Going crazy…

Academic deadlines are here. Add family expectations and the stress of the holidays and you might feel a little bit crazy. For the final project in one of my classes, I assign a project that embraces “crazy,” but not as in deranged – “crazy” as in the Prince song, Let’s Go Crazy.

There is a video on YouTube where a 13 month-old boy, Holden, is dancing in his kitchen. It happens that the Prince song is playing in the background. It’s hard to hear. You barely even notice it. Here, let me show you:

See? You were listening for it, I know, so you heard it a bit more easily than if you weren’t focusing on that one aspect of the video. After posting this video, Stephanie Lenz, Holden’s mother and the videographer, received a cease and desist letter from YouTube at the request of Universal Music Publishing Group (representing Prince). Ms. Lenz took Universal to court, where she was represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Time passed, or if I were I Seinfeld character, I’d write, “yada, yada, yada.” Lenz won the case in a California Supreme Court in August 2008. The video was reposted on YouTube and YouTube and Universal Music Publishing Group were both slapped on the wrist for using the copyright law for such an absurd interpretation of “infringement” on a website like YouTube.

So the project, if you’re my student, or maybe another educator who wants to use this project in a class (the more the merrier), is to create a parody of the original video using the same 29 seconds of the Prince song. Parody is protected by fair use, and, in a certain light, the entire case is darkly humorous. Maybe that’s the wrong word…how about, crazy?

It is easy to find all of the parodies on YouTube, because they are posted as “video responses” to the original video of Holden. I usually have several favorites each semester as we make more and more of these short videos. This December, my favorite version of the video takes place in an elevator. The rest of the story: yada, yada, yada.