Watch: Hilarious VRChat Parody of Bo Burnham's "Welcome to the Internet" by YouTuber With Successful Career as a VR-Based Musician

"Do you want to live in the Metaeverse all of the time? Little bit of Metaverse all of the time?"

This is a pretty brilliant VRChat-themed parody of Bo Burnham’s very brilliant “Welcome to the Internet”, created and performed by YouTuber TFMJonny, who tosses the original lyrics into the Internet content vortex of the Metaverse, and spins out some clever and on-point tweaks along the way.

For instance, where Burnham had the lines "apathy's a tragedy and boredom is a crime", TFM tells me, “I rewrote those lines to ‘apathy's an amnesty and boredom is sublime’ to reflect the dichotomy between regular Internet culture and VRChhat culture. 

“Most of VRChat consists of sitting around doing nothing and just being social with friends," he explains. "There aren't any particular goals and thus the game can quite often turn into a money and time sink. Those lyrics were some of the last I wrote and are probably my favorite because they differ entirely from the original because it highlights this stark difference.”

TFM shot the entire video in VRChat using VRCLens to insure every angle matched that from the original video -- and went into Unity, to recreate Bo Burnham’s set:

 

“I created the world from scratch in Unity and painstakingly matched perspectives and lighting so everything looked identical.” (I.E., he recreated Bo Burnham's Los Angeles guest house as a world in VRChat.)

Bo Burnham himself first catapulted his performing career on YouTube, so it’s interesting that TFM is also doing so on YouTube, just with VRChat as his own focal point.

“When I started content creation three years ago,” TFM tells me, “I just had a vision that one day musicians would use virtual avatars and motion capture to embody regular public personas in the industry. We have seen various attempts at this over the years. I saw the opportunity with VR to use consumer technology to take my crack at it and I'm still here after all this time still doing it.”

He’s been performing music for over 17 years, but now has a far larger audience than he ever did from performing IRL, with nearly 1 million subscribers on YouTube alone. (Very few indie musicians have that kind of social reach.)

“While VR presents some unique challenges, there isn't too much different that I do when performing concerts in VR,” says TFM. “The only difference is I am also wearing full body tracking and a VR headset.”

Hat tip: Indefatigable VRChat scout Adeon Writer.

Comments

[Kaylee West]

Brilliant!! This is one of the things I love about virtual worlds like SL and VRChat.

[TonyVT Skarredghost]

Very funny!