I don't know about you, but I love wasting time on YouTube and I'm always looking for new videos to watch. Your task for this entry is to post your favorite YouTube video of two minutes of less and to explain what you love about it. (Keep the videos PG-13 in content. No music videos.) Shoot for min. 300 words.
_______________________________________________________________________________
"Well, obviously, we have a rapist in Lincoln Park. He's climbing in your windows. He's snatching your people up. Trying to rape 'em, so ya'll need to hide your kids hide your wife and hide your husband, cause he's raping everybody in here."
And with that, a star was born. Even Andy Warhol, who purportedly predicted that in the future "everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes," could never have anticipated the strange story of Antoine Dodson, the most unlikely of unlikely celebrities. Dodson's Wikipedia page generously lists him as an "American internet celebrity, singer and actor." It would be more truthful to describe him as a thirty-one-year old man from a poor neighborhood of Hunstville, Alabama, who was suddenly cast into the spotlight after his eccentric and impassioned rant on a local news segment.
What happened was this: A intruder entered Dodson's sister Kelly's bedroom in the middle of the night and attempted to assault her. She woke up to find the man in bed with her and, after a struggle, , but not before leaving his t-shirt behind. (Nothing funny so far.) The local news interviewed Kelly later that day and her account of the incident aired on the Huntsville Evening News. But it was completely overshadowed by her brother's commentary.
It's easy to see why this news clip quickly went viral. Dodson is remarkably uninhibited in his delivery. He doesn't seem to be performing at all; you get the sense that what you're seeing is pure, unfiltered outrage. There's no getting around it, though: the guy is eccentric. His effeminate speech inflections, his sassy mannerisms and his wild afro, only partially hidden under a red bandanna, all add up to create a truly striking presence. The consensus - which I'm moderately uncomfortable to admit I agreed with - was that this clip was really, really funny. Although it's kind of hard to determine whether most people were laughing with Dodson or at him. Yes, his rage is real, but his delivery is flamboyant and his words hyperbolic. (Hide your husbands? He's raping everybody in here? Really, everybody?)
Then comes the really weird part of the story: shortly after this news clip went viral, it was transformed into an auto-tuned song by a group of comedian musicians called the Gregory Brothers. It was called "Bed Intruder," and dammit, it was a catchy song. So catchy, in fact, that it topped out at #89 on the Billboard Top 100 List for 2010. The royalty money poured in, as did the interview bookings - and even an invitation to perform the song live at the BET Music Awards that fall. (Weirdly, it was probably the first time Dodson had ever performed the song, in the true sense of the word.) By September of 2010 - two months after the clip aired, mind out - Dodson had earned enough money to move his family out of the projects and into a better neighborhood.
Wikipedia tells me that since his few months of wildly improbably fame in late 2010, he has done the following things: authorized the design and sale of a "Bed Intruder" Halloween costume, came out as gay, got arrested for speeding under the influence of marijuana, got arrested for violating a city noise ordinance, renounced his gayness, claimed to have become a Hebrew Israelite. It's pretty safe to say that his fifteen minutes of fame have long since passed.
The whole idea of the American Dream, as I understand it, is that everyone has the opportunity to succeed as long as they are willing to work for it. In the age of the internet, the corollary to the American Dream is that sometimes success is the result of random selection by the strange and fickle internet gods. In the age of the internet, you don't necessarily have to sing in order to be called a singer. And in the strange and perverse age of the internet, the unsettling premise of a sexual assault can end in the laughter of 138 million strangers from around the world.
