Epic Fail?

The UK’s Rebecca Black hits YouTube…

Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between a prank and a genuine effort that has fallen on its face. The lines can be blurry. However, it would appear that the UK may be about to welcome its own Rebecca Black into the Pantheon of online videos that have gone viral and reached a massive audience. D4nny has accumulated well over 300,000 views of his song ‘Goodbye’ on YouTube over the last few days. I won’t attempt to describe the song or the genre. I’ll let you decide for yourself whether or not this is a wind up or a genuine attempt to storm the charts with some heartfelt r’n’b…

If the current trajectory and buzz continues – D4nny will hit something approximating meme status at some stage in the coming week. From there, it’s a hop, skip and jump to joining a long line of Epic Fails – which have ranged from Cecilia Jimenez’s attempts to restore Ecce Homo in Spain almost a year ago to bad acting, terrible business decisions, awful books and much more besides.

For those of you seeking a primer on the concept, you could do a lot worse than reading Mark O’Connell’s excellent book that traces the history of epic fails from Shakespeare to the modern day. Memes and failure are nothing new. As a species, there has been more than a touch of Nelson Muntz about us for a very long time.

The interesting question nowadays is the level of self awareness involved in epic failure. Many of the recent perpetrators of epic failures have actually made careers (of a sort) for themselves - parlaying their apparent failure into appearances in Superbowl ads. Others have ended up hosting award shows, releasing branded iPhone apps and more. It begs the question – just how epic is their failure? How long before D4nny ends up on a reality TV show, or at least Panto in the UK? He might have a better chance of unlocking some Internet money than most website owners or app developers. With that in mind, how long before people start planning for failure as a route to success?