Almost as many people as there are in New Zealand, have seen Matt Mulholland’s Youtube videos.
THE biggest thing on YouTube right now is a song called Friday by 13 year-old Rebecca Black. With more than 110 million hits (and climbing) since it was uploaded around two months ago, and hitting high on singles charts worldwide, you’d assume the song was brilliant. But Friday is popular because it’s bad. Rebecca Black, a beautiful but slightly awkward girl with a horribly auto tuned voice, sings about a weekday morning (“Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs, gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal”) spent in anticipation of the weekend, “Partyin’, partyin’ (yeah), partyin’, partyin’ (yeah), fun, fun, fun, fun, lookin’ forward to the weekend”.
Friday represents a condensing of modern pop culture inanity, simultaneously poking fun and paying tribute to the factors that make a hit - repetition, simplicity, and x-factor – which in this case appears to be Black’s sweet-faced obliviousness to this horrifically bad song. Lady Gaga called Black a ‘genius’, and perhaps she is - Billboard magazine estimates she makes $24, 900 a week from sales of the ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ song alone.
Meanwhile, here in Wellington, our own YouTube superstar Matt Mulholland recently surpassed four million views for his 33 videos.
“It freaked me out, that’s almost the population of New Zealand,” he says.
His most popular video, with 1.7million hits and entitled My Heart Will Go On - Recorder by Candlelight, depicts Vaseline-on-the-lens film footage of a heartbroken Mulholland wandering around familiar Wellington spots, while playing a torturously bad recorder-rendition of Celine Dion’s classic theme for Titanic.
“For the first year that song was up, there were barely any views. Then all of a sudden it was discovered in Japan and Korea and the numbers went crazy. That’s how it works – a video can sit there and no-one sees it for ages, and then one person finds it and ‘boom’, it’s off,” he says.
Mulholland’s version of the Ghostbusters theme, where he uses his voice to mimic all instrument parts and then layers them over each other, had less than 10, 000 views for a year, then jumped to 500,000 views overnight. His videos have been broadcast on television in France, USA, Japan and Hungary.
“What I do is try to create a song that would be a ‘real’ song if the lyrics were different,” he says.
For the song Penis Chorale Part II, half a dozen Mulhollands in choirboy dress sing the layered parts of a beautiful church song, his voice soaring to hit notes you’d think unreachable, but where the only word he sings is “penis”.
“I want people to think, ‘this is a really good song, but is he singing about penises?’” he says.
While many of these YouTube sensations appear all-laughs and, often, not a lot of skill, Mulholland is a talented musician. His singing voice is pitch-perfect, he played trumpet “every day for 12 years”, winning best trumpet player at the Tauranga Jazz Festival in 2007, he attended the New Zealand School of Music, and plays ‘some’ piano, violin, drums and guitar too.
Mulholand recently quit barbershop after 13 years of involvement. A big part of his life since he was a teenager – Mulholland’s Tawa high school quartet ‘Soundwaves’ won high school national champs in 2005 and 2006, his quartet ‘Quarter Tone’ placed second at nationals this year, and his barbershop chorus Vocal FX is currently placed 10th in the world.
“It was sad. It’s been such a big part of my life but it takes up too much time and is a huge financial commitment. I needed to commit to my videos and it was splitting my focus,” he says.
Aside from some unusual successes, Mulholland says it’s not easy to make money on YouTube.
“I make a little, but not enough to cover costs just yet. I’ve just started taking YouTube more seriously, and I’m planning to make a living off of it in the future.”
Mulholland just quit his job to pursue his YouTube dream– he pays his bills with weekend gigs in a covers band, and the rest goes towards his videos – which he makes almost entirely on his own.
“When I’m not writing songs, editing or filming I’m trying to reach new people. It’s pretty much all I do,” he says.
The intensified focus seems to be paying off.
Last month, Mulholland uploaded his own cover version of Black’s Friday, and it received 480,000 views in nine days.
“It’s the first time I’ve planned a video to hit off something viral, and it’s really worked. The more I do it the more I get a grasp on what to do.”
For the Comedy Festival in May, Mulholland is showcasing the songs loved by millions in a live on stage “musical extravaganza”, complete with flashy lights, epic theatrics and backup dancers.
In the words of Rebecca Black; it’s gonna be “fun, fun, fun, fun (yeah!)”.
Matt Mulholland: Beyond Emotion, Bats Theatre, May 11-14.
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