The Internet Didn't 'Kill' Carly Rae Jepsen's Career
from the LEAVE-THE-INTERNET-ALONE!-*sob* dept
The Internet gets blamed for so much. This loose collective of millions of users and websites is blamed for everything from killing off major industries to turning the world's children into short attention span txt fiends. The Internet will kill art via piracy, we are assured repeatedly. A new generation of children will be raised by the wan glow of LCD monitors and nurtured by thousands of ethereal Facebook friends.Now the Internet is being charged with filicide. In a post titled "How the Internet Killed Carly Rae Jepsen," Katherine St. Asaph applies her detective skills in order to solve the mystery of why Jepsen's new album has been met with large quantities of indifference. First, she chronicles the swift rise of "Call Me Maybe," the inescapable phenomenon that entertained us briefly between Rebecca Black's "Friday" and Psy's "Gangnam Style."
Tastemakers heard it, then moguls who were de facto tastemakers, and it spread to listeners who knew nothing about the singer except this beautiful thing she'd written. They fell in love at first listen. They gushed. They sang along. They recorded karaoke videos and public swoon mobs and re-enactments of its summer-love video. They sent it to No. 1 for seemingly the entire summer and sent its singer to what looked an awful lot like dazed stardom.Doesn't all of that sound absolutely horrible? Apparently St. Asaph would prefer Jepsen wallowed in obscurity so that she never had to be disappointed by the fact that she had and lost fame. Instead, it's better if she never had it, if I'm following the logic here correctly.
Jepsen and her two bandmates recognized it was best to strike when the iron was still tepid and ventured into the studio with enough co-producers and songwriters to choke a "Tribute to Lou Perlman" compilation. Jepsen's debut album was released and promptly fell off the public radar, failing to surpass 100,000 sales. This sort of situation is hardly unique. Plenty of big hits have been followed by a loud sucking noise as fans rush off to examine the Next Big Thing, creating a temporary vacuum in their wake.
St. Asaph discusses the internet's well-chronicled role in Jepsen's rapid rise to fame, though, it's not so much the rise to stardom that concerns St. Asaph (and leads toward murder charges being brought against the Internet). It's what happened during the rise. In her estimation, the homicidal Internet took the spotlight off of the talented Jepsen and shone it on itself, taking something vital away from the actual artist with the endless stream of remixes, lip dubs, image macros, covers and other forms of audience participation.
This sounds counterintuitive; shouldn't it help Jepsen for thousands of people to remix, recreate and otherwise rejoice over her song? But the meme's not about Jepsen; it's about her song, and she is secondary... This is the problem Carly Rae Jepsen's facing: loving "Call Me Maybe" as a meme hasn't made people invested in her as a musician.That may seem unfortunate, but it's hardly unique and it's hardly new. It certainly isn't an "Internet" problem. In fact, throw quotes around "problem" as well. Super-popular pop stars are rarely embraced as artists. They're embraced as temporary phenomena, a momentary distraction to be enjoyed until the next groundswell displaces them.
Long before the Internet was meming artists to death on a regular basis (and in broad daylight!), people were picking up and discarding pop phenomena nearly as quickly. (If you don't want a bunch of horrible songs stuck in your head, you might want to skip ahead to the next paragraph.) Remember the "Macarena?" Did anyone ever care about the musicians behind the devilishly circuitous hook or the "choreographer" that crafted a dance so easily emulated your grandmother has probably attempted it? How was the album, I ask rhetorically, as if anyone outside of the artists involved have ever listened to the entire thing? How about Right Said Fred, whose "I'm Too Sexy" took clubs by storm for an entirely unreasonable amount of time before vanishing into the pop ether? Lou Bega, temporary mambo king who finally hit it big with his 5th attempt? How about Jesus Jones, who had two singles hit the US Hot 100 but managed to leave the charts untroubled for the next four albums? Chumbawumba were a frickin' anarchist collective, and yet, all anyone in the US knows is they cranked out the perfect drinking song about drinking. The list could go on and on and that's only covering a small part of a single decade.
The Internet doesn't split the artist from their creations. It certainly provides more avenues for interpretation but it doesn't change anything about humanity's relationship with charting artists. Very few artists enjoy continued mainstream success, no matter how artistically valid their non-hit offerings are. To lay this at the feet of an inherently participatory culture that was previously limited to drunkenly bellowing their 75% correct karaoke interpretation or drunkenly performing a 75% correct interpretive dance is to take a few steps into elitist territory and chastise people for only liking the "hits." The tool set the Internet provides may bring a much wider variety of participation (and bring it much faster), but it's not anyone's "fault" that Carly Rae Jepsen's album isn't racking up hundreds of thousands of sales. That's simply the nature of pop culture. The phrase "15 minutes of fame" has been around since before you had an internet connection.
And while you're fitting the Internet for a Murder One charge, you might want to step back and consider that Jepsen's rise to superstardom, however brief, was largely due to this very same Internet. While it's true that the Internet wears many hats -- some white, some black -- you can't just hold it responsible for destroying artists and ignore its star-making power.
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Filed Under: carly rae jepsen, hype, internet, one hit wonders, pop music
Reader Comments
The First Word
“The power of the internet
It turns out that the internet invented the one-hit wonder. Who knew?Subscribe: RSS
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I get knocked down...
When even Tim C. says its a bad idea to read the next paragraph he wrote, follow his advice.
...but I get up again.
MAKE IT STOP!
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Re: I get knocked down...
...and I waited for this.
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Re: I get knocked down...
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"It's a Small World" trumps all. I used to wonder why people would ride that ride...now I realize they just want to get Justin Bieber our of their minds.
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Re: I get knocked down...
Now, the question of whether that's a good thing a bad thing is somewhat up for debate...
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The power of the internet
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One-hit wonder - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A one-hit wonder is a person or act known mainly for only a single success. The term is most often used to describe music performers with only one hit single.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-hit_wonder
One Hit Wonder Central
Come here to find all your favorite one hit wonders of the 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's, and 90's.
www.onehitwondercentral.com
Top 100 One hit wonders - One Hit Wonder Central
Visitors Choice: Top 100. These may not be the 100 greatest one hit wonders, but they are the most popular one hit wonders on this site. These rankings will ...
www.onehitwondercentral.com/top100.cfm
50 Greatest One-hit Wonders - Oddee.com
Oct 16, 2007 ... In the music industry, a one-hit wonder is an artist generally known for only one hit single. The hits of many one-hit wonders are novelty songs ...
www.oddee.com/item_90666.aspx
Another case of "lazy reporter" wishes to troll for page hits.
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Re: Re: The power of the internet
Record studios like to take actual good content and spread it out by throwing in filler. By doing this they are able to keep artists alive (aka making money for the studio) longer. Seriously when was the last time you bought an ablum backed by a major recording studio and actually found more than 2-4 truly likeable and good songs? Usually it's 2-4 good songs and 8-9 tracks that range from indifferent to straight garbage.
Well what happens when someone releases a hit to start the flow...but then is unable to follow through with anything else that is actually a solidly good track?
You get the one hit wonder.
Acts that come out strong have a few songs (maybe even a good album) but after the inital boom wears off (as in the fans are hungry for the next hit) there is nothing to fill the void. Sure they may try to launch a "comeback" and sometimes it might work but usually it doesn't.
As a result you will see them on VH1, a reality show, or an infomercial.
If anything the internet has done some good for this process. With the internet hits are able to get circulated much faster than before and the parodies and imitations of these hits can circulate faster as well. You can see this over time. How many parodies of "Macarena" are there versus how many parodies of "Gangnam Style"?
The record studios don't have much value in parodies because they one don't inherently translate into success for the artist, two the studios try as they might aren't in control of what is parodied and how it is parodied, and three they don't necessarily profit from these parodies.
The internet alone cannot prevent the one hit wonder. The only way for that to happen is for the artist (and the studio) to actually release a regular stream of good content.
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There are basically one hit wonders going back to the 1800's and probably even earlier, mainly various opera composers and singers that were very popular for a single piece and then never really heard of again.
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Re: The power of the internet
you mean:
"Al Gore invented the one-hit wonder. Who knew?"
there FTFY
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P0rn
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You know what's funny?
Maybe the new album isn't doing well because she's just not particularly memorable as an artist? I learned who Jonathan Coulton was because someone shared a video of him playing Re: Your Brains with an audience at PAX, and the reason I was so taken in by his music was BOTH the fact the music was good and his incredible talent at connecting with his audience, as I was plainly able to see in the video.
CRJ may have come up with a cute, catchy pop ditty... But what did she do to build on that? What did she do to connect with the fans who were making her into a meme? Or did she just rush out a new album figuring that she had people's attention? If you want people to focus on you as an artist as opposed to just focusing on one of your songs, you need to give them a reason to do that!
PSY reposts people photoshopping Gangnam Style onto Malaysian McShaker bags via his official twitter account for cripes' sake! He fully embraced the memeing (is that a word?) and ran with it.
Never mind Gangnam Style is a better song than Call Me, Maybe in my never to be humble opinion...
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Your usage of "filicide", "homicide", "Murder One" is
It's a good encapsulation of what's on the Internet: silly pretender reaches for the most extreme of terms and falls flat on delivery. Tone it down, sonny. Stick to facts.
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Re: Your usage of "filicide", "homicide", "Murder One" is
"I kept looking for those literally in the article, and learned only that it's lousy hyperbolic writing for an opinion piece"
On an opinion blog? My God!
"silly pretender reaches for the most extreme of terms and falls flat on delivery"
Yes, but enough about the trolls who infest this site, what about the article?
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Re: Your usage of "filicide", "homicide", "Murder One" is
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Re: Re: Your usage of "filicide", "homicide", "Murder One" is
Yeah, and eating lead paint chips.
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Re: Re: Re: Your usage of "filicide", "homicide", "Murder One" is
Ah, well.
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Re: Re: Re: Your usage of "filicide", "homicide", "Murder One" is
I like the occasional zinger, or rant, but ootb is nothing more than a troll and should be treated as such. No response, report, move on. At least until such time as he actually attempts a discussion based on the article, without a personal vendetta...
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I just wanted to point out that there's a small error in your story. To explain, I'll regale you with a story while I do my morning exercise routine to insure testicular fortitude of my globular man butter breweries.
Carly, much like Ashless Simpson, became the target of my sensuously dangerous affections. One consequence that seems to affect most starlets who gaze upon the voluptuous trunk of my yogurt gun is the tendency to lose their fame in a fortnight. Unfortunately, the fame erodes even faster if they take a ride on the infamous "Zimmer Baloney Pony."
So, it is most depressing that young Carly has lost her privilege of fame, though maybe the world is beginning to realize that vapid lyrics and a flashy hipster garb are not items conducive with popularity.
I'll tell what is conducive with popularity...A Pronto Uomo vest and a pair of jeans from The Men's Wearhouse. Timberlake wears it, and he likes the way he looks. I guarantee it.
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I heard porn maintains it's popularity quite well. Then again I was also told I'd go blind trying to see if that's true.
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If you want porn that will make you blind, I suggest you join one of my corporate team-building exercises at my cabin dungeon in the Appalachian mountains.
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The follow up single was bland pop something about a "Good Time". The album flopped because of the follow up single being crap and the fact that the album is crap as well (heard it on Spotfiy).
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Amen to that, brother
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I find it funny too that this lady refers to Epsen's latest album as the best pop album of the year.
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I had to google the song,and later regretted it, to get the context of the joke.
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Did she WANT to be booed off a stage?
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Who?
I've been a musician for 40 years, never had or even wanted a "hit".
I've had a lot of fun though and I figure that anyone that has made any money at all is pretty lucky.
Just think in 30 years she can join a reunion tour and be nostalgic with a bunch of other one hit wonders.
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Japan latest Tsunami? Blame the Intertubes. Lunatic shooting people randomly? Blame the Intertubes. Hunger in Africa? Blame the Intertubes. Too much porn? Actually that's the Intertubes fault in a good way. DH nudity calendar? Blame the Intertubes. Rinse and repeat.
Shall we start realizing it's normal and stop trying to blame the Intertubes for what's essentially a natural development?
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OMG, the vibration of sound waves in the air led to the rise and fall of all previous artists! We must boycott sound!
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Hats?
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Re: Hats?
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Random anonymous commenter? FBI agent.
Person signed in with a witty username? FBI agent.
Nathan Fillion doing an AMA on Reddit, with pictures and confirmation from his Twitter? Oh cool, when did the FBI hire Nathan Fillion?
It makes a lot of things a lot more exciting.
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I'm sorry...
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Yeah, exactly. And more specifically it's about the people doing things with that meme. They make videos, remixes, etc. because they think it's cool, because their friends will like it, because they want to appear on the front page of some pop blog.
They're not doing it to please Jepsen. They don't really care about Jepsen - she's just not that big a part of their lives. They're doing it for themselves, and to expect them to put Jepsen's interests ahead of their own, particularly at the behest of some writer in a music mag, is frankly ridiculous.
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But she's not a one hit wonder
"Her follow-up single �Good Time,� charted well, but the credit belongs largely to Owl City; Jepsen�s mostly the hook singer."
But it's on her record. It's a duet and she sings half the song. And it didn't just chart well, it's everywhere.
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Leave Right Said Fred alone!
I think the key example of how he matured though, is that he presented a gameshow where you ended up actually making gold ingots in the Jordanian desert as both the final challenge, and your prize (The Desert Forges).
And yes, I've heard the first two Right Said Fred albums, my sister had them. They're not bad, actually. Still not a patch on Hawkwind.
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There are more fractions than integers.
Also :-
http://www.onehitwondercentral.com/
The list is looong.
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Now, this is just guesswork as I don't know how the "less than 100,000" sales were actually counted, but I would guess that they're counting full album sales and not individual track downloads. But, it occurs to me that most people have gotten quite used to the idea that artists with one catchy song tend to have an album full of filler or songs that aren't represented by the single. So, a lot of people who would previously have blind bought an album based ona single will now preview the whole thing - and then only buy the tracks they actually want.
So, one question is this: how many tracks off the album actually sold individually? Does the 100,000 include that number, or are we talking those sales along with another 200,000 downloads of Call Me Maybe from the album, another 190,000 of another track, another 180,000 of another track, etc?
In other words, are we actually looking at a situation where people enjoyed the first hit but opted not to try the album, or is it that the album only had 3 decent songs on it and people bought those instead of the whole thing? Either way, this is neither unprecedented nor a real problem - as stated above she had her 15 minutes and missed the chance to extend it for whatever reason - but it would be interesting to know.
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