The day after Christmas, the world was blessed with a belated gift: a new meme. Twitter account @noahboat_ shared a video simply titled, “When the music video doesn’t match the song.” If you watch the visuals on mute, it looks like your average video pulled together by an aspiring rapper.
While a mob of young black men take swigs out of Hennessey bottles, flaunt cash, and make gun gestures with their hands in the background, a few of them step forward to recite lyrics to what most would assume belong to a hard rap song. But when you un-mute the video, you're met with the pop stylings of Big Time Rush, the boy band from the now-off air Nickelodeon show of the same name. The juxtaposition of the visuals against the sugar-sweet lyrics and production made the video go viral on Twitter, Instagram, and Youtube.
Days later, another version popped up on social media, this time set to Justin Bieber's “Somebody to Love.” The world must have been waiting for another one, because it also went viral. Before they dropped the third version of the meme series (this time set to Jesse McCartney's “Beautiful Soul”) on Friday, Complex spoke with the creators of the meme: 21-year-old Drexel students Ryan Burton and Noah Taitano. Check out the video below and continue for the full interview.
How did you two meet?
Noah Taitano: Ryan and I have known each other since we were 10 years old. We met when we were in 6th grade, and we went to middle school together. We were in a gym class, and then we just kind of stuck together throughout all middle school. Then we went to separate high schools, but we still remained friends. Then we ended up deciding to go to college together.
When did you decide that you wanted to do this... would you call it a “meme”?
Ryan Burton: Honestly, it’s hard to describe. “Meme” is an interesting term, because it's kind of evolved over the years. I had the idea for, honestly, like two or three years. I was thinking about funny stuff, like, “Oh, how funny would it be if there was a hard-looking rap crowd, dancing to a country song.” I always thought that would be so funny.
And then I told Noah about it, like a month ago. We took that Big Time Rush “Boyfriend” song, then we held it up next to this other music video, and put the music video on silent. It was like a World Star music video. We were just sitting there, and I was like “Yes, this is hilarious. If we can recreate this, except sing the words, this would be so funny.”
So we were cracking up in our apartment, laughing about it. And then sure enough, Noah got a bunch of friends from his high school to be in it, and we just filmed it. We had no idea. We used to do a whole bunch of stuff on our channel. All types of videos. So to us, it was just another funny video concept that we wanted to put out there for people to enjoy.
You said you were sitting on this for two or three years?
Taitano: Yeah, just a random little idea that I didn't even know if we were ever gonna do. He just brought it up to me randomly, and when we synced the hard music video with the pop song, I was like, “This is funny, let's do it as soon as possible.” We both went home for Christmas break and we just set up some people, told them the idea, and they were down.
What roles did both of you have in bringing this to life?
Burton: I had the idea, and then I showed it to Noah, and then he was the one who had all the friends who were down to do it. They were all in the area, and they had the exact look that we needed to pull the video off. Most of the people in the video, they were all friends or acquaintances, and it was kind of like a nice family reunion.
Taitano: Yeah, I brought the friends. I had another friend, Jarod Neal, who had a better cinematic camera than me. I stood by him and told him the shots that I wanted. He shot the video, I edited the whole thing, but Ryan chose the spot that we should shoot at. Ryan organized some other buddies to choreograph where you could stand and how the art direction should look. We had cue cards in the background; he told the people to stand a certain way; and then I was behind the cameraman, telling him, “This is the type of shot I'm looking for.” When we got everything we needed, I edited the whole thing together, and out came a cool little piece of art.
Was there a particular rap video that you studied for the gestures? I for sure saw the Kodak Black money spread on the arms in the “Boyfriend” video.
Burton: There were two that I had in mind. One was from an artist named Shabazz [PBG], and the song's called “If You Need It.” That was the music video that we first paired with “Boyfriend.” There's also a video called “Fuck It Off,” by Cdot Honcho. It was also a little bit of a challenge because historically, in hip-hop videos, you have a lot of guns, and obviously smoking and stuff, and we don't want to push the narrative of using guns. So this was our way to recreate it in a way that was a bit more harmless, yet it still had the same effect.
You're both in the videos, but who are the other lyricists? Like the guy who opens up both videos on Twitter? I feel like the choice of him is what got a lot of people interested.
Burton: If you watch the YouTube one, it's me who's doing the first verse. The one who does the second verse in the first two parts, his name is Corey Rious.
Taitano: He's the dark-skinned guy. And the one with the dreads, with the light skin, his name is George Tolson. I went to high school with both of them. That's just the relationship I had, and I just called them the day before we shot it and they were cool with it.
I feel like a lot of people didn't pick up on the fact that it was a straight up lip-sync. Do you think that that helped it go viral?
Burton: I think that there's a lot of variables, but that's one of them that helped spark conversation. Because if you mute the video, you're not going to assume that song's being played, and many people thought that we just took a regular music video and synced it up with that song. Just the way we orchestrated the color correction and everybody looking the way they looked, I don't think they were expecting them to be singing those things.
It's hard for people to think that we were able to convince all those people to do this idea, because it completely does not match, as the title says. I think it kind of confused people at first, but then it's even funnier when you watch it again, realizing, “Wow, they actually took the time to memorize the different verses and pull this off.”
That was the big thing. I saw Reddit threads where they said, “Oh, it's clear that they weren't actually lip-syncing, it was just clever editing tricks.” And I was like “What? What the heck?” They were clearly singing the words. But some people thought it was our song, which was funny.
Taitano: There were just so many cool moments and shots in the video that make people want to watch it again. Kind of like you said, where Ryan did the arms part with the money. And we have the shots where the people are pointing gun fingers at the camera while they’r singing about trying to be somebody's boyfriend.
The video that you orchestrated is made to look like your average rap video. And when rappers shoot videos, things can go wrong. Sometimes the wrong type of people are being nosey or the cops will see a group of young black men and be like, “What the fuck is going on over here?” Did you run into any issues while shooting any of these?
Burton: Surprisingly not. I was like, “We've got 20 black people here. Surely somebody's gonna call in and be like, “There's a bunch, I don't know what's going on here,” and the cops would show up. Nothing happened. Iit was in Waldorf, Maryland, and we were in the back of this shopping center, and everything went off great. Everyone was friends, and a car drove by a little bit slow, just to see what we were doing. But surprisingly, there were no issues whatsoever when we were filming.
You guys just shot another one for Jesse McCartney, right?
Burton: Yes, we shot a part two, and that was a Justin Bieber one.
Tell me about part two: Did you shoot them in the same day?
Taitano: No. We did the first one and then we watched the views hour by hour. It got more views than any of our other videos—it got a million in a day.
And that was on YouTube, right?
Taitano: Yeah, on YouTube. And it got six million on Twitter. Daquan got like, three million on that Instagram page. When we've done videos for our channel that pop off really good, we have to continue to do another version of that, because that's what the people want. One week later, we hit up the same people and we went to film part two. We just knew that in the social media world, if you wait too long, then you've lost your time. But we were in this sweet spot where we were like, “If we make another one right now, it should also pop off just as much as the first one did.”
Do you anticipate making more? Is this sustainable?
Burton: I think yes. On the internet, obviously trying to please everybody is impossible. The second you try to do that, you lose what you're doing, and it becomes not as fun. But with other things we've done, where we've done a bunch of parts to a series, some people live for it. And some people say, “I don't want to see any more of this, I'm tired of it.” The luxury of that is, as long as we're enjoying what we're making, we're going to keep doing it. And if someone really hates it, they can look away. Nobody's forcing them to watch it. Part three is definitely a step up, I think personally. It was arguably the most stressful out of the three to film, and coordinate, and plan—
Taitano: 60 people showed up this time.
Wow, and how many people were there the first two times?
Taitano: It was like 15 for the first one, and 20 for the second one.
And now it's 60.
Burton: Yeah, there were 60-plus people in a house. Another thing is, you want to top it every time. You have to keep building because that's what people want. So we're just trying our best. You can only go so far. We're in school so we don't have a lot of time and resources to be going back and forth from Maryland to Philly to get the people, and finding locations. But who knows, we'll see how many we put out.
Back to the first one, Big Time Rush. Kendall Schmidt, who was the “lead singer” of Big Time Rush, showed y’all love literally the day after it went up. Did you feel like you accomplished your goal?
Burton: We had no plan of them reaching out or anything like that. It's all for our YouTube subscribers and people of the internet. That's who we do it for. We don't really do it for the recognition of big peopl. But hey, when that happened, I felt ecstatic, I felt grateful. We both did.
Vince Staples and Juice WRLD gave y’all a shout-out, but not directly to you. Do you know if they ever found out that it was y'all, and not just like some random internet video?
Taitano: I'm not sure, specifically. I don't think so. But I'm good friends with YBN Cordae, who went on tour with Juice WRLD. I don't know, maybe he put in a word for us? I bet it was just one of those things they were scrolling through, thought it was funny, put their little two cents on it, and probably just went about their day.
Burton: You never really know who sees a video. Who knows? Drake could have seen the video, but he just didn't comment on it, so we'll never know. But that was one of the big things where Scooter Braun [could have] commented on the Daquan post and tagged Justin Bieber, and that would have made my life. Because who’s to say Scooter Braun didn't just text it to JB or DM it to him or anything and say “Oh, this is hilarious!”
Do you have any hope that it could happen?
Taitano: If Justin Bieber was going to react to it, it would have been shortly after we posted it, after Daquan tagged him.
Did anybody else pop up that you're fans of, who you haven't mentioned yet?
Burton: Kehlani liked it on Twitter. There's a whole list of people. Winnie Harlow, the model, she commented. A few members of the Wild ‘N Out cast. And there were some Viners. Well, ex-Viners.
R.I.P.
Burton: Tinashe commented on it. Billie Eilish, she liked the video.
Taitano: Hopefully Jesse McCartney will see the next one. But I don't want to set the bar high, I don't know.
