Back in 2010, a peculiar song cracked the US charts, peaking at number 89 in the Billboard Hot 100. You probably first encountered it on YouTube, through your thriving Facebook feed or even via a MySpace message: the aptly named 'Bed Intruder Song'.
From the rhythmic cadence of Antoine Dodson’s voice to the catchy call-and-repeat melody, it's easy to see why this remix of a local news report became a viral smash (at time of writing, it holds over 153 million views on YouTube). It was the first time that a song of its nature had ever entered the official charts, and a slew of similar tunes featuring excitable real-life interviewees followed in its wake. Who could forget Dead Giveaway by Charles Ramsey, Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That by Sweet Brown or Backin Up feat. Diana?
It was a truly surreal phenomenon; a relatively short period of the late Noughties in which random people were unknowingly sampled from local TV news eyewitness accounts, becoming the viral vocalists for heavily auto-tuned, tongue-in-cheek pop songs. If the track and accompanying video racked up enough views, it transformed these people into instant celebrities with global recognition.
“It was a bit of an unusual time,” says Dr. Vince Miller, reader in Sociology and Cultural Studies at the University of Kent. “The mash-up culture was big back then, with mixing music like Destiny’s Child into Nirvana, and it overlapped with that period where YouTube was still quite new and people were trying to figure out how to use that platform.”
Many of the most successful remixes were created by The Gregory Brothers (Michael, Andrew, Evan and Evan’s wife, Sarah), through their YouTube hit factory, Schmoyoho. The quartet were initially interested in US politics, beginning 'Auto-Tune The News' (later called 'Songify The News') after a 2008 presidential debate, and political gaffs – like Republican politician Pete Hoekstra comparing the building of a turtle fence to the American healthcare service – proved ripe for parody. Speaking over email, Michael Gregory says of the time: “There was a severe lack of songs about turtle fences and presidential elections on the airwaves, so we had to rush in with some solutions. I never thought it would grow so quickly, I guess climate change and smoking lettuce (this was a concept from another congressional speech) were more replayable in song form.”
Yet more digitally manipulated songs of politicians and news anchors followed at a rapid rate, until the brothers realised that local news segments could also prove fertile ground. “The same thing that works in a purposeful song will work in an accidental song – a good melody and/or good lyrics and rhythm," Gregory tells me. "Unintentional singers like Tariq of It’s Corn or Markiplier of Space Is Cool have Midas vocal cords.”
Miller explains that these viral songs constituted what American media scholar Henry Jenkins refers to as ‘convergence culture’; the idea that digital information can easily be cut and pasted, taken out of context and used in different ways. “Alongside this, it was a bit of a no-holds-barred environment back then, people were becoming ‘prosumers’ in the sense that not only were they consuming media but now they had the means of producing it as well," he tells me.
“The ‘00s were a time where everyone was experimenting with convergence culture and memes were becoming a huge thing.”
Gregory estimates that over the past 15 years, they’ve been behind “an absurd, probably 4-digit number” of tracks. Of them all, it’s 'Bed Intruder' that became the most famous. You probably remember it well: Dodson relaying the story of a person breaking into their house and trying to attack his sister, warning others in the neighbourhood to “hide yo’ kids, hide yo’ wife… ‘cos they raping everybody out here.” The Gregory brothers split the sizeable profits from iTunes downloads with Dodson, allowing him to move his family to a new house; a happy ending, born out of a dark beginning.
Needless to say, the unsettling nature of these tracks – frequently featuring stories of assault, kidnapping and mugging – soon came under heavy scrutiny. Reverend Charles E Williams, a pastor and social worker from Detroit, wrote in the Huffington Post in 2013 that “many laugh when they watch the Charles Ramsey and Sweet Brown interviews, but the joke is really quite sad”. Slate Magazine's Aisha Harris called out the problematic racial aspects of the trend. “It’s difficult to watch these videos and not sense that their popularity has something to do with a persistent, if unconscious, desire to see black people perform," she writes. "Laughter directed at people like Sweet Brown plays into the most basic stereotyping of blacks as simple-minded ramblers living in the ‘ghetto’, socially out of step with the rest of educated America.”
Dr. Francesca Sobande, senior lecturer in Digital Studies at Cardiff University, says that losing the context behind viral videos can be problematic. "These individuals are often referred to as ordinary people and there’s sometimes an implication that there’s relatability there, but often they’re depicted in situations that can be horrific or are rooted in trauma," she tells me. "They take on this spectacular quality in terms of how they circulate online and are decontextualised and recontextualised, which is what underpins digital remix culture.”
Some of the stars of these videos faced exploitation or abuse online, their private lives raked over and now made public, while others, like Charles Ramsey, found it difficult to hold down a job afterwards, suffering under the paradox of not being famous enough to spin his viral success into a financially secure job in the entertainment world, whilst also being bombarded with attention and unable to carry out his work at a ‘regular’ job due to his notoriety.
This niche chapter of internet history is back in the headlines following the release of a new Netflix documentary called The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker. It tells the story of Caleb McGillvary, better known as Kai, who shot to fame in 2013 when the tale – told by the man himself to TV news reporters – of his attempt to save a woman being attacked was successfully songified.
An aside in the interview that was used in the song (“No matter what you’ve done, you deserve respect. Even if you make mistakes, you’re loveable”) helped to portray him as a sweet-natured free spirit, and social media went wild for the have-a-go hero. “Kai the Homeless Hitchhiker Is the Hero Millennials Need,” read one of many fawning headlines.
But as the documentary reveals, all was not as it seemed. This evidently erratic man, who hinted at an abusive childhood, would soon make headlines again. A few months after the video went viral, a 73-year-old man named Joseph Galfy invited McGillvary into his house, and Galfy was brutally murdered. In April 2019, McGillvary (who claimed he was raped by Galfy and acted in self-defence) was convicted of the killing and sentenced to 57 years in jail. During the trial, the judge branded McGillvary a “powder keg of explosive rage”.
The McGillvary case raises questions about the ethics of propelling people to fame through viral videos and memes, and the media circus that surrounds them after the event. As a neighbour of Galfy’s comments in the documentary, “If you’re going to glorify someone, you’d better know who you’re glorifying.”
If you ask Sobande, it highlights just how little we know about the people and moments in time we encounter online. "Sometimes content can circulate in ways that either glorifies or demonises an individual. This example is just a reminder of the fact that memes are a tiny part of a bigger picture that forms a person’s life and history," she tells me.
Thankfully, over 15 years later, there simply isn't much of an appetite for these trauma-based tracks. The Gregory Brothers are still churning out remixes, still raiding local news reports for potential bangers, but they're altogether more wholesome – you may have recently encountered the aforementioned 'It's Corn', which has racked up 27 million views and propelled 7-year-old 'Corn Kid' Tariq to global fame. Then there are what they call “positive pump-up songs” like the joyous All The Way, sampling Irish YouTube gamer Jacksepticeye (104 million views). Meanwhile, as more people migrate from YouTube over to TikTok (The New Yorker reports that 67% of US teenagers now use the app) the art of sampling has arguably never been more popular. But the focus has shifted away from strangers with no desire to be on a public platform; instead, TikTokers are remixing media from the world of music, film and TV. A current favourite is crafted from a now iconic line uttered by The White Lotus’ Tanya McQuoid’s, deftly transformed into a dancefloor filler.
Maybe the internet has, for the first time ever, learned its lesson. Or maybe we're just waiting for the beat to kick in.
