without thought

Another 2.0 fairy tale

I just caught this in the Irish news today and I couldn’t not comment on it. I had come across a mention of this incredibly successful video clip on YouTube (million and odd hits blah blah blah) of this random girl dancing around her garden. The unique feature of this clip (i was told in the article I read) was that she had danced in half time to the song then it was brought back to normal time in the edit, creating this strobe like effect. The tune she is dancing to is Daft Punk (so ok nothing abnormal so far) but to be quite frank, it isn’t anything ‘amazing’ and quite how it managed to achieve over a million hits plus wind up in an article in a Times newspaper supplement had me puzzled until, of course, I found out today that ‘groovy dancing girl’ has become the face for French fashion label Etam.

Sophie Mary as she is known, who has made several more videos since, features in an advert for the French brand dancing like a maniac in their cool denim products. As John Lydon once said ‘ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’ I was able to find this clip with the title ‘Sophie Merry: a modern Fairy tale Part1′

Yes, a modern 2.0 viral fairy tale. Why should we ever think otherwise. But if you look back on any of her various gigs on YouTube, the comments tell quite a different story. Incomplete YouTube profiles posting things like: ‘Brilliant’, ‘Great’, ‘Keep it up’. Are these marketing trolls sent into inflate figures? Most likely. And then there’s that curious coincidence of it being a French label picking up on a ‘cult’ video with a French track. My god this IS the land of make believe! Perhaps some of this blarney could rub itself off on this blog. If I get a few thousand hits over night, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, check this article out on TechCrunch.