Is the Greyson Chance Viral Video Faked?

Jury’s still out for us, but Bob Lefsetz, he of the famous Lefsetz Letter,  has found a bunch of links  suggesting that we might all be looking at the next viral campaign  concocted by a major record label.

Granted, there’s not much to go on, but then, there wasn’t much for  the 9/11 Truthers or the Birthers to go on, either, and it took years for them to finally shut up.

The top (potentially) damning pieces  of evidence:

YouTube play count: We’ve seen things go viral  before, and the definition of the phrase is constantly changing as more  and more people start flocking to the “Internet sensations” that clog up  our culture, but 18 million plays? Already? Very, very fishy.

The girls. In the video that shows  Chance performing at what’s supposed to be some kind of talent show,  where are all the dudes? There are nothing but girls in that auditorium,  which suggests either a) that Chance goes to an all-girls school, and  is therefore some kind of hermaphrodite (which we are NOT discounting as  a possibility), or b) all those girls were somehow herded in there,  possibly with the promise of locks of Justin Bieber’s hair, and were  turned into some kind of test-marketing audience.

The sound quality. As explained by the Random  British Guy (supposedly a social media expert) in one of the videos  Lefsetz links to, the sound is very well-balanced for a talent  show. As anybody who’s worked in an A/V club before knows, getting audio  from your auditorium to sound anything close to that good is really  freaking hard, and it’s exceedingly unlikely that they have someone that  smart working at the public high school in Oklahoma that Chance  attends.

Of course, we could be totally wrong about this (and if we are,  Greyson, we’re sorry we called you a hermie), but given that the two  biggest success stories to happen to the record industry in the last  decade have been Susan Boyle and Justin Bieber, doesn’t it make at least  a little bit of sense that some executive at Interscope would think to  combine the two?

Because after all, if you could mash Susan Boyle’s non-celebrity  status together with Justin Bieber’s haircut, that combination would  look like a million bucks, right? At least.