The Music of a Casey Neistat Vlog
Welcome back to the Mixdown!
Now I don’t know about you all, but I always seem to pay attention to the decisions YouTube Creators make with their music.
It could be how Sara Dietschy does time skip edits set to the beat of music in her tech and lifestyle videos, or how John Hill times the music in his skating montages to whenever his board hits a surface, or how Kraig Adams will beautifully craft a montage with orchestrated music and then abruptly cut to a moment of comedy —
I am someone who is truly appreciative of how the craft and creativity of music is merged with filmmaking and video creation.
Amidst all of my online media consumption, I’ve noticed an interesting trend with regards to the *type of music* being used in YouTube vlogs. It really stems back to the music choices of a one Casey Neistat, arguably one of the biggest innovators of the vlog format.
Before he started vlogging in 2015 , Casey had garnered an audience of roughly 100,000 subscribers through his homemade documentary films on different kinds of subjects. You may or may have seen them in the late aughts or early 2010s: iPod’s Dirty Little Secret and Bike Lanes are two of the more popular ones.
The biggest of these prior to his daily vlog was a film made in collaboration with Nike called “Make it Count,” in where he used the budget for the movie entirely on spontaneously traveling the world, cutting together his adventures to illustrate the grander point of the importance of truly going out and *living life.*
The excitement behind such a distinct filmmaker tackling a daily vlog was palpable, and during his rise to popularity, Casey’s homemade documentary approach to making a vlog is, while easily mimic-able and meme-able, something truly idiosyncratic to who he is as a storyteller.
This extends to his choices in music — either the music he finds or commissions by artists like Dyalla Swain, Andrew Applepie, Lakey Inspired, or Joakim Karud.
All the artists live and create music for Casey within the general realm of a specific hip-hop subgenre: Chipmunk Soul.
The subgenre was prevalent in his vlogs right from the jump, first appearing in his third video in the series.
So what is Chipmunk Soul, where did it come from, and most importantly, why do we hear it time and time again in every single YouTube vlog? To understand this, we need to go back to the year 1958, to a novelty record-maker named Ross Bagdasarian, Sr. Back in the late 50s and early 60s, our dear friend Ross was experimenting with new methods to speed up records to create a higher pitched, chipmunk-esque sounds.
Most records could only speed up in specific increments, such as two times or three times as fast, and therefore pitched voices one or two octaves up. This trick was used on various comedy and novelty records during that time period.
However, the one problem that occurred with speeding the records up in this way was that while the sounds were higher pitched, the voices and instruments sped up, making the music harder to understand.
Mr. Bagdasarian was interested in affecting the records with speeds in between those increments, and so he used new tape recorders that could alter the speed of records in between the traditional octave and two octave increments, creating a more understandable and more human-sounding “chipmunk voice.” Thus, by pitching his singing voice in different manners, Ross the Elder. was able to engineer this sound:
The result birthed the the third best selling Christmas song of all time [*per Nielson SoundScan in 2011] and the Grammy-Award winning franchise we now know as Alvin and the Chipmunks.
As the Chipmunks grew in popularity, the methodologies Bagdasarian developed became more widely known among the music production communities. So by the time we got to the 1990s in the golden age of hip-hop, the engineering methods of speeding up records to craft an entirely unique yet still innately human sounds had been in the zeitgeist for quite some time. In fact, 90s breakbeat house music had been utilizing the method for quite some time.
Though the RZA and the Wu-Tang Clan were known among hip-hop heads to be the first artists to implement the chipmunk techniques into their production work, the artist and producer Kanye West was among the first to bring the subgenre to mainstream audiences as a result of his contributions to the critically acclaimed Jay-Z record “The Blueprint.” When it first came on the scene, Chipmunk Soul was as distinct and unique as those initial Chipmunks records, taking various snippets of Soul music records, speeding and pitching up the sound, and building beats and song arrangements off of those samples.
What was distinct about Kanye West’s implementation of the subgenre was the prolific rate at which he made the records. A lot of his early production work, from producing for other rappers to his first album The College Dropout, was full of these elements, and as his style developed over the years he became more intentional with how he utilized this genre of chipmunk soul. More advanced versions of it can be heard on later albums to an extent.
As to the *why* behind Kanye’s choice in using sped up, pitched up vocals as the basis for his production style, aclip from the Dissect Podcast that showcases Kanye’s excitement in showing the songs to Jay-Z that would eventually be included on the Blueprint says it all. It’s apparent to me that both Jay Z and Kanye connected on a human level through this moment of listening to soul music flipped on its head.
In my eyes, much in the same way Bagdasarian’s sonic experiments lived at the intersection of affected sounds and human vocals, chipmunk soul is music that lives at the intersection of two different worlds: the soulful, longing nostalgia of the past, and the thunderous, powerful energy of the present, assembled in a manner with great care and respect for the work that’s come before and the work yet to come.
It’s this kind of connection to chipmunk soul that I believe draws Casey and many DIY documentarians to this genre of music, and is the reason why his style has been lauded and imitated by so many.
The YouTuber Volksgeist, who did a great video essay on Casey’s choice to use this style of music in his vlogs, summarizes Casey’s work ethic really well.
Organic. Homemade. Something about this style of music paired with Casey’s filmmaking style touches us on a deeply human level. It makes us long for the days of yore where families would film home movies of our childhood, and yet with pulse pounding beats, thrusts us into the mode of the present day.
Whether he knows it or not, Casey, like the best filmmakers, freezes life in time for us, and his choice in music amplifies just that.
