Spotlight On... 1/21/10

Whether walking down dorm hallways or bopping your head to the RIDDIM finale, the Midd-kid Rap seems to be unavoidable. Sam Robinson, Writer and member of The Allen Jokers, sat down with The Campus’ Tamara Hilmes and told the story of the viral hit’s origins.

Middlebury Campus: Who first conceived of the Midd-Kid Rap, and when did you decide to make it happen? Who wrote the music? The lyrics? What came first?

Sam Robinson: I started it the first day of this fall semester. I think the first time I thought of doing anything like this, I was in regression class, on the first day, and there was a kid in front of me who was wearing flannel and six different carabiners and was really distracting and he was keeping himself hydrated.

That’s when I wrote the first part of it, but I was just messing around. I didn’t write the chorus until later. Colin Meany wrote the second verse about the library and read it to me and I just thought it was funny and that got me motivated. So then we decided to have different verses about different types of Midd-kids.

I wrote the first verse, then we needed to have something about Quidditch in there so with Phil’s help, we wrote that verse. I knew I wanted to have a “lax bro” verse, but couldn’t think of anything else, so I sent an e-mail to my brother who just graduated from Vanderbilt. He ended up sending me an e-mail that day from the office. That was kind of the whole thing.

MC: How many hours total were spent on production, if you had to guess?

SR: I don’t even know. It changed a lot […] there were a lot of different versions of it. The first one really wasn’t that good — I hadn’t put any time into the music. But then I got a new program and redid the whole thing. It literally took the whole semester. All those guys in the Chateau have heard it over and over again. I’ve heard it over and over again — it took awhile. I got Phil to rap on it, and Colin did his verse, and then a lot of people wanted a part of it.

MC: Where did you draw your inspiration from? What other artists are sampled aside from the obvious Jay-Z and the Lonely Island/T-Pain? I’ve heard a rumor that “I get inbox like Gmail” might be from Chiddy Bang. Was that an intentional shout-out since they are a similar group of college sophomores?

SR: My brother likes Chiddy Bang, but he said he wrote that line when he was on Gmail. But we just used Jay-Z’s vocal tracks. You know, just his voice saying, “ladies and gentleman […]” but none of his beats or music or anything. I actually talked to the copyright office and they said that it could all be copy-written in my name. I could mix a version without Jay-Z, but just like Girl Talk and all those guys copyright the way they cut up his voice […] I could do that, too. My dad’s a lawyer, so I called him and he told me what to do. It’s an eight-month process, so I don’t actually have the copyright yet.

MC: So how did this all happen? Were you hoping that it would spread the way it did?

SR: I remember I finished the song on a Tuesday night. I had no idea how to master tracks, so I was reading up on that and my brother was helping me. I went down to Palmer that night to show a bunch of my friends and we were really thinking about trying to film the video on a handheld camera. Michaela O’Connor ’11 was down there and she’s a film major, so she offered to help me out. We started getting e-mails all over the place from people who wanted to help film it. Shane Mandes ’10, also a film major, and I had been looking at applications to get Middlebury equipment.

Now this has sort of just become this project. Then it really took off […] they talked to Nalgene to get permission to use Nalgene products. She had already heard the song. Said we could go on their Web site and get a bunch of things. The film company is even bringing in a quarter-of-a-million-dollar camera. I’ve just been talking to the director, and they’ve been trying to storyboard it and set up locations. Shane and Aaron and those guys have been good about going around the Commons and asking for funding, but I really haven’t had to do that much this J-term.

It started as a such a joke, and that week when I sent the song out to my friends [it kind of got] sent out all over the place. None of us had intended … I mean, we wanted people to hear it. When I got an e-mail from this company saying they wanted to film a video I thought, ‘This is ridiculous.’ I’ve also heard from guys 15 years out [of Middlebury] — I was at a New Year’s Party this year, and the CEO of some company said to tell me that it was funny and that he liked it.

MC: Have you heard it played at parties around campus? At the bunker? What’s that like?

SR: It’s pretty neat to go somewhere and see people that I don’t know at all singing it […] they know every word. And they do choreographed dances to it, which is funny.

MC: What’s next for the Allen Jokers? Or is this your magnum opus?

SR: I don’t even know. It’s definitely hard to come out with a song. I think the first step is this video […] it has a lot of potential to either be great or fizzle the song out. We’re trying not to add anything really comedic to the song, because I feel like that could ruin it. Hopefully I’m just going to be amazed by the quality by it .

MC: How did you come up with the name ‘The Allen Jokers?’

SR: The whole name thing is kind of funny. It came up on iTunes and had artist, genre — all that stuff. Knew the name would be Midd-kid. But we don’t have an album — that was a joke. The Allen Jokers was just a thing that we had said freshman year. All of us were just kind of jokers. It just kind of stuck, and once I sent that e-mail out, it was set in stone. There was no going back.