}

Wednesday, May 06, 2009

My sentiments exactly



This video, “The Big Fat Gay Collab!” (language NSFW), is the latest “viral video”, and my current favourite. When I first saw it this morning, it had a few hundred views. When I checked a couple minutes ago, it was around fifty times that many.

The song has a history of its own, but the video is a collaboration of some 20 YouTubers led by steviebeebishop who said of the project:

“There’s a disgusting amount of hate on the internet (especially on YouTube!) directed at minority groups (especially the LGBT community) so I was inspired to organize this collab video. I never set out to "change the world" I simply wanted to make something light hearted to put a smile on the face of any hate-victim watching. You're not alone! Stevie loves you :)”

I think he and the others succeeded. The sentiment in the song is one I’ve been feeling a lot lately, as readers of this blog already know. I think that the catchy, almost bubblegum pop sound of the song softens its lyrics and combined with the fun video, this succeeds where ordinary polemics—or blog posts—cannot.

Well done, steviebeebishop and everyone else.


Update 07/05/09: I corrected my numbers above, and I can now report that the video has been viewed over 50,000 times—more than 100 times the number when I first watched it. Today I listened to the song on my iPod while I was riding on the bus, and it seemed so subversive. Maybe that's why it wasn't my generation that came up with this video.

2 comments:

jamie said...

Just now saw this post with the video -- How awesome is that? I love it.

Arthur Schenck said...

I love the video, too (kind of obvious, I guess), so I'm really glad to see that it's now gone over 99,000 views (it'll probably hit 100,000 this week). That's even better!