Jacuzzi Boys
Glazin'
"Glazin''
Dir: Mayer\Leyva
Hardly Art
Originally released as a fan video by the “Jacuzzi Gals.” It promptly got banned from everywhere (not before getting a half million views in 36 hours on YouTube). Even the label tried to disown it, sent cease and desist letters, etc. For legal reasons, the official website had to be hosted on the same Swedish server that is home to NAMBLA, Wikileaks, et al. Mayer\Leyva stay in character for interviews and twitter.
The Jacuzzi Gals Saga: A Tale of Creativity, Independence, & Singing Vaginas
by Whitney Mallett (originally published in Bullet)
This is a David and Goliath story but with a lot of vagina. In this version of the tale, David is a pair of video artists and Goliath is a corporate entertainment behemoth. David makes a music video that goes viral and Goliath threatens to sue for copyright infringement. The confusing thing, though, is that Goliath has all these indie subsidiaries, so it’s not at first obvious he’s Goliath. Oh yeah, and did I mention there are a lot of vaginas involved?
Let’s start at the beginning. In 2011, two Miami-based video artists, Jillian Mayer (the weirdo behind “I am your Grandmother”) and Lucas Leyva, wanted to make a music video for a local band they were friends with, rambunctious garage rockers the Jacuzzi Boys. “We want to dress up vaginas and make them sing,” they wrote in an email. “LOL let’s do it,” replied the band. Mayer and Leyva found young women willing to turn their lady bits into singing puppets in the likeness of characters like an alien vampire and Homer Simpson, with the help of some body paint and googly eyes. They filmed the whole bizarre, awesome, unsexy thing on a VHS camera with a light they returned to Walmart afterward. After, the band got $500 from their record label to cover the cost of materials.
As if Mayer and Leyva’s singing genitalia weren’t funny and weird enough, they added another layer to whole thing and pretended the video for “Glazin’” was made by die-hard fans of the Jacuzzi Boys who called themselves the Jacuzzi Gals. Mayer and Leyva gave these smart sassy girls quite the backstory. In their minds, “Karen” at a younger age had tried to turn her vagina into N’Sync’s Joey Fatone, but when her mom caught her squatting over the VHS, she “freaked the fuck out.”
Trouble started, however, when Mayer and Leyva sent the finished video to the band and CC:d one of the guys from their indie punk record label, Hardly Art, who retorted with a list of the vaginas they would have to cut out, including the ones made to look like Ronald McDonald, Jabba the Hutt, Homer Simpson, Mr. T, and Harry Potter. Mayer and Leyva did some research and found that they had a good case: their use of these franchised characters could be considered satire, which falls under the comment and criticism section protected by fair use. Record label guy still wasn’t having it. For our naive video artists, the reality of the situation came as a shock. Despite the glasses and stripes of the guys that worked there, the indie label wasn’t indie at all. It’s a subsidiary of Sub Pop which is a subsidiary of Warner, and the bottom line was that Warner was afraid of getting sued.
A couple of weeks ago, Mayer and Leyva hosted a panel at SXSW where they spoke about the vagina puppet saga–you can listen to the full audio here. One of the hashtags they gave the talk was #indiewhentheypayyoucorporatewhentheyfuckyou. During the panel, the pair explained the how at one point the record label suggested they could do a re-shoot excising the famous characters for $300. From their perspective, the re-shoot was only in the interest of protecting Warner and all its money, yet they still were asking the artists to work on an “indie” budget. When something is “indie you are supposed to sacrifice earnings to have more creative freedom,” Mayer noted during the panel. “We realized we were in a corporate game but not making any money from it.”
At one point, Mayer and Leyva offered to give the $500 back to the record label and make it a true fan video, but they didn’t come to any solution with Hardly Art. Finally, they just said fuck it, and posted the video online anyways. It went viral, getting half a million views in 36 hours.
Next came the cease and desist letters and the threats of legal action for copyright infringement. The claim was that the artists didn’t have permission to use the Jacuzzi Boys’ song. Warner went to war with Mayer and Leyva, taking down the video as fast as they could put it up. They heard that Warner even hired interns for the sole purpose of tearing down the video all day.
Mayer and Leyva answered the threats of legal action with a flow chart explaining that whether it’s considered a fan video or the official video, they should be left alone. They tried another approach and emailed asking if they could license the song for a “commercial” they were making. They didn’t get a response. Mayer explained they didn’t have day jobs so they had more time to put into this than the record label. They even wrote responses to the cease and desist letters in the character of the imaginary Jacuzzi Gals.
Although the video’s initial momentum was squashed, David conquered Goliath to some extent: the Jacuzzi Gals video for “Glazin’” is online today and the artists haven’t been sued. Two years later, it’s generating a discussion about ownership, indie, fair use, satire, reappropriation, and the Internet–not to mention another one about the (de)sexualization of the female body. “There was an intense debate as to whether or not it was porn,” Mayer and Leyva noted. “We didn’t realize that any sort of nudity– even nonsexual or better antisexual–constituted pornography.”
In spite of the interesting conversations the video has provoked, the whole ordeal suggests the Internet is becoming increasingly regulated by corporate interests. “At the end of the day we just wanted people to be able to see vagina puppets singing along to music our friends made,” said Mayer and Leyva. “If that can happen, it seems like there is potential for far more sinister uses of this control.”
"Best Music Video of the Year" -Eric Wareheim (Tim and Eric)
"Worst Music Video Ever. Ruined vaginas for me." -Joseph Kahn (Director of Thong Song Music Video)
Mayer\Leyva is performance artist Jillian Mayer and retired playwright Lucas Leyva. Their collaborations include short films, art installations, music videos, experimental theater, and web projects.
Their last two short films (Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke; #PostModem) premiered at Sundance and went on to play AFI, Milan, New York, Los Angeles, Winterthur, New Zealand and festivals all over the world. In 2012 four separate Mayer\Leyva projects were screened at SXSW and in 2013 they returned with another.
Named to Filmmaker Magazine’s "25 New Faces of Independent Film” list, their projects have also screened at museums worldwide including MoMA, Guggenheim Museums, New Orleans Contemporary and the permanent collection of the Miami Art Museum. This year they were selected for the New Frontier Story Lab Fellowship at the Sundance Institute.
Their music videos have been featured by Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Vice, Stereogum, and NME and have been named to various year-end Top10 video lists, including IFC.
They have made three viral videos, including I Am Your Grandma, which became an unlikely sensation that has been spoofed on various TV shows and was featured on the cover of Art Papers Magazine, and the controversial Jacuzzi Boys: Glazin’ which became infamous after getting over 600,000 views in 48 hours before being banned from YouTube permanently and becoming the subject of a SXSW Panel.
They have been awarded grants from the Cintas Foundation Fellowship for Cuban-American Artists, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Elsewhere Museum/ National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Harpo Foundation, the Zentrum Paul Klee Museum Fellowship (Switzerland), and the South Florida Cultural Consortium’s Visual and Media Artists Fellowship.
Together they help run the Borscht Corporation and the Borscht Film Festival in Miami, where they work and live with Shivers, their wise and benevolent miniature chihuahua.
website: mayerleyva.com