Entertainment

(WCCO) Remember when we used to talk about the great sitcom we saw on TV last night? Now it seems, that many of us are talking at work (or forwarding e-mails) about the latest video we saw on YouTube.

Many of those videos are coming from Minnesota apartments, basements and landmarks.

Perhaps the most famous, or infamous, of those Minnesota videos is called "Chocolate Rain." It's a music video, recorded by artist Tay Zonday.

"I think the song has a catchy beat that people really latch onto," said Zonday.

At least, that's his stage name. Fellow students in the University of Minnesota American Studies graduate program know him as Adam Bahner.

Bahner is studying performance and its relation to social change, and he's had a first-hand lesson in that phenomenon. "Chocolate Rain" has recorded more than 10 million views, and has landed Bahner on ABC's "Jimmy Kimmel Live." He also performed live at legendary Minneapolis music club, First Avenue.

"It's fantastic, but I don't think there's a template for it," he explained. "Who is the exemplar to be like? 'Well, gosh, this has happened before.' I don't know what to make of it. I have to take it a day at a time."

Bahner's fame is an illustration of the democratization of the music industry. His video emerged from a tiny studio jammed into his one-bedroom apartment.

His camera is a $250 mini-DV camcorder, his acoustics consist of hanging curtains and walls made out of "stuff found at Home Depot," according to Bahner.

He uploaded "Chocolate Rain" in April 2007, but it took two months before it was discovered and propelled into the pop culture zeitgeist.

Bahner looks like a teenager and sounds like Barry White, but in reality, he's 25-year-old. Because of his YouTube fame, he now has a manager.

"If I could make money as an international singing superstar, my goodness, I would drop everything and do that right now," said Bahner.

Courtney Mault is a Minneapolis woman who has just a fraction of Bahner's audience, and she said she's OK with that.

"Even after I finish one, I'm very excited," said Mault. "I put my insane ideas on the Internet because I feel like, I thought of the idea, I better put it up there before someone else thinks of it."

Mault has a blog called "Your dress would look better on me" and she posts video to her blog as the ideas come to her.

One of her first videos takes place in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. She's visiting when hunger strikes her, and she decides to eat the cherry from the famous sculpture.

"It's amazing how quick you get used to taking a camera out in public and not caring if people are thinking: What is she doing?" said Mault.

She uses a Kodak still camera with video capabilities to shoot her videos, and she edits them on her Apple laptop.

Why?

"Mostly its just for my own entertainment," she said.

Entertainment is Steve Barone's specialty. Online, he dubs himself the "Mashed potato wrestling champion of the universe, actually."

"There's a comma in there. That's my title, and I made it up," laughed Barone.

His Mashed Potato Wrestling video takes place at Potato Days in Barnesville, Minn. In it, you see Barone in full wrestling garb, grappling in a pit of mashed potatoes. Delicious.

"To me, I can kinda be serious about it, yet it's so ridiculous, and that's where the humor lies," said Barone, 36, an employee at a Minneapolis ad agency.

Besides the potatoes, Barone uploads a video a week to YouTube. He's hoping to find a regular audience for his comedy.

"I'm just not there yet. I think, maybe if you have consistently good content, people will start to come back," said Barone.

That's the lesson of Phil Hansen. He's an Eden Prairie artist, with such incredibly popular videos, he's among the top 100 directors in terms of audience at YouTube.

His current project is called "Goodbye Art." Every week, Hansen uploads a video with a different theme. When the theme was fire, he created an image of Jimi Hendrix out of matches. Then he set the matches on fire.

His video of karate-chopping paint to create an image of martial-arts superstar Bruce Less is approaching two million views.

"YouTube is giving me this outlet for more creativity, more experimentation," said Hansen. "It's just doing stuff I normally would never spend the time to do."

Hansen is a professional artist, who works in his brother's Eden Prairie basement. His large-scale works take up to six months, but his videos just take a weekend.

Hansen's online success started on his chest, when he painted 30 Influences on himself.

"It's non-toxic, until you wear it on yourself for 30 hours," he laughed.

Hansen has parlayed his online popularity into paid work. KFC saw his stuff, and paid him to create an image of Colonel Sanders out of Teriyaki sauce.

"I could make art where the final product is what I want, but then the whole process would be interesting as well," said Hansen.

 

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