Surprise Hit ‘Mortal Kombat Song’ Changing Shape of Music and Video Game Industry

6 Million views in under 46 hours and counting….

By the time this article is published, the song could easily be at seven or eight million views…it might even be nine. The only thing for certain is that at the rate of  over 2000 views a minute, the Jace Hall Mortal Kombat music video is catching on like crazy. The million dollar question is, who is it catching on to?

First, let’s take a step back and look at who the hip-hop music industry is trying to appeal to. The mainstream society…but what exactly is considered “mainstream” these days?

Think for a minute how often you use your phone in a day. Chances are, you just pulled out your cell phone to try and calculate that exact answer (there’s an app for that). To say that technology has become a necessary and essential tool for society is like saying that oxygen is necessary for breathing, or that water will make your mouth less dry. Technology is so obviously entrenched into our daily lives, it’s to the point where we can’t function without it. But that’s a relatively recent trend. What isn’t so obvious is how seamless, dare we say overlooked, this transition has been.

If you obsessively carried around an electronic device 20 years ago, you would’ve been referred to as a “nerd.” That’s just a simple fact. But today, if you carried around an electronic device people would just look at you funny wondering where your other three devices were.

Technology, formally known as nerd activity, now drives almost every social activity of our society. Talking to a friend or co-worker (texting on a cell phone). Reading a book (holding a kindle). Watching a baseball game (viewing an iPad). The universal consumption of technology has molded our unique interests into almost identical activities. The experiences may be different, but the portal is the same.

Be it gaming, technology, social networking or music, the average way a person lives today is different than it was just 10 years ago due to those influences – But current hip hop music messaging doesn’t reflect these changes. Music isn’t speaking to relevant activities, it’s giving us great beats but still the same tried-and-true repetitive themes of love, sex, money, and party lyrics to play over them.

The Mortal Kombat song looks to be the first to successfully branch out to the mass consumer and discuss the new social activities that we are partaking in and care about. What’s happening? People are responding as if it’s something they’ve never heard before (well…).

Prior to the Jace Hall Mortal Kombat song, the hip-hop subcategory of Nerdcore music existed as a relatively small sub-genre of hip-hop music, appealing to a more narrowly defined segment of the “nerd population.” Jace Hall’s Mortal Kombat song, and his similar works like “I Play Wow” which achieved 10 million views, demonstrate that a mass consumer type of Nerdcore, that Jace has casually named “ LeetMusic” or “LEET” (1337) is possible and may now likely represent what the cutting edge of hip-hop is today. An entire audience was waiting for something new and Jace Hall was making a video game centric Mortal Kombat song while the major labels were busy signing Rebecca Black…the beat merely goes on for the latter, while the sky is now the limit for the former.

The Mortal Kombat Song...Millions of views and counting.

Even more compelling is the fact that the success of the song has also accelerated and expanded interest in the Mortal Kombat video game, much to the video game publisher’s delight (Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment.) With “I Play Wow”, and now “Mortal Kombat”, Jace is creating a new method of promoting and acknowledging a new lifestyle and technology affected culture, which in turn, speaks to all of us who have been touched by these changing times.

If a music video does its job, it will visually tell a story that accompanies the message of the song, enhancing the song’s appeal. The Mortal Kombat music video seems to accomplish all of that, all while promoting the content and the physical product, the song is based upon. That’s almost an impossible feat for mainstream music videos to accomplish–seeing as top songs in hip-hop are “Alien Sex” and “Down on Me” that might not be such a bad thing…

You can say what you want about the music video, but with 6 million viewers in less than 2 days, you don’t really have to because it just speaks for itself.

A cynic might conclude, “what’s the big deal, it’s a re-mix of a popular Mortal Kombat song that gamers are getting off on, it will be gone in a few days….”

That’d be true if the song was going viral on sites dedicated exclusively to gamers, but the Mortal Kombat song is going crazy all over the place, most specifically, WorldStarHipHop.com, which just so happens to be one of the most critical consumer landscapes for hip-hop music.  These are the same people who listen to Jay-Z, Wayne, and Drake.

The Jace Hall Mortal Kombat song isn’t attempting to be everyday hip-hop, it’s expanding the hip hop genre for people that thought they’d seen and heard everything it had to offer. The song personifies the new themes that matter to society today, and provides a voice for an audience that has been waiting to be heard

Hip Hop can now once again return to its origins: A new and rebellious dialog and reflection of the changing times.

It’s a new genre and generation of music for those who thought that they were stuck with music in the mainstream. Millions of views and listens later, people still can’t believe their eyes and ears. Who can blame them? The mainstream audience has never seen or heard anything like this before and they have been clamoring for something new for quite some time. It’s a deafening sound.

And that sound is the Mortal Kombat video just reaching 7 million views in under 50 hours right about now…