The Lost Art of YouTube Music Parodies
The beauty of early YouTube was its raw promise that anything, no matter how absurd, could go viral. Leave Britney Alone. The Duck Song. Nyan Cat. These were only a few of the weirdest, most low-budget videos that literally helped cement YouTube as a legitimate platform, and showed the world that you could make it big online. And one surefire way of rising to the top was to make the silliest, wackiest renditions of popular songs and music videos.
“Wait, you’re telling me people with barely any musical talent could create parodies, make fools of themselves on camera, and end up getting millions of views?” Yes.
Chances are, if there’s a song you like, it’s been parodied by someone on YouTube. Whether it’s a basement-dwelling hobbyist or a household name (whatever the YouTube equivalent of that is), so many have tried to capture what it means to successfully parody a popular song.
Maybe it means making fun of the look and feel of a song’s music video, beat for beat, and joking about the artist – enter Bart Baker, the self-proclaimed “king of music video parodies.” In his 2014 parody of Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse,” which has 195 million views, the first shot has text that reads, “Hollywood, California on a shitty ass green screen…” and fully mimics the original music video in an over-the-top way, even commenting on the inappropriateness of the video’s Egyptian setting and themes. It’s completely derivative of the original and brings out the “WTF” factor of like, what was Katy Perry actually thinking when she made this?
Maybe it means… just, fun? Take this 2010 parody of Kesha’s“Tik Tok” by thecomputernerd01 and its absolute chaos that isn’t derivative from the original at all. There’s no actual commentary on Kesha’s lyrics, music video, or persona – it’s just a guy making up new lyrics to the same exact melody, with every new line throwing you in a completely different direction. He starts the song in bed wearing a wig, singing “Wake up in the morning feeling like Nick Jonas” and a minute later, the chorus, “Let’s punch Captain Crunch, Then we’ll eat his face for lunch.” It’s pure, unbridled creativity where you just figure out words that rhyme and make them come to life.
Maybe it means something more contextual, reserved for a specific niche. Behold, the Minecraft parody universe. As a Minecraft kid myself, whose childhood was defined by what has become the best-selling game of all time, pretty much any song you could think of from the early 2010s had a parody set in the world of Minecraft. The most popular one is by the YouTuber CaptainSparklez, titled “Revenge,” and is a parody of Usher’s “DJ Got Us Fallin’ in Love.” The video, released in 2011, now has over 289 million views, and the lyrics and animated music video follow Steve, the main character in Minecraft, fleeing from then subsequently killing a Creeper – one of the monsters in the game. The video became so popular that in 2015, it was taken down for eight months due to copyright reasons. It then resurfaced with a completely new song that wasn’t even to Usher’s melody, and finally in 2018 was restored to the original audio. The parody format does indeed come with its consequences if not done properly.
Parodying popular songs can really be a contentious act, and always raises questions of copyright infringement and the ethics of satire. In the United States, parodies are considered fair use so long as the parody is significantly transformative when compared to the original. There must always be an added layer of humor, critique, or commentary (for example, Bart Baker), or at least some artistic spin on the original. I’d argue YouTube has the artistic side of things covered quite well.
The YouTube parody scene truly embodied an art form, and it’s been lost. Take your pick: The rise of YouTube’s commercialization, the behemoth of TikTok and its short-form, vertical content, the ever-growing legitimacy of social media as sites for not just creators, but influencers. All are responsible for the corporate dilution of social media now that the internet is the mainstream. There’s less emphasis on fun and creativity, and so much more on ad revenue and brand partnerships.
The only recent example I can recall that resembles old YouTube parodies is this 2018 “American Boy” parody that’s themed around yet another popular game, Fortnite. It blew up all over TikTok in 2021, and it’s definitely funny, but it’s technically an orchestrated nod to the old YouTube parody style. A parody of a parody, if you will. You’ve got a kid’s voice singing slightly off-beat, you’ve got the lyrics fit for an adolescent boy’s vocabulary, you’ve got some occasional voice cracks on high notes. It’s an homage to the time a decade ago when any random kid could find an instrumental version of a song, sing their own lyrics over the track, and upload it to YouTube, no questions asked. And for that, I did love seeing this parody circulate a bit.
Ultimately, music video parodies are few and far between now. The era of YouTube parodies truly was what typified the more humble, homespun nature of content creation. That promise that anything can go viral still exists, but it’s so much harder to stand out. I don’t think any of us could name a single truly iconic YouTube video from the past few years. And take Vine, the defunct platform that many dub as the precursor to TikTok, where you could only upload videos that lasted a max six seconds. There are still Vines that people reference to this day, like “FR E SH A VOCA DO.” TikTok has iconic sounds and trends, sure, but can you pinpoint individual TikToks that stand out? The space is so saturated that we’re consuming so much more yet remembering less.
I don’t think there’s a way we’ll go back to iconic parody videos. In 2024, content creation feels like more of a space that’s either very well put-together or very informal and conversational. We won’t be returning to the elaborate yet simple styles of Bart Baker or thecomputernerd01, but in some ways, I think music parodies had their moment, and didn’t overstay their welcome. They serve as reminders of the shameless optimism and lightheartedness that defined YouTube in the early 2010s, and there’s still a lot to learn from that time, now a decade later. Parody culture isn’t dead – people are still critiquing and making fun of music, celebrities, cultural stereotypes, etc. (think of the “POV:” format you probably see everywhere). Yet YouTube’s infatuation with parodied pop song music videos in the 2010s was a golden era that we should always remember.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think we should punch Captain Crunch. Then we’ll eat his face for lunch.
