In class on Friday I asked if anyone had seen the video of Brian Williams performing “Rapper’s Delight.” Not many of you had, and that’s good, because hopefully this will be your first exposure to what is, as I mentioned, an absolute masterpiece of editing and research.

Before I get to that, some background on the players. First up, Rapper’s Delight. This is a song that although you may think you’ve never heard before, you almost certainly have. It was a huge hit in 1979 for The Sugarhill Gang, and is widely considered to be the first mainstream rap song ever written, the first to crack the Billboard Top 40. It has maintained its popularity for decades, is a pop-culture phenomenon, and has been featured in many movies, television shows, and commercials (the latter winning them $3 million in a lawsuit, speaking of Intellectual Property). In case you need a refresher, that’s the original below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8bKTzksZEw

Now that you’re caught up on the song (you remember it now, right?), some introductions about this new one. It was created by Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show staff, and it It stars Brian Williams, anchor for NBC evening news who covers war, disease, poverty, politics, and everything else both good and bad as the guy behind the anchor’s desk. As the link says, more people see him each night than anyone else. It also stars Lester Holt who, among other roles, sits behind the anchor desk for the weekend editions of the newscast. He has extensive reporting experience, and although I’m not a huge fan of national news, these are the two guys I watch because they seem like the most upstanding and straightforward. I expect Lester Holt will actually take over from Brian Williams whenever that day comes.

Brian Williams and Lester Holt

Before I get to the video, however, let me reiterate why I think it’s so unbelievable. First, as I said earlier, it’s a masterpiece of editing, the likes of which I haven’t seen before. Simply matching the voice to the music must have been a herculean task. For instance, consider the opening line of the first verse “Now what you hear is not a test.” That’s a line from the original song and appears in this version as well. Not only does it match in the words themselves, but it matches quite closely in tone and inflection also, it’s tonally accurate. They didn’t just match up words, they matched up the sounds of the words. If there was a slight up-tone in the word, they matched it, or a down-tone. Absolutely astounding. I couldn’t find info on what tools were used, but I would guess it was something along the lines of Premier Pro, or I suppose even Final Cut Pro is a possibility, but I can’t say for certain.

But what amazes me even more than that is the research that went in to finding all the clips that are used throughout. You’ll remember I mentioned there are companies who run thousands of DVRs recording 24 hours a day on over one thousand channels, then use special software to create subtitles for all that video then archive it in huge databases so people can search it all. Gigantic collections of text are known as a corpus, and the ones these companies have accumulated thus far must be gargantuan. One such company that does this is called TVEyes, and is (I believe) the biggest. They even have an iPhone app (and note they use WordPress as their web platform). They only charge a few hundred dollars monthly for their services which the Tonight Show can afford, so my best guess is that a service such as theirs was used to scan thousands of hours of broadcast news for just the right clips. The editing in this video is superlative, but the research that went into it to find just the right clips, and the clever uses of them (he says ‘bank’ instead of ‘bang,’ for example) is no less incredible.

It’s only about a minute and a half (the original song was fourteen!), but it just gets better and better as it goes on. The skill that went into this is unequaled.

So now, through the magic of video editing and data-mining a huge corpus, the video of Brian Williams and Lester Holt (with a brief guest appearance by Kathie Lee Gifford) “performing,” for lack of a better term, Rapper’s Delight.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YCeIgt7hMs