☆ ♪ singing alone in my room ☆ ♬

la la la la la la

I started my YouTube channel in April 2006. I was 17 years old at the time and I mostly used the platform to watch Aphex Twin music videos and Old Gregg with my friends. One of my earliest videos on YouTube was a webcam video of me dancing and singing along to AFI’S “Miss Murder.” I deleted the video out of embarrassment (something I actively push back against now), but I remember I was wearing a pink tank top and I was on a hardwood floor. In 2010, I started posting regularly on YouTube, mostly uploading short webcam clips of me eating, dancing, staring at the camera, doing my makeup, and most of all: singing.

The earliest video I can find of me singing was posted on December 29, 2010 titled c-r-a-z-y. In it, I’m singing alone in my room, to my webcam, with the black and white filter turned on, to Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.” The caption reads, “singing patsy cline alone in my room typical lyfe.” There isn’t anything particularly interesting about this video aside from the fact that it’s the first of what would be many “singing alone in my room” style videos for me. My 2010 rendition of “Crazy” was not the first and would not be the last video posted of a girl singing “Crazy” alone in her room.

I’ve always had a fondness for singing videos - whether it’s acapella, karaoke style, or a ukulele cover. Sharing lyrics in an AIM away message, posting a ukulele cover of a rap song, and mouthing the words to a trending sound on TikTok have the same energy. There’s an undeniable earnestness to it all, something deeply teenage about wanting to share what you’re listening to by placing yourself at the center of it.

My 2018 video, Me Singing Stay By Rihanna is currently part of the group exhibition “I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen” at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, curated by Alison Hearst. This piece was born out of my love for girls singing alone in their rooms. At the time of its creation, I was obsessed with the song “Stay” by Rihanna. So much so that I was obsessively collecting every video I could find on YouTube of girls singing the song and compiling to a playlist. When I made the playlist I had not yet conceived of the piece, I was just consumed with watching and collecting. My attempt to cull all of these individual videos of girls singing alone in their rooms resulted in a choir, with a recording of myself in the center, finally joining the sea of girls I had been watching.

In April 2013 I uploaded a video of myself singing the song “Steadier Footing” by Death Cab for Cutie in my old bedroom in Chicago. I’m not completely sure what was happening with me emotionally on that specific day but it’s clear that I was feeling sad and wanted to perform that sadness for the internet through this particular song. I titled the video :''''(. Since then, I have been recording myself singing along to the previous recording of myself singing “Steadier Footing” roughly once a year, creating some sort of nesting doll effect. The videos and old YouTube and desktop interfaces stack on top of each other - over time the audio becomes more distorted, my 2013 pouting more obscured. In each new video, I’m responding to the most recent one, attempting to mimic gestures or glances, approximating a feeling. The game of telephone continues indefinitely.

The popularity of YouTube singing videos has waned significantly, reaching its peak before 2013, when the site started to shift more towards vlogs, beauty, and lifestyle content. Singing videos can’t be monetized: they were at their height in a mostly pre-influencer Internet. Most of these videos are also amateur, relying on the computer’s built-in webcam to capture them. Of course, there were users that maybe hoped to strike it big with high production covers, launching their own music careers in the process. I’ve always preferred the low stakes singing videos in all of their urgency, awkwardness, cuteness, and longing.

It makes sense that TikTok (and Musical.ly before it) has picked up where YouTube left off. The impulse to share oneself existing and emoting in relation to a particular song will always be there, just repackaged. Instead of needing to rely on having a good singing voice to keep viewers engaged, you can simply mouth the words. Of course, things like beauty, delivery, and editing are prioritized instead. Last night I laid in bed trying to guess someone’s astrological sign based on how they mouthed the words to a trending sound on TikTok. Pisces, no–Taurus.