* Illustration: Mr. Bingo * Hello, America. Remember me? For a few glorious days last summer, I was the toast of the blogosphere, a viral-video celebrity on par with that incredibly dramatic prairie dog. Perhaps you recall (or wouldn't mind Googling — go on, I'll wait) a certain hair-metal power ballad, with lyrics by Paris Hilton.
Yeah. I did that. I did it at the urging of a colleague who (a) pointed out the uncanny convergence of Hilton's jailhouse poetry and '80s hair-metal lyrical excess, and (b) predicted easy, greasy Net fame if I could write a crappy song in 12 hours. (Hilton, fresh from the slammer, had just recited these moving words on Larry King Live: "They say when we reach a crossroads / Or a turning point in life / It doesn't really matter how we got there" — the "Ev'ry Rose Has Its Thorn" of our great age.) I cranked out the tune, a videographer friend handled the visuals, and we uploaded it to funnyordie.com. The ditty spread like drug-resistant staph. I won't bore you with the impressive reticulations of my linkage, but suffice it to say . The "Paris Power Ballad" made the pop-blog equivalent of a full Ginsburg. Meanwhile, my pageview tally steadily climbed to more than 300,000 — a healthy chunk of those racked up in the first 72 hours.
Flabbergasted friends in "old media" called with congrats and predictions of "a deal," perhaps even "deals," though no one could say what said deals would consist of. Nonetheless, they advised me to purchase a URL and brace for incoming traffic: For while Net fame is the most disposable, its onset is also the fastest, and I could be a thousandaire by dawn. I'll admit it went to my head, this possible promise of potentially actual virtual fame. Much like Paris, I'd begun my "journey" on a whim: Why not throw a little wit at the wall and see if it sticks? At the very least, my hated Google rivals — DJ Scott Brown, English footballer Scott Brown, Scottish footballer Scott Brown, the other English footballer Scott Brown, Massachusetts state senator Scott Brown, and the loathsome Philadelphia architecture firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates — would cower beneath my top-ranked search results. Someone might finally write me a friggin' Wiki. Thus, with these modest expectations, did I spread-eagle myself on the crowdsourced casting couch of Net meritocracy. Piggybacked on Paris Hilton, a person famously famous for nothing, I had a chance to become famous for even less.
So, you wonder: Where am I now?
I'm the same grounded, bitter journeyman writer I was before my brush with cewebrity. There were no deals. The world did not beat a path to my WordPress blog. Venturi Scott Brown still eats my lunch, Google-wise. Where did I go wrong? Frankly, I was trying too hard, yet not hard enough. For one, I didn't appear in my own video, making it harder to franchise myself. And my muse may have overshadowed me: The comments amounted to variations on the theme "Paris is such a ho imho." And yes, I settled for an of-the-moment cheap shot instead of creating a line of durable, creative, and genuinely funny sketches along the lines of Human Giant or the Whitest Kids U Know, comedy troupes that've nabbed TV deals based on homemade Web videos.
But those guys are pros. I was striving for accidental celebrity, a la the "Leave Britney Alone" guy or Brooke "Brookers" Brodack — both of whom nabbed the type of deals I'd been denied. These are the real Web celebs: found objects snapped up by agents and producers on the cheap as affordable insurance against the approaching new media storm. Couldn't I at least be one of those?
Nope. To carve out a niche, I would've needed to churn out several more celebrity-foible-themed songs. What's more, I'd forgotten the supply-side mechanics of Web fame: More of us can become famous for less, but there's also less fame divvied up among more of us. Apologies to the president, but this pie isn't getting higher. The culture's entertainment metabolism has just sped up; whole careers run their course in a matter of hours. (Meanwhile, the big-screen gods can drop in and upend the small-screen game whenever they wish. As I struggled in the funnyordie.com pit, Will Ferrell and his ubiquitous "Landlord" video sat atop the heap.)
Ah, well. "Paris Power Ballad" still outpolls "Kucinich Sings Sixteen Tons.'" Nothing to blog home about, but it's something. And FWIW, it's still out there. I even invite you to lip-synch it. C'mon! I'll make ya famous.
Email scott_brown@wired.com.
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