Category Archives: Kultcha

I recently spent three minutes and forty-two seconds of my life that I will never get back listening to DJ Khaled – I Believe (from Disney’s A WRINKLE IN TIME) ft. Demi Lovato on YouTube. (In my defense, it autoplayed.)

I admit I totally don’t get the appeal of either artist, especially DJ Khaled–and not because of some non-existent aversion to rap either. But de gustibus non est disputandum and all that. So my question is not why does this basically uninteresting song have more than 1.6 million views — autoplay, right? or maybe movie tie-in — but rather, how can this possibly be called a song by DJ Khaled featuring Demi Lovato, when by my very rough count (I will not make myself play it again) he supplies the audio for less than 15 seconds and appears on the video doing his arm-wavy thing for at most a little more than that.

She does all the work, it’s his song with her ‘guest’ vocal?

By the way, Chloe x Halle’s Warrior from the same soundtrack, while in no way ground-breaking, is much nicer and the video also better-looking:

Yet as of this writing it has only under 400K views, less than a quarter of the other one.

The genius of Weird Al Yankovic is marrying sympathy for the material he parodies with a childish (sophomoric seems too grown up) comedic sensibility. His Hamilton medley featuring an accordion was I suppose inevitable.

I’m guessing that most of the readers of this blog won’t care, and some others won’t agree, but I think it’s a shame that this piece of mashup brilliance by the Kleptones has only had fewer than 62000 views on YouTube since being uploaded exactly seven years ago. Even if the ending is abrupt.

Wikipedea on the Kleptones:

The Kleptones are a one-man English electronic music group fronted by music producer and DJ Eric Kleptone. They are best known for their Internet-exclusive mashup albums. Typically, Eric Kleptone mixes rock/R&B instrumentals with rap and hip-hop vocals in a style that is “fun… and often surprising”.[1] Both his name and the group’s name are parodies of the famous guitarist, Eric Clapton, and a play on the fact that he is a “klepto of tones” (that is, he “steals” others’ music).

Update: OK, I see 125K views on Vimeo, which is a little better, but still way short of what it deserves.