Numa Numa

~ the obit ~

Dragostea Din Tei did not need a webcam video to reach turkey. It was on the radio through the summer of 2004 the way a european summer hit gets on the radio, which is relentlessly, and by december most people here were done with it. So the video arrived as a second act rather than a first. In the united states it worked the other way around, where the video was how a whole country met the song, and the song sounded like an accident because of it.

Gary Brolsma was eighteen, in Saddle Brook, New Jersey. On 6 december 2004 he uploaded a file called the Numa Numa Dance to Newgrounds under the name gman250. It is a webcam pointed at a chair. He is visible from the chest up, wearing headphones, and he does not dance so much as commit, entirely, with his face and his arms, to a song in a language he does not speak.

That is the whole thing, and it worked because it is completely unguarded. There is no bit and no attempt to be seen doing something clever. It was made in a bedroom for the audience of a flash portal in 2004, which is to say for almost nobody, and then it was watched something like seven hundred million times.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

The number comes from The Viral Factory, which told the BBC in 2006 that Numa Numa had done around seven hundred million views and sat second on the list of the most watched videos on the internet. Star Wars Kid was above it. In march 2007 VH1 put Brolsma at number one in a countdown of the forty greatest internet superstars, a phrase that could only have been coined inside that specific window.

None of it ran through a single site. YouTube did not exist when the file went up, and by the time it did the video had already been copied onto every mirror and forum that would host it. The version most people watched was not his upload and did not credit him. He was famous the way a photograph is famous, without a name attached to it.

~ the cracks ~

In february 2005 the New York Times ran a piece describing him as an unwilling and embarrassed web celebrity. He had already begun canceling appearances. There was no template for what had happened to him and no money in it either, because the thing generating the views was a song owned by other people, sitting on sites that owed him nothing.

In september 2006 he came back with New Numa, a produced follow-up attached to a contest with forty-five thousand dollars in prizes and twenty-five thousand for the winner. It did not work, and it could not have. The first video was interesting precisely because nobody had decided to make it interesting. You cannot commission that from yourself.

~ the long tail ~

The death is the modern part. On 11 may 2023 the original came off its channel permanently after copyright strikes over the music. The same happened to the Newgrounds copies, with both the 2004 original and the ten-year reunion taken down over licensing. Eighteen years of the most watched clip of its generation, removed because the three minutes of moldovan pop underneath it belonged to somebody with a rights administrator.

Brolsma put up a remake in august 2023. It is fine, and it is not the thing. What died in may 2023 is the file itself, the specific compressed webcam capture that a few hundred million people actually watched, and it died from a rights claim rather than from anyone getting bored of it. That is a very 2023 ending for a 2004 video.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »