Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last three and a half years, odds are you’re one of the 118 million viewers of the hit YouTube video ‘Bed Intruder Song!!!,’ featuring Antoine Dodson of “hide yo’ kids, hide yo wife fame,” or one of the 51 million viewers of the songified version of Charlie Sheen’s epic “Winning” interview. (If you haven’t seen either of those videos, please correct that immediately before proceeding to read the rest of this article.) The two videos are the work of The Gregory Brothers, a musical group that catapulted to national fame in 2009 with their popular ‘Auto Tune the News’ series.
“Back in 2008 we had a couple of videos that are kinda like proto-versions of what we’re doing now around the presidential debates back in October of that year. They didn’t get seen a lot but more than say five views, which is what you’d get if it’s only your mom watching,” Evan Gregory told Red Alert Politics in an interview. “But our first big break was that next year in April 2009 we had a video that kinda broke out that was political in nature that was called ‘Auto-Tune The News #2’ and it featured Katie Couric and Hillary Clinton and a number of other folks from the media and politics and it kinda broke out virally and got seen by maybe a million people or something like that. So for us, who we weren’t on the map, that was a huge break for us.”
Though the group also records their own songs (check out ‘DJ Play My Song’, the group’s entry for YouTube’s Comedy Week) and makes covers of hit tunes (like this must-listen version of Miley Cyrus’ ‘Wrecking Ball’), the Brothers — Michael, 28, Andrew, 31, Evan, 34, and Evan’s wife Sarah, 31 — are best known for ‘songifying’ the news, which they do through their Schmoyoho YouTube account. (The name ‘Schmoyoho’ is a long story involving Michael, Evan says.) In 2010 ‘The Bed Intruder Song’ even hit the Billboard Hot 100 chart, becoming the first YouTube video to do so, and in 2011 the group was tapped to songify the year’s hottest films for the Oscars.
Although the group songifies all sorts of news, their work often includes politicians and addresses issues of national importance.
“We had always been engaged politically and aware. Maybe not deep political junkies, but we were following the news cycle like anybody would. At the same time we had been on tour together as musicians,” Evan said of the group’s early days in an interview with Red Alert Politics. “It just kind of occurred to us, ‘What would happen if we tried to apply some of our knowledge and skills in the area of music and bring along some of these figures that we are following in the news?’”
The group’s political videos became so successful that in the fall of 2012, in the heat of the presidential election, the New York Times commissioned the Gregory Brothers to create 5 videos for its ‘Op-Docs’ editorial section, including V.P. Debate Highlights, Songifed and Patriot Game.
Despite working with a news organization and creating news themselves with their videos the Brothers see themselves more as entertainers than newsmakers, Evan said.
“You know we came from a musical background and that’s kind of how we got started out and we still see ourselves that way as musicians and songwriters,” he said. “But at the same time we are bringing to the forefront — or at least bringing to our audience — issues that maybe they wouldn’t be aware of, or highlighting different things that are going on in our nation’s government, in the media.”
The truth is, he said, they are probably “somewhere more in-between the two.”
“You know we’re more like the entertainment wing of the op-ed page or we’re like the commentary,” he said, though he reiterated that they don’t think of themselves as journalists and noted that the work they did for the New York Times is the closest they’ve gotten to making “real commentary.”
One way the group is acutely different from the journalists who can be found commenting on the op-ed pages of the Times is the lack of political bias in their work.
“It’s just not a goal of ours to hit really hard on a political agenda and try to convince people or win people over,” Evan said, emphasizing that the group takes pride in its ability to attract people across the political spectrum.
In fact, the group has been praised both by the likes of Rachel Maddow and Glenn Beck — two commentators who couldn’t be more opposite in their political beliefs.
“Something that we strive to be is not weighing in heavily on one side or the other,” Evan said. “Even within our group — they’re four of us — we have different political backgrounds and perspectives, so we can kind of bring that to bear on our videos.”
The group is currently touring America and has big shows on both coasts this month. Hopefully, they’ll find time to songify the government shutdown in between jamming out to Miley Cyrus. With no end in sight to Congress’ bickering over what programs the government should and shouldn’t be funding, The Gregory Brothers have a lot of material to work with.
