The Key of Awesome

» see thekeyofawesome.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The channel was created in June 2007 under the name Barely Political by Ben Relles, and its first upload was a music video called "Crush on Obama" starring Amber Lee Ettinger, who became known to the entire internet that summer as Obama Girl. Plenty of things had gone viral by 2007, but very few had been built on purpose to do it, and this one was, in a primary season when American political comedy on the web was mostly a man at a webcam being angry.

The candidate himself was asked about it by the Des Moines Register that June and gave the answer of a man who had decided not to mind: "It's just one more example of the fertile imagination of the Internet." He told the Associated Press separately that the video had upset his daughters. By October 2007 Barely Political had been bought by Next New Networks, the startup trying to build television-style channels on top of YouTube, and when YouTube bought Next New Networks in the spring of 2011 the channel came along in the deal.

What survived all of that was the show rather than the politics. The Key of Awesome, created by Mark Douglas with Relles, became the channel's whole identity, and eventually its name. Douglas wrote the songs and sang them with a different wig on every time. The channel ended up with 5.38 million subscribers and 3.41 billion views, and in 2014 it sat at number 29 on the New Media Rockstars list of the top hundred channels on the platform.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the weekly machine ~

The format had a clock built into it. A song gets big, and you have a handful of days to write the parody and shoot it before the song stops being the thing everybody has heard too many times. Miss the window and the joke is about nothing. Douglas worked with a small repeat cast including Todd Womack and Doug Larsen, with Tom Small directing most of it, and they hit that window week after week for nine years.

Around the main show sat the side series, which is how a channel keeps people subscribed between hits. YouTube Complaints ran from 2012 to 2015. There was Reggae Shark, there was a run of videos where a character named Frank ruined movie trailers. There were crossovers too: a Super Bowl showdown with Epic Meal Time in January 2011 that took two million views, and an episode in April 2015 where Statler and Waldorf turned up from The Muppets to heckle Douglas and Womack in person.

Obama Girl crossed over as a news story, the way an American election always does, so I knew that one video existed without having gone looking for it. The weekly show behind it was a different proposition. A parody only works on somebody who has had the original pushed at them all week by a radio station, and the stations I could get were playing other songs. What I had seen of an eleven-year channel was four minutes from its first month.

~ the last song ~

On 4 February 2018 the channel uploaded a video titled "THE LAST KEY OF AWESOME". It is a song, in the format the channel had used for eleven years, and in it Douglas thanks his subscribers and tells them he is taking an indefinite break, with the thought that he might come back at a more relaxed pace. There is no corporate language in it and no takeover to blame. A man who had been shipping a music video a week since the first Obama administration had reached the end of what he could do on that schedule.

Nothing came after it. The two domains the operation used still resolve, barely: both thekeyofawesome.com and barelypolitical.com now have expired certificates, and over plain HTTP each one redirects to its YouTube channel. The channel is still there with everything on it, five million subscribers deep, which means the show is in the strange condition of being fully available and completely over.

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