Dubbing the Gap
New Media has manipulated the ability of computer technology to illustrate what the world is capable of creating. YouTube, a multi-billion dollar company, paved the way for creators from all over to share their lives and what they find meaningful with the rest of the world and eventually leading to the ability to profit off of it. A freshman student at the University of Tennessee, Fadi Saleh, had the brilliant idea of incorporating Barack Obama’s speeches throughout his political history into popular culture. The now iconic Barack Obama dub of “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen has over 50 million views on his YouTube account and is still the highest viewed video of Saleh’s. Within the comedic relief of Saleh’s digital contribution to media, Baracksdubs brought a bright light to the world of politics and combined the existing convention of television with the convention of editing software to produce a “New Media” that holds a purpose of effect that could only be impactful in the digital age.
Backtracking a bit, Baracksdubs is a YouTube channel purely dedicated to, well quite obviously, the dubbing of Barack Obama over popular tracks such as “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen or the titular classic, “Respect,” by Aretha Franklin. The medium uses an iconic figure from the last 10 years and turns them into harmless gags. Through rigorous editing and time consuming tropes of unlocking the ability to find the words that match the lyrics, Obama’s digital appearances are remixed. The channel, using previous media to create new media, utilizes the idea of art imitating art. In that the meta concept of dubbing Barack Obama over popular back-tracks of today’s pop is using both the media of music and leadership to create comedic relief for the nation.
Baracksdubs is a mix between existing cultural conventions and the conventions of software. Barack Obama never actually orchestrated these songs nor performed them. Speaking on existing cultural conditions, presidential speeches have been filmed, televised, and normalized ever since the days of Ronald Reagan. With that being said, the existing cultural convention of televised presidential speeches are a thing of the past. With the creation of YouTube in 2005 and editing software made available at the hands of many for a reasonable price, chaos ensued.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX1YVzdnpEc
In the clip for “Call me Maybe”, notice how the user quite literally embeds Obama over the track of the original song and matches the the two almost completely through certain timing. It’s almost like Barack Obama did karaoke for everyone in the world. It is completely bizarre and insane but it is a phenomenon eight years on as the account still holds 1.6 million subscribers. The video merged the gap between internet culture, mainstream media and quite obviously, politics. Thinking back to when the video first arrived, it created a friendly face out of our nation’s leader and somewhat moralized a man with a plethora of power.
Internet culture is based out of irony, and Baracksdubs extravagated the line between serious and playful media. “Call me Maybe” became an instant hit and Carly Rae Jepsen became an idol for tweens, teens, and nearly anyone access to public radio. Think about it, Barack Obama, the President of the United States is singing a song written for pop listeners and the iconic video is available in the seconds it takes to type “Obama Call me Maybe.” Pretend for a moment the dub just released and it is 2012, the election is happening in a few months and the fight between the two leading parties is almost in full gear. A child views this video for the first time, after hearing the smash-hit song blare through radio stations the entirety of the summer. It then creates sense of bond and relatableness as this man who runs the country is seen in a carefree and friendly manner. A child sees this song being recited by not only a president, but an icon living through history, and their brain receptors associate some sort of comfortable feeling when viewing this man later in life. One would argue it could be used as propaganda to vote by humanizing a political figure in the sense of harmless entertainment that carries the ability to have a lasting effect. YouTube’s humorous beginnings were derived from irony and Barack Obama singing “Call me Maybe” is ironic and warm enough to bridge the gap. Entertainment and politics is not an easy feat to combine, unless one is creating a joke and using these figures as punching bags (such as many of the “Cold Opens” on Saturday Night Live), but Fadi Saleh was able to do that with his content.
With YouTube, Saleh was able to provide the masses with turning a president and an icon into a light-hearted gag relief of a character that occasionally provided vocals to popular music. Baracksdubs provides a copious amount of dubs to 1.6 million subscribers, not including the hundreds of millions that have viewed his videos since the creation. It was one of the first channels to create harmless humor through remixing speeches of a political figure and then using technology to quite literally remix and create entertaining videos for the pleasure of day-to-day life. In regards to remixing and dubbing, the ideas still hold as a satirical concept with entertainment value that also holds the possibility of a lasting effect on a generation of viewers within the digital age, as well as possibility for an ever-evolving platform.
