When Kendrick’s character auditions for the a cappella group the Barden Bellas early in the film, she sits down on stage and begins to slam a plastic cup around in the customary Lulu and the Lampshades fashion. Then Anna Kendrick came along and launched it into the stratosphere. “The Cup Song,” as it quickly became known, went viral: mimicking the beat and singing along to it became a veritable meme. The hook was the a cappella percussion: flipping, clapping, and drumming on an old plastic cup - a technique learned from an instructional video posted to YouTube the year before - the girls had devised an accompanying beat as catchy as it was seemingly easy to replicate. In 2008 a pair of girls performing under the name Lulu and the Lampshades uploaded a video to YouTube of them reworking an old song called “Miss Me When I’m Gone,” by Mainer’s Mountaineers. Now there’s some complicated history to unpack here. It’s perhaps the major triumph of the singalong trend: so infectious was the desire to replicate one of the film’s key musical moments that fans transformed a bit of Web-learned improv into a bona fide radio smash. And the pop tracks worked over in the film, from “Titanium” to “Since U Been Gone”, are some of the most common karaoke numbers around - not a coincidence.Īmong the stranger consequences of Pitch Perfect’s karaoke-inspired rise to pop cultural ubiquity is the hit song it inadvertently yielded.
Pitch Perfect karaoke videos, as you might imagine, have infested YouTube, even as rights infringements mean they’re regularly taken down. It has already, in the three years since its theatrical release, become a mainstay of the revival circuit, routinely popping up for special presentations - including, just last week, at Toronto’s own TIFF Bell Lightbox - at which the audience is expressly invited to sing. And its success has a great deal to do with how conducive it proved to musical accompaniment.
#LET IT GO RIGHT HAND SINGLE NOTEA MOVIE#
Pitch Perfect is something of an aspirational karaoke movie - a singalong musical about people who sing along. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. It should therefore come as no surprise that movies have begun to capitalize on the trend.
(Sing King Karaoke, a dedicated and professional-looking karaoke YouTube channel, offers hundreds of videos that have together clocked over 170 million views.) It’s never been easier, or cheaper, to sing along with something popular. Meanwhile YouTube, beamed onto television sets or booted up on phones, can readily transform any social gathering into an impromptu concert among friends. Private karaoke bars have been migrating for a number of years from South Korea to cities across the West, affording tipsy teens and twentysomethings nightly opportunities to belt and bleat. It’s the right time for the singalong phenomenon. It seems the best way to persuade young people to spend money on a piece of music is to make them want to sing it. Today the emphasis has shifted away from albums and instead toward digital singles - and, in the movie industry, from winning soundtracks to breakout songs.
In the late ’80s and early ’90s, as Americans were busy replacing their vinyl record collections with bleeding-edge CDs, the original motion picture soundtrack was where the money in movie-music could be found: audiences were buying The Bodyguard and Dirty Dancing in the tens of millions.
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