Awfully Viral (Paula Harper on Will Robin’s Sound Expertise)

It’s summer and we are busy working on episodes for our fourth season. We’ve also rebuilt our website–check out the the fabulous new phantompod.org. There’s other great stuff in store for the podcast, so stay tuned! But today, I want to share one of my favorite podcasts with you: Will Robin’s Sound Expertise. For those of you into musicology or popular music studies, there’s a great chance you’re already a subscribe. That’s because Will’s show is fantastic and I personally know many music scholars who are devoted fans of this show that features conversations with established and up-and-coming music scholars. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Dr. Robin, you might remember that I quoted his New York Times obituary of R. Murray Schafer in our first episode on Schafer. He has written about music for the Times for at least a decade. He’s also an assistant professor of Musicology at the University of Maryland and the author of the book Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music. Sound Expertise will be dropping its third season in the fall. The episode you are about to hear is one that I love as a media scholar. Will Robin interviews Dr. Paula Harper about her work on viral music videos and taste, specifically that terrible Rebecca Black video “Friday” that’s probably still rattling around in some dark recess of your brain. Dr. Harper digs into the awful virality of that video and all of its cover versions, discerning what this case study can tell us about genre, gender, and how and why sound travels on the internet. It’s a great discussion and I hope you enjoy it. And by the way, since this interview happened, Paula Harper has joined the faculty of the University of Chicago as an assistant professor of music. So, who says YouTube rots your brain?TranscriptSound Expertise – Season 2, Episode 7Rebecca Black’s Friday and Viral Music with Paula Harper TRANSCRIPT prepared by Andrew Dell’Antonio Paula Harper 00:00One of the reasons that I do the work that I do, which is writing about music and sound on the internet, is in part because I am fascinated and delighted by objects that are frequently obnoxious. So a lot of the things that I’m engaging with are things that occupy this weird, liminal or ambivalent space between something that gives people delight and something that makes people want to throw their computer off of a tall building. So just like right in the middle space between those two emotions, or having those two emotions at the same time, is how I’ve engaged with a lot of stuff on the internet, including, but certainly not limited to, the Rebecca Black Friday video. [intro music] Will Robin 01:05Welcome back to Sound Expertise. I’m your host, Will Robin, and I’m a musicologist. And this is a podcast where I talk with my fellow music scholars about their research and why it matters. You probably remember Rebecca Black’s Friday, and if not, you almost certainly heard it. It was absolutely ubiquitous about a decade ago, a music video by an amateur teen musician, which went viral because it was widely trashed as one of the Worst Songs of All Time. Friday went from YouTube to Tosh.0 to parodies and covers on late night TV, racking up tens of millions of views in the process. It was 2011, it was a more innocent time, when our expectations for what kinds of internet content would go viral were not yet fully formed. And when Facebook and Twitter seemed like fun places for “Have you...