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      Meet George Collier, YouTube’s Star Music Transcriber

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      George Collier started his YouTube channel as a way to stay engaged with music during the pandemic. Now nearly a million followers tune in for his notations.For some budding musicians (and even old pros), the very sight of sheet music can elicit a fight-or-flight response, bringing up painful memories of strict piano teachers and high-pressure recitals. George Collier, a 20-year-old music transcriber, is doing his part to change that.Collier, a student at Warwick University in the United Kingdom, takes snippets of videos from live performances by well-known artists like Wynton Marsalis and Celine Dion, or bedroom musicians who’ve posted clips online, and adds detailed directions for what’s being played. Juggling harmony, melody and rhythm, he turns sounds into wildly detailed notations and shares the results with an audience of over 882,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel, where his most popular videos have between 5 million and 18 million views.“Music can be a bit uptight, particularly in the whole music theory land,” Collier said during a break between lectures, as he video chatted from a light-filled campus building where the sounds of bustling university life swirled around him. In his videos, made with the help of a team of transcribers, he deciphers mesmerizing cadenzas, barbershop quartet arrangements, funk jams and jazz solos in an entertaining way that softens sheet music’s reputation as something academic and unforgiving.His video “When You Make the Trombone SING” takes on a soaring trombone solo by Frank Lacy from a performance in 1988 with the Art Blakey Big Band. Another clip, titled “She Practiced 40 Hours a Day for This,” captures a virtuosic Mozart piano cadenza by Mitsuko Uchida. While Collier specializes in jazz, he also showcases performances from the classical world, as well as everyday people with impressive talents. A clip titled “When Your Family Is Musically Competent” features a version of “Happy Birthday” that turns into improvised gospel-laden riffing. His video “Pro Musician Jams With Street Performer on Subway” notates a saxophonist on the London Underground as he spontaneously engages a guitarist in a version of Big Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll.”“The transcriptions are to understand the musical decisions made by performers,” Collier said. “It doesn’t really matter how famous you are. If you make good stuff, then people are going to want to listen.”Because he’s navigating full-time university student life, Collier works with transcribers from the United States, Germany and beyond to keep his channel uploading consistently.Alice Zoo for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Did Melanie’s ’Brand New Key” Hit No. 1?

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      Melanie’s “Brand New Key” is just one of many weird songs that somehow topped the Billboard charts.When Melanie’s “Brand New Key” debuted in 1971, some people were confused. What did the singer, who died on Tuesday at 76, mean when she sang about having a brand-new pair of roller skates and someone else having a brand-new key?Melanie told interviewers that she wrote the song in 15 minutes, after ending a 27-day fast, and that it was intended to be cute. The folk singer said that it did not have a deeper meaning, though many thought its playful lyrics about biking and roller skating were really about sex (“Don’t go too fast but I go pretty far”). It sounded strange, like a song out of time — Melanie said she intended it to hearken to the 1930s — sung with what could now be called a warbling “indie girl voice.” And it somehow hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.The song has lingered in pop culture, from a lip sync battle between Jimmy Fallon and Melissa McCarthy to a post-apocalyptic DJ playing it endlessly on “Kids in the Hall.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Steve Harwell: How Smash Mouth’s ‘All Star’ Got a Second Wind From Memes

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      The track, sung by Steve Harwell, took a winding path to evergreen status that illustrates how social media and fan-made content have transformed the music business.Long before it became a soundtrack nugget and an internet meme, it was just a rock band’s attempt to land a radio hit.But the long path to evergreen status for “All Star,” the 1999 track by the California alternative band Smash Mouth, whose founding lead singer, Steve Harwell, died on Monday at age 56, is an illustration of how social media and fan-made content have transformed the music industry.The song took shape while the group was working on its second album, “Astro Lounge,” after its first taste of success with the song “Walkin’ on the Sun” (1997). The group submitted a batch of songs to its record company and was told: “You’re not done. We don’t hear a single, so keep working,” Robert Hayes, the band’s manager, told Rolling Stone in 2019. Greg Camp, Smash Mouth’s guitarist and primary songwriter, said the song’s lovable-loser theme (“I ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed”) emerged from fan mail. “About 85 to 90 percent of the mail was from these kids who were being bullied” for being Smash Mouth fans, he told the website Songfacts. “So we were like, ‘We should write a song for fans.’”“All Star” was quickly placed on film soundtracks, including “Inspector Gadget” and “Mystery Men,” in 1999. (The original music video had clips from “Mystery Men,” a superhero sendup starring Ben Stiller and Janeane Garofalo, among others.) But the song’s immortality began with its placement in “Shrek,” the 2001 animated favorite starring Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy, where the song plays in the opening credits. The film grossed a total of $484 million around the world, according to the site Box Office Mojo.A decade or so later, generational nostalgia kicked off another level of success for “All Star,” when the children who grew up on “Shrek” began meme-ing on it relentlessly. There was the version made up entirely of samples of Bill O’Reilly saying his name. And the one, from “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” with lyrics stitched together from “Star Wars” clips. There were the ones sung by Jon Sudano, a YouTuber, showing him melding the song — sometimes painfully — to hits like Adele’s “Hello” and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” or with the vocal line maddeningly shifted one beat from the original. And don’t forget the guy who recreated Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” using samples of Harwell’s voice.Perhaps the most popular take was “Mario, You’re a Plumber,” a Mario Bros.-theme adaptation — with actual effort taken to write new lyrics — that has garnered 1.6 million views on YouTube.Those were all iterations of what has become a key avenue for artists to find wide success in a fragmented media environment, with user-generated content ricocheting through social media to propel a new song (see Lil Nas X, “Old Town Road”) or point younger listeners to an old one (Fleetwood Mac, “Dreams”).In the case of “All Star,” this process kept an old track alive for years and led to gigs like the band performing a snippet of the song on a Progressive insurance ad in 2020. All of that activity tends to drive listeners back to streaming services, and “All Star” has garnered just under a billion streams on Spotify alone.In an interview with the music site Stereogum in 2017, Harwell expressed the contrasting opinions artists sometimes have about such memes. On the one hand, it’s valuable exposure, and that can lead to money in their pocket. On the other … it’s not always fun to have one’s work flattened into a joke.“It’s entertaining, I get it,” Harwell said. “It doesn’t bother me, but at the same time, I don’t love it.” More

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      Review: ‘The YouTube Effect’ Is a Discursive Documentary

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      Alex Winter offers an overview of the world’s second most popular website in this unfocused tech documentary.The numbing experience of web video surfing is recreated — intentionally, I think — in “The YouTube Effect,” a discursive documentary that assembles a fair amount of information about the impact of YouTube on society, but struggles to find something new to say with it. Directed by Alex Winter, the film charts the rise of the video sharing platform and then attempts to trace its Sasquatch-size footprint on the culture.YouTube, the world’s second most popular site (after Google), is a stimulus machine. The film emulates this quality, finding a formal rhythm by layering a hodgepodge of YouTube clips with voice-over analysis from tech experts. It also spotlights several popular YouTube creators, including the social commentator Natalie Wynn, who is best known for her channel ContraPoints. A cogent speaker, Wynn says that she has declined offers to partner with streamers or cable because she values the “creative control” YouTube offers.Interrupting these success stories are tangents into a number of troubling chapters in the site’s history. We hear from the video game developer Brianna Wu, a target of death threats during Gamergate, as well as Caleb Cain, who describes his tumble into a matrix of far-right videos. These events have already been heavily reported on — “Rabbit Hole,” a New York Times podcast, relays Cain’s experience — and the sections often feel like retreads.The internet moves quickly, perhaps too quickly for an overview this unfocused. Even Winter seems overwhelmed by the task of curating this deluge of white-noise news and memes: His rundown of YouTube’s connection to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot lasts about as long as the viral video “Charlie Bit My Finger.”The YouTube EffectNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Hot Ones’ Was a Slow Burn All Along

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      This YouTube talk show’s premise is simple: Disarm celebrities with deep-cut questions and scorchingly spicy wings. Nearly 300 episodes later, the recipe still works.Bob Odenkirk was dubious when he walked onto the set of the long-running YouTube interview show “Hot Ones” last month. He was, after all, about to take on the “wings of death,” as the lineup of treacherously spicy chicken is called.“I’ve heard such good things about the show,” Odenkirk told Sean Evans, its even-keeled host, once cameras were rolling, but “I think I’m perfectly capable of talking without having a part of my body injured.”Despite peppering the interview with a couple of F-bombs, Odenkirk, the Emmy-nominated actor from “Better Call Saul” and “Breaking Bad,” underwent a familiar shift: He’d warmed up — emotionally. Particularly after wing three, when Evans, quoting a 1989 Chicago Tribune article, asked him about his one-man show “Half My Face Is a Clown.”“That was far more entertaining and fun than I thought it would be,” Odenkirk said in the closing credits through spice-induced coughs.“Hot Ones” — a breakthrough pop-culture phenomenon in which stars eat 10 progressively fiery wings (or, increasingly, a vegan substitute) while being asked 10 deeply researched questions — has built itself into an online pillar, holding steady amid the shifting tides of digital media.Since 2015, First We Feast, the food culture site that produces “Hot Ones,” has aired nearly 300 episodes, almost all of which have amassed millions of views. Guests this season, its 20th, include Pedro Pascal, Bryan Cranston, Jenna Ortega and Florence Pugh. In the early days of the show, guests were mostly rappers, comedians and athletes. Now Oscar winners like Viola Davis and Cate Blanchett often occupy the hot seat, as do headliners like Dave Grohl and Lizzo. The two most watched episodes, with Gordon Ramsay and Billie Eilish, both in 2019, have a combined 165 million views. The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson popped in to discuss our place in the universe, and its place in us.Bob Odenkirk, the star of “Better Call Saul,” conquered the “wings of death” in March, during Season 20 of the show. Peter Fisher for The New York TimesEvans uses his affable, unassuming approach to his advantage, with his deep-cut questions disarming guests, as the wings set them ablaze. Often visibly suffering, the guests are swiftly won over by Evans’s knowledge of their careers and his uncanny ability to keep conversations on track, even when they come dangerously close to going sideways.When he asked Josh Brolin why the Geva Theater Center in Rochester, N.Y., was special to him, Brolin responded, “Literally the greatest questions I’ve ever been asked. Seriously. I’m blown away. I don’t know who’s working for you, but don’t fire them.” (Turns out, it’s the small theater where he earned his stripes as a character actor.)In recent years, “Hot Ones” has edged itself into the big leagues: with spoofs on “The Simpsons” and “Saturday Night Live,” and Daytime Emmy nominations for Evans and the show. Its influence seems to have rippled down into the bevy of late-night or online segments that test celebrities one way or another: “Seth Meyers Goes Day Drinking” or Vanity Fair’s lie-detector series.Since its start, Evans said, “We’ve lived through like four different new media generations over that time, and we’ve been able to ride those rocky waters just in like the smoothest way.”The show could have easily been pigeonholed as a novelty or gimmick, but Evans and Chris Schonberger, the co-creator and executive producer of “Hot Ones,” say its steady ascent is a product of their dedication to the craft of interviewing and, perhaps unexpectedly, to linear TV: New 20-30 minute episodes drop on Thursdays. “‘Hot Ones’ is a little bit of like a sitcom from the ’80s or ’90s,” Evans said, comparing its cozy watchability with “The Office” or “Friends.”Schonberger calls “Hot Ones” a “true Venn diagram,” where today’s emphasis on viral formats overlaps with time-tested journalism. “It’s rooted in doing the research, trying to be factually accurate, trying to be broader than the gossip of the day,” he said. Its North Star has always been to answer the classic question, “What would it be like to have a beer with that person?”Peter Fisher for The New York TimesDomonique Burroughs, now a senior producer for “Hot Ones,” has been with the show since the start.Peter Fisher for The New York TimesThis is all so much more than Evans, 36, and Schonberger, 39, could have fathomed when the idea was born almost a decade ago.First We Feast, started by Complex Networks in 2012 and led by Schonberger, was struggling to catch up to legacy food brands like Gourmet Magazine or Bon Appétit, with their thousands of recipes or restaurant listings. Then, in 2014, digital brands pivoted hard to video. “It was this amazing flattening of the landscape,” Schonberger said. “Suddenly we were not way behind the starting line, and we also had this brand that could credibly speak to pop culture and not just food.”And with platforms like YouTube evolving, Schonberger said, “People were looking for something to puncture the veneer of celebrity — how interviews were becoming more experiential and gamified.”“‘Hot Ones’ was just the dumbest idea of all time,” Schonberger said, only half-joking. “How is it, philosophically, that the dumbest idea is the best?”“It’s like, well, we can’t just have people get drunk or high,” he went on, “but I think we can get people to eat spicy food, which might just be hilarious.”“Hot Ones” started selling its own hot sauces in 2016, and in 2022, it sold more than two million bottles.Peter Fisher for The New York TimesPeter Fisher for The New York TimesThe N.B.A. star Shaquille O’Neal was a guest on the show in 2019.Peter Fisher for The New York TimesCasting someone formally was not in the budget, Schonberger said, so he went hunting for onscreen talent “down at the end of the hallway.” And there was Evans, who had been hosting segments for Complex News, playing golf with Stephen Curry, for example, or eating Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson’s diet.In the beginning, the show had a more contentious, unhinged quality (like a “Wild West U.F.C. barroom,” as Schonberger put it). Publicists, Evans said, would bring in their client, “half apologizing for it in front of us.” Conversations that Evans had during Season 1 (which didn’t feature any women) — like when he used numerous expletives during a question to Machine Gun Kelly about his relationship with Amber Rose — would not fly today.In 2018, Charlize Theron’s episode kicked open the door for top-tier female guests, like Scarlett Johansson and Halle Berry, previously difficult to book in part because of the show’s unconventional, unproven concept, which hadn’t quite broken out of its bro-centric box.Evans, left, with the creator of “Hot Ones,” Chris Schonberger. “How is it, philosophically, that the dumbest idea is the best?” Schonberger has asked himself over the years.Peter Fisher for The New York TimesIf you’ve pictured Evans going into hiding for a week before each interview to consume every part of his upcoming guest’s career, you wouldn’t be wrong. But he also gets a lot of help from his brother, Gavin Evans, the show’s researcher, who compiles a dossier on each celebrity that might be 50 pages long — no magazine profile, podcast interview, IMDb entry, Wikipedia page or archived local news story is left unplumbed.Sean Evans, a Chicago native who grew up admiring Howard Stern, David Letterman and Adam Carolla, turns out to have a knack for demystifying celebrity. Near the end of his interview, the Oscar nominee Austin Butler, who told a touching story about riding roller coasters with his late mother, hugged Evans, saying, “I’ve made a new friend that I hope stays in my life for a long time.” The night after Grohl’s episode, in which the two drank an entire bottle of Crown Royal whisky, Evans attended a friends-and-family Foo Fighters show.Despite consistently trending on YouTube, the show has managed to maintain some level of underdog appeal. Maybe it’s that a team of around 10 people has worked on it since its inception. This includes a hot sauce curator: Noah Chaimberg, the founder of the Brooklyn-based small-batch hot-sauce shop Heatonist. The lineup of sauces changes every season, but a mainstay is the brutal Da’ Bomb Beyond Insanity, a turning point in nearly every interview. The final wing tops two million on the Scoville scale.Or maybe it’s the unchanging bare-bones set: an all-black liminal space akin to the Looney Tunes void.The set was “a byproduct of us being broke,” Evans said, but it’s been a boon to the show. Though it often films in New York or Los Angeles, “we can pop that set up wherever,” Evans said, as when they traveled to Hawaii to interview Kevin Hart or London for Idris Elba. “The restrictions of the show became a superpower,” Schonberger said.The bare-bones “Hot Ones” set was originally “a byproduct of us being broke,” Evan said.Peter Fisher for The New York TimesSchonberger and Evans said that cable networks and other platforms have expressed interest in buying the “Hot Ones” brand, but they have prioritized their control over it, staying with YouTube and expanding their reach by creating and selling hot sauces (first conceived as a keepsake for superfans, then broadened exponentially to meet demand). They have had collaborations with Shake Shack, Reebok and Champion sportswear. And in 2021, Hot Ones started selling chicken bites in the freezer aisles of Walmart.And while “Hot Ones” wasn’t created with social media in mind, it is “made for it,” Schonberger said, with each wing being its own two- to three-minute segment designed to have a beginning, middle and end. Then come the reaction GIFs and compilations, which rack up millions of views on TikTok, along with videos of fans trying the sauces themselves.“We’ve just continued to focus on making the whole as good as possible and having faith that once it’s out in the world,” Schonberger said, “it belongs to the internet, and they’re going to find their ways to have fun with it and amplify it.” For the duo, who are admittedly bullheaded about their vision, the future will look a lot like the present.“I don’t really have these world takeover plans or aspirations. I think I’m just happier being a duke or being a baron on my little corner of the internet,” said Evans, who has eaten thousands of wings onscreen. “Hopefully I can just sustain this as long as my stomach will allow.”Peter Fisher for The New York Times More

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      ‘Jam Van’ Dares to Ask: What if Family Road Trips Were Actually Fun?

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      A new travel series featuring a diverse array of beloved musical artists uses original tunes to help children navigate the world.Few family expeditions are more fraught than long-distance road trips. What parent hasn’t longed to take the kids on a highway journey that is free of bored whines, back-seat battles and the terrifying possibility of having to put “Baby Shark” on endless repeat?Now a new series aims to fulfill that dream: “Jam Van,” on the YouTube Originals for Kids & Family channel and the YouTube Kids app, stakes out novel territory as a tune-filled travel show for children. In each of the season’s eight episodes — the first two will be released at noon Eastern time on Thursday, and a new one each Thursday thereafter — young viewers become the touring companions of Lamb, a detail-obsessed sheep, and Anne, a free-spirited alligator. Together, they explore a distinctive American city (and, in one case, a wide swath of a state) in their sky blue S.U.V.“I felt like this was the best way to sort of make something funny and interesting, both visually and sonically,” said Bill Sherman, one of the series’s creators and a Tony Award-winning music orchestrator and composer whose credits range from “Hamilton” (he won a Grammy as a producer of the original Broadway cast recording) to “Sesame Street” (he is that show’s Emmy-winning music director).Anne and Lamb’s 10- to-12-minute adventures in locations like Seattle, Nashville, Los Angeles and New Orleans involve landmarks, culture, food and, most important, music. On these road trips, however, moms and dads need not cover their ears: Musical artists including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Brandi Carlile, Sheryl Crow, Fitz and the Tantrums and Trombone Shorty portray themselves in live action, serenading the cartoon heroes with an original song created for each destination.The series’s animation is a pastiche of real-world footage, live-action performances, stop-motion animation and computer animation.YouTube Originals Kids & FamilyIn some episodes, like the one set in Virginia, featuring the band Old Crow Medicine Show, the artists have written the central tune’s music or lyrics (or both) themselves; in others, they perform the work of an eminent composer like Butch Walker, who wrote the song for Sheryl Crow, or Sherman himself.The result, Sherman said, is “music that you don’t often hear in kids’ shows,” including hip-hop, ’70s funk, bluegrass and country indie tunes.In a joint video interview, Sherman and Brian Hunt, the series’s other creator, explained how they made their show look different, too. Working with the Vancouver animation studio Global Mechanic, they invented a freewheeling collage of styles. Anne, Lamb and the animals’ Grumpy GPS — the series’s own Oscar the Grouch — are computer-animated, while the Big Book of Travel, a talking tome, is stop-motion. In addition to the live-action footage of music stars, the production team included pop-up cameos of children, who offer intriguing details about the destinations.To create the regional backdrops, Hunt said, “we took thousands of photographs in the actual cities” that were treated to give them a “heightened look.” The images include vivid views of the Hollywood sign, the Guggenheim Museum and the Liberty Bell.But the two men, who are fathers and close friends, intend “Jam Van” to be more than sightseeing — a resolve that was heightened by their early brainstorms at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. “No one could travel anywhere,” recalled Hunt, the president of Believe Entertainment Group, a producer of “Jam Van.” “And everybody was mad at each other.”The best buddies Anne and Lamb get mad at each other sometimes, too. (Grumpy GPS, voiced by the comedian Marc Maron, is almost always mad.) The series’s creators hope that through these characters’ interactions, children 4 and older can learn life skills and how to get along, both on and off the road.Anne is “really the one driving the ideas and the adventures,” said the comedian Nicole Byer, who voices the character. Lamb, voiced by the comic Pete Lee, “sometimes is like, ‘I don’t like that, that’s not a good idea,’” Byer added. Ultimately, she said, their friendship “is push-and-pull.”In each episode, the two travel companions face a problem, interpersonal or otherwise, that the segment’s song addresses. During the pilot, set in New York City, Anne grows frustrated when she can’t find her Uncle Salligator (who, naturally, turns out to live in the sewer). She and Lamb bump into Miranda, who sings and raps an encouraging strategy.“Building up a frustration tolerance in children so they can see their goals through to the end is such an important thing to do (as a parent, anyway),” Miranda wrote in an email.The Nashville episode also counsels persistence. Here, a mischievous armadillo keeps running away with the steel for Lamb’s steel guitar, and Crow’s vocal performance urges Lamb not to give up.In an episode set in his hometown, Oakland, Calif., Daveed Diggs advises Anne and Lamb on the importance of following directions.YouTube Originals Kids & Family“The power of song is that it sticks in your head,” said Daveed Diggs, who stars in an episode devoted to his hometown, Oakland, Calif. That segment’s vocal number, written by the rapper Phonte Coleman, with an additional verse by Diggs, focuses on the importance of following directions, using a catchy refrain.In choosing the artists who would perform the songs, “it wasn’t just about who was the biggest name,” Sherman said. “It was who worked well enough for our show, who could really fit in and make it work, because it wasn’t just about singing.”For the Seattle episode, the series’s second, the men sought out Carlile, not only because she’s from the area but also because of the plot they envisioned: Lamb and Anne, who is suffering an uncharacteristic bout of homesickness, meet an octopus whose “family” is a variety of species. Anne, realizing that friends can be as supportive as her own relatives, shakes off her melancholy.“I was just really inspired by the subject matter,” said Carlile, because, she added, “I’m part of a nontraditional family.” (She and her wife, Catherine Shepherd, have two daughters.) The song “One Sacred Thing,” a ballad about love that Carlile wrote and performs in the episode, emphasizes “that family comes in all different shapes and sizes,” she said.Brandi Carlile wrote and performs the “Jam Van” song “One Sacred Thing,” a ballad emphasizing “that family comes in all different shapes and sizes,” she said. YouTube Originals Kids & FamilyAs they put the episodes together, Sherman and Hunt also discovered an unexpected synergy. Frequently, Hunt said, the main characters’ “social-emotional challenge actually served as a great vehicle to help us explore the cities.”The conflict, for instance, that arises in Philadelphia, where Lamb is determined to stick to a schedule and Anne is desperate to eat, allowed the show’s creators to highlight that city’s quintessential dish (the cheese steak). The Philadelphia R&B vocal group Boyz II Men also introduced several Philly references to “The City of Brotherly Love,” the episode’s song about compromise.“We added Ishkabibble’s, which is a Philadelphia cheese steak spot in down south Philly,” said Wanyá Morris, a member of Boyz II Men. They also worked a signature local greeting into the start of the song, a hoot that sounds roughly like “Heer-yoh.”In addition to revising the musical number, the group’s members worked on being “relatable,” Morris said.The Philadelphia R&B group Boyz II Men helped write Philly-specific references into the song they sing for Anne and Lamb, including one for a beloved cheese steak restaurant.YouTube Originals Kids & FamilyThey wanted to act as if they were talking to their own children, he added, “so that the kids cannot look at us like, ‘Who are these old dudes singing to these cartoon characters?’”Including long-established artists, however, was part of a strategy to make “Jam Van” multigenerational viewing. The show also offers historical humor: At one point, Grumpy GPS even evokes the computer Hal in the film “2001: A Space Odyssey.”Craig Hunter, global head of kids and family for YouTube Originals, who acquired the series, praised it for offering insights into “various things that the everyday kid wasn’t necessarily aware of.” Although it is far too early to know if the show will have a second season, he acknowledged that the concept “has legs.”As for the creators of “Jam Van,” they’re already dreaming of places, artists and musical genres that haven’t yet been tapped.“K-pop?” Sherman said. “We’re ready to go.” More

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      ‘Gangnam Style’ Brought K-Pop to the World, but Haunted Its Creator

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      In 2012, the song took over the internet, and it helped pave the way for the global success of Korean pop. But Psy, the artist behind it, spent years trying and failing to replicate the phenomenon.SEOUL — He may not look it, in a spiffy double-breasted suit and a coiffure secured with enough hair gel to reflect the ceiling lights, but the 45-year-old music executive confides a secret as he rubs his temples: He’s hung over.But he doesn’t mind nursing this headache, at well past 2 p.m. on a Thursday in Seoul. Some of his best songwriting ideas come to him, he said, in the malaise that follows a night of hard drinking.The man doing the creative suffering is Psy, the onetime global internet sensation whose 2012 viral music video and earworm of a song, “Gangnam Style,” became the first-ever YouTube offering to surpass one billion views and had the world galloping along with him.The outlandish but irresistibly catchy song and accompanying video — which has Psy doing the tune’s signature horseback dance move in and around Gangnam, an upscale Seoul neighborhood — achieved the breakthrough, worldwide success that had mostly eluded Korean pop acts, or K-pop, before then.The video, which now has some 4.6 billion views, was so culturally pervasive in 2012 that Barack Obama was asked about it on Election Day. NASA astronauts recorded a parody, and a North Korean state propaganda site evoked the dance move to mock a South Korean politician. But for several years in the aftermath of all his viral fame, Psy said, the song’s success haunted him. Even as he was thrust overnight into a Hollywood existence, getting chased around New York City by paparazzi, signing with Justin Bieber’s manager and releasing a single with Snoop Dogg, internally he felt the pressure mounting for another hit.Psy performing “Gangnam Style” live on NBC’s “Today” show in New York, in 2012. At the time, the video for the song had more than 200 million YouTube views; it now has more than 4.6 billion.Jason Decrow/Invision, via Associated Press“Let’s make just one more,” he says he kept telling himself.He moved to Los Angeles in an effort to get a global career going in earnest, an ocean away from his native South Korea, where he was both a fixture of the music charts and a source of comic relief on silly television variety shows. But none of the attempts came close to replicating the formula that made “Gangnam Style” a global success.Psy wasn’t alone in trying to figure out how to reproduce the phenomenon. In South Korea, not only the music industry but government officials and economists, too, were studying just what it was about the tune, the lyrics, the video, the dancing or the man that had vaulted the song to such singular levels of ubiquity.And in the decade since the song and video first put South Korea’s pop music on the map for many around the world, K-pop has become a cultural juggernaut, expanding out from markets in East and Southeast Asia to permeate all corners of the world.Artists like BTS and Blackpink command devoted fans numbering in the tens of millions, and the bands wield an economic impact that rivals a small nation’s G.D.P. The fervor has spilled over beyond music into politics, education and even Broadway.Some say Psy deserves much of the credit.“Psy single-handedly placed K-pop on a different level,” said Kim Young-dae, a music critic who has written extensively about the industry. The song was a “game changer” for the Korean music scene and paved the way for the groundswell of interest and commercial success that the South Korean stars who came after him experienced, Mr. Kim said.Now, 10 years on from his lightning-in-a-bottle moment, Psy, whose real name is Park Jae-sang, is back home in South Korea, where he has started his own music label and management company and is trying to recreate the magic with the next generation of K-pop talent as one of the industry’s tastemakers.“Let’s make just one more,” Psy said he kept telling himself after “Gangnam Style” became a phenomenon.Chang W. Lee/The New York Times“One of the things I love most about this job is that it’s unpredictable. We say among ourselves we’re in the ‘lid business’ — because you don’t know what you’ve got until you open it,” Psy said in an interview at the offices of his music label headquartered in — where else? — the Gangnam neighborhood of Seoul. “You don’t know which cloud will bring the rain.” With 10 artists under his wing, including a newly minted six-member boy band, TNX, Psy says he feels immensely more pressure shaping and stewarding other people’s careers compared to when he was responsible for his alone.And while he can give his budding stars advice based on decades of industry experience, what he can’t do is offer them surefire instructions on making a hit record.For all the years he has spent thinking and talking about “Gangnam Style,” he remains just as mystified as anyone by its success.“The songs are written by the same person, the dance moves are by the same person and they’re performed by the same person. Everything’s the same, but what was so special about that one song?” Psy said. “I still don’t know, to this day.”Psy performing on the grounds of Korea University in Seoul in May.Anthony Wallace/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn global terms, Psy and his “Gangnam Style” are the epitome of a one-hit wonder. But in South Korea, he had been well-known as a rapper and musician for a decade before, carving out a path that differed from many of his fellow performers, in that he didn’t count on a boost from his physical appearance or shy away from courting controversy.He never had the chiseled look sought after in South Korea’s pop music industry, and from the release of his first album in 2001, he became notorious for his blunt, profane and at times ribald lyrics. “I Love Sex” was one of the tracks on his debut album, “Psy from the Psycho World!” which was slapped with a ban on sale to minors at the urging of the country’s Christian Ethics Movement.Despite — or perhaps because of — his unapologetic, iconoclastic ways, over the past two decades at home in South Korea, the college dropout has consistently logged chart toppers, best-selling albums and sold-out concerts.“It’s kinda sorta ironic he became so iconic — he went from being occasionally censored to widely celebrated,” said Bernie Cho, president of DFSB Kollective, a Seoul-based creative services agency that offers marketing and distribution solutions to Korean music artists and their labels. “He irreverently winked his way from being the bad boy of K-pop to the golden boy of K-pop.”For a pop song, “Gangnam Style” also unleashed an avalanche of deep think pieces and analyses on the various aspects of South Korea and Seoul it was said to be lampooning: the hypocrisy of the nouveau riche, the superficiality of its social standards and the inequality exemplified by the opulent Gangnam neighborhood.Psy insists the song never intended to deliver any profound social commentary — he was just looking to give people a few minutes of mindless hilarity and a reprieve from reality.If anything, he said, he was poking fun at himself, because he doesn’t aesthetically fit the bill of a posh Gangnam local.A decade on from his lightning-in-a-bottle moment, Psy has started a music label and talent management company. Chang W. Lee/The New York Times“It’s funny because someone who doesn’t look like he’s ‘Gangnam style’ says he is,” he said.Initially targeted for development in the 1970s to expand Seoul south of the Han River, Gangnam has became a coveted address where many of the capital’s wealthy congregate and the best schools are concentrated, an educational disparity likely to ensure that the inequalities symbolized by the neighborhood continue into the next generation.In the years since Psy made Gangnam a globally recognized, if oft-mispronounced, proper noun (“Gang” sounds closest to the latter half of Hong Kong; “nam” like Vietnam), the neighborhood has gotten ever more unattainable for the average South Korean. Nowhere have runaway real estate prices risen as steeply as in the Gangnam area.“If you say you live in Gangnam, people look at you differently,” said Jin Hee-seon, a former vice mayor of Seoul and professor of urban planning at Yonsei University. “It’s an object of desire and envy.”Psy, raised in the greater Gangnam area in a family running a semiconductor business, now lives north of the river with his wife and twin daughters and says he spends little time thinking about the place.A bronze sculpture in Gangnam by the artist Hwang Man-seok, modeled after the signature “Gangnam Style” horse-riding hand motion.Anthony Wallace/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhat he has recently returned to is his signature live performances.His concerts are legendary in South Korea for raucous good fun. His music — loud and energetic — is often accompanied by dance moves just as outrageous, requiring him to jump, kick and wave his arms wildly in the air. During his six-city tour this year, his first since the pandemic, he said he was surprised to find his joints and limbs as nimble as ever in middle age.In his latest album released this April, his ninth, he collaborated with the rapper Suga of BTS on a single titled “That That.” In the music video, Suga comically duels — and kills — the blue tuxedo-wearing Psy of the 2012 video. (That video has accrued 369 million views.)As for the chase of global fame that once drove him nearly mad, he says he’s made his peace with its absence.“If another good song comes along and if that thing happens again, great. If not, so be it,” he said. “For now, I’ll do what I do in my rightful place.” More

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      At Comedy Shows in Lviv, Crowds Look for Humor Amid a Deadly War

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      At the Cultural Defense shows in Lviv, comedians and audiences look for humor amid a deadly conflict. Don’t mind the air raid alarms.LVIV, Ukraine — Some morsels of news are so grim and absurd that they sound like they were conceived in the warped imagination of bored satirists. Like the headline from Belarus a few weeks ago, reporting that 10th graders there were being taught how to aim rifles — using shovels.“What do you think about that?” asks the comedian Vadym Dziunko.Dziunko is onstage with two other comedians and a well-known singer. All are seated and holding microphones, gamely trying to find humor in a place and at a moment when the tragic is trouncing the funny by a spectacular margin.It’s a recent Saturday night at the Cult Comedy Hall, a comedy club in downtown Lviv, near Ukraine’s relatively peaceful western border. Some 100 people have spent about $13 apiece to eat, drink and listen to comics riffing about whatever crosses their minds, which is often the latest news about the war with Russia. Or in the case of this shovel-as-rifle business, the topic is the oddness of life in Belarus, a dictatorship a mere 150 miles to the north.“What do you expect from a country where a potato is a weapon?” says the comedian Oleksandr Dmytrovych. Then he imagines an instructor, giving tips to the kids.“‘We can’t give you rifles yet — —”“‘Because we only have one,’” finishes the third comic, Maksym Kravets.From left, Maksym Kravets, Oleh Luzanov, Bohdan Vakhnich and Oleksandr Dmytrovych riff on whatever crosses their minds.Emile Ducke for The New York TimesThis is Cultural Defense, an evening of unscripted and free-flowing humor staged in Lviv every few nights. It began two weeks after the Russian invasion, when Kravets, a Ukrainian intelligence officer by day and a comedian by night, called the co-creator of the show, Bohdan Slepkura, and pointed out that the Cult Comedy Hall was in a basement.“I said, ‘You know, the place is a bomb shelter,’” recalled Kravets, a burly and bearded 42-year-old.Kravets, wearing a T-shirt with “Wildness” on it, and Dmytrovych were sitting in another room in the club after the show recently. Initially, they said, they were not sure anyone in the country was in the mood for chuckles. The shock of the invasion was then fresh and hundreds of thousands of residents from the eastern part of the country were flowing into the city.“Before the first show, we thought, maybe this isn’t the right time for comedy,” said Dmytrovych, who is 30 and bearded, too. (“Without beards we’re ugly,” he explained.)“We were petrified,” he went on. “But after the first show, we came and sat in this room and realized, people want to laugh. They want to hear jokes about our enemy. From that first night, we understood this would be bigger than we had thought.”The shows are held in a basement space that is certified as a bomb shelter.Emile Ducke for The New York TimesThere has been exactly one international breakout star in Ukrainian comedy and he happens to be the president of the country, Volodymyr Zelensky. If this puts pressure on others in the business, it wasn’t obvious onstage on this Saturday, when nobody seemed especially pressed to land on a punchline and a singer, Mykhailo Khoma, spent a lot of time ruminating about his childhood.Ukraine has long had a modest live-comedy scene, though anyone accustomed to the standard setup at American clubs will find novelty in the show’s format. There’s no warm-up act, and at no point is anyone standing onstage alone. There are different guests every night. The evening starts with four men leading a raucous call and response in Ukrainian, like the rest of the show.Hosts: “Glory to the Nation!”Audience: “Death to enemies!”Hosts: “Ukraine!”Audience: “Above all else.”Hosts: “Putin!”Audience: Unprintable putdown!After that, the stars take their seats and start to talk.Some of the humor is self-deprecating. In a previous show — they’re all available on YouTube — Dmytrovych riffed about the news that Ukrainian soldiers had mastered a “single use” antitank missile called an NLAW. This was amazing, he said, because by nature and necessity, Ukrainians are accustomed to reusing everything, over and over.“I got slippers in a hotel in Egypt a year and a half ago and I’m still wearing them,” he said. “When they got dirty, I washed them. When they fell apart in the washing machine, I glued them together. Now these are slippers I offer to guests.”Kravets is a Ukrainian intelligence officer by day and a comedian by night.Emile Ducke for The New York Times“For as long as we’re laughing, we’re not giving up,” Dmytrovych said.Emile Ducke for The New York TimesThere are plenty of jokes at the expense of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who is scorned as a blustery idiot who underestimated the spirit and resolve of Ukrainians. The Russian military, on the other hand, is largely spared. The point, explained Dmytrovych, isn’t to belittle the invading forces, which Ukrainians regard as formidable and horrifying. It’s to lift the spirits of people who are not on the front lines, or who might have once lived near the front lines and have since relocated.So during one show, Kravets extolled the surprisingly polished beauty of checkpoints in Lviv (“I would not be surprised if they served lattes”), some of which have exceptionally long lines. (“I thought at the beginning they would take my order and at the end I’d be handed a Big Mac.”)Internal politics are a recurring theme. During a show a few weeks ago, a poll was cited that found 90 percent of Ukrainians want to join the European Union.How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 6Gavriel Heine. More