because most - if not all - big label contracts will require artists to forfeit the control of their online image. This is particularly difficult if the artists already have a large following, and signing to a big label will mean betraying their fanbase and essentially “selling out”.
Another reason YouTube and older media don’t necessarily get along is because the internet steals traffic from television and radio. This is truer today than it was in 2009, so today it would be even harder for a major label to sign a YouTube artist. People are more than capable of cultivating their own image and fanbases, and they would be less likely to simply hand that power away. I’ve seen a few careers ruined by signing the wrong contract.
So, in 2010, The Midnight Beast peaked at no. 4 on the ARIA singles chart (the Australian equivalent of the Billboard charts) and ended 2010 at no. 77. I was around 14 at the time, so I don’t think I had the ability to analyse things too closely. However, I remember how normal it was that people were listening to this song - all of my friends were enjoying it and I was enjoying it too. I think this can be all boiled down to the fact that people were sick of the current stream of pop music. It wasn't the first time a parody song had charted in Australia - with Weird Al Yankovic's "White and Nerdy" peaking at no. 12 on the ARIA charts in 2006-07.
The state of pop music is usually a paradoxical combination of volatile and boring - very constantly changing, but evolving just slowly enough that people get acclimated to the new sounds. In the years surrounding 2009, music was in a terrible state - the Black Eyed Peas were at their peak and every single track on the radio sounded like them. Each track had sickly, repetitive and uninspired beats, with an overload of stilted electronic music that was so quantized and formulaic that it was driving almost all serious music fans insane.
The Midnight Beast making jokes about one of 2009’s worst perpetrators struck a chord with a lot of people - especially in Australia where almost all mainstream music comes from the US and a marginal number of tracks are local. Some people found the remix even more listenable than the original. This could come down to the attitude of the parody having a certain charm and the boys in the video providing an antithesis to the manufactured pop divas.
So yeah, this was a weird one. I tend to write about random things and this is something that captured my attention. If you are into novelty songs, you could look up these guys. Some of their songs have pretty neat melodies too, and some of their more serious side projects are pretty nice to listen to. Here’s one I’ve been digging: