The musical Rent is in its 20th anniversary, so a few Ohio University alumni got together to pay it tribute with a mashup with Lady Gaga music, under the title #GAGA4RENT.
Michael Korte, who created the #HAM4BEY mashup of Hamilton and Beyoncé music, knew he wanted to publish his second youtube mashup before the Super Bowl. The #GAGA4RENT video currently has more than 120,000 views.
“The first one was such a mind-blowingly successful kickoff ... so we knew we had to do another one,” he said.
Korte is a YouTube content creator and says he learned a lot of what he does today from his OU professors.
“If there is an opportunity for you to work than you need to create your own work,” Korte said his OU professors told him, and “it is an incredible blessing to be on that path,” he said.
When first getting ready to create the mashup, Lady Gaga was not in the game plan.
“She was kind of on my back burner,” Korte, who graduated from OU in 2010 with a degree in acting said. After he sat down with his team, Korte decided with Gaga playing the Super Bowl and Rent recently seeing it’s 20th anniversary, “it just seemed like the perfect way to go.”
While merging two bold mediums Korte is “incredibly proud to work with other LGBTQ artists and cast all different kinds of people,” he said.
Although this was his second time creating a mashup, it was not any easier than the first. Hamilton and Beyonce have a similar style, he said, while Lady Gaga and Rent are two completely different genre’s to merge. It was a challenge, be Korte is proud of the final product, he said.
Along with combining two completely different mediums, Korte said he also faced the challenge of rising up to the hype that #HAM4BEY had received. The only goal for this project was to create something “fun and wacky,” Korte said, not to get a certain number of views or likes.
“What was really cool about this time around is I was able to partner up with two other OU graduates,” Korte said. He posted on a ‘Bobcats in LA’ facebook page looking for audio engineers to help with this project, and that is where he found Nathan Bodiker, the production manager at Smash Haus Music Group.
“It was super exciting to see how it all came together,” Bodiker, who graduated from OU in 2016 with a degree in audio production said.
“It happened so naturally and we worked so well together, which was an incredibly special part of this project,” Korte said. From the time that Bodiker contacted Korte on facebook, to the release date of the project, things went by really fast, Bodiker said.
Korte is already working on his next video and has recently been approached to turn his mashups into a live tour, and thinks taking the tour to Athens would be, “dope,” he said.
