The amazing race of Mr. Trololo
Last week a video came out from the dust. It shows a fancy guy in a freaky stage, singing some unintelligible sounds in the worst playback of the world. It is one of the most creepy videos I’ve seen in my whole life. I saw it for the first time in a late show TV program, last thursday:
It seems that after being ‘asleep’ during almost a year, as the first uploaded video seems to be from february 2009, it came to life after some sites echoed the song. From there, it jumped into Colbert Report and Jimmy Kimmel TV programmes, and once there, the Trololo Guy, as it is known now, became mainstream and skyrocketed. After that, russian news and TV programmes rescued The Artist Formerly Known As Andrew Hill and got it back under the spot, interviewing him and showing him all the worldwide buzz in which his 70′s song became.
As in every fashion trend, unknown-book-becoming-a-best-seller or cult-director-going-commercial, It only took the time to reach the proper persons, and that those persons made a short review. That’s called the tipping point. When something reaches the most pre-eminent nodes some social network, and this node chooses to talk about it, or to pass it to its contacts, it usually booms exponentially. Social network software, as facebook or twitter, are simple tools that makes the thing a bit quicker.
It happened in Philippines in 2001 with the overthrowing of President Estrada, in Spain in 2004 after the government lied about the 11-M bombing, and again in 2004, this time in Ukraine and the Orange Revolution, after the rumours of the pro-russian government stole elections.
It did not happened two years after in Belarus and the Denim Revolution, as the armed police disrupted the crowd before it reached the tipping point.
Taking in consideration the differences between the cases, as the results from Orange or Denim revolutions were so different between them, and somewhat permanent, the system works the same way for anything: from books to songs to videos to comics. It just takes to find the correct node in any social network.
The Trololo Guy will keep his momentum and continue his race around the world for some weeks (note that the facebook profile is now booming with spanish users), but eventually will start to go down as the next “whatsoever guy” appears and asks for its one month of glory. It does not matter how brilliant, how awesome, how ugly or how disgusting (remember goatse?) the thing is. Once it gets over the tipping point, there is no stop but memory.
