![]() In his apology to Goldman Sachs and in an email to me on Friday, Mr. ![]() Watson had apologized profusely to Goldman Sachs, saying the voice on the call belonged to Samir Rao, the co-founder and chief operating officer of Ozy, according to the four people. The inquiry didn’t get far before a name emerged: Within days, Mr. When YouTube learned that someone had apparently impersonated one of their executives at a business meeting, its security team started an investigation, the company confirmed to me. Someone else, it seemed, had been playing the part of Mr. Piper told the Goldman Sachs investor that he had never spoken with her before. That’s when things got weird.Ī confused Mr. Piper, not through the Gmail address that was provided to participants before the meeting, but through Mr. As he spoke, however, the man’s voice began to sound strange to the Goldman Sachs team, as though it might have been digitally altered, the four people said.Īfter the meeting, someone on the Goldman Sachs side reached out to Mr. Watson was as good a leader as he seemed to be. Once everyone had made the switch to an old-fashioned conference call, the guest told the bankers what they had been wanting to hear: that Ozy was a great success on YouTube, racking up significant views and ad dollars, and that Mr. He was running late and apologized to the Goldman Sachs team, saying he’d had trouble logging onto Zoom, and he suggested that the meeting be moved to a conference call, according to four people who were briefed on the meeting, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal details of a private discussion. The scheduled participants included Alex Piper, the head of unscripted programming for YouTube Originals. 2 that Ozy arranged between the Goldman Sachs asset management division and YouTube was supposed to be about. That’s what the Zoom videoconference on Feb. And, crucially, Ozy said it had a great relationship with YouTube, where many of its videos attracted more than a million views. Ozy boasted of a large audience for its general interest website, its newsletters and its videos, and the company had a charismatic chief executive, Carlos Watson, a onetime cable news anchor who had worked at Goldman Sachs early in his career. The kazoos employed to such delightful effect in “Smells Like Nirvana” return along with the accordion that distinguished Al’s self-titled debut and even the musical hands of manualist Mike Kieffer.This past winter, Goldman Sachs was closing in on a $40 million investment in Ozy, a digital media company founded in 2013, and there seemed to be a lot of reasons to do the deal. The same is true of “Headline News.” It’s one of the only songs in Al’s oeuvre that has the same chorus as the song that Al is parodying, which finds Al singing in a register lower than he ever has before in a successful attempt to replicate the oceans-deep croon of Crash Test Dummies frontman Brad Roberts.Īs “Headline News” draws to a close, Al pulls out all the stops. Instead of words in its chorus, “Mmmm Mmmm Mmmm Mmm” substitutes noises, namely strangely hypnotic humming. Crash Test Dummies frontman Brad Roberts sings in a bass-baritone so low that it almost sounds like he’s doing a goofy fake voice to amuse friends. “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” is one of the goofier products of the Nirvana-fueled Alternative Rock boom of the early to mid 1990s, a borderline novelty song full of additional novelties. Al’s tongue-in-cheek spin through the top tabloid tales of the day is consequently the product of an earlier era. We’ve changed a lot in the quarter century since the release of “Headline News.” We’ve evolved and de-evolved, made great social progress and regressed egregiously. Happy” in what is perhaps not the most sensitive moment of his career. Bobbitt was similarly the subject of a sympathetic film, in this case a documentary that portrayed her not as the tabloid cartoon of the public imagination who lopped off her cheating husband’s penis in a fit of rage but rather as a passionate, dignified immigrant who was viciously raped and sexually terrorized by a dead-eyed sociopath until she was moved to take violent action against the instrument of her abuse, which Al refers to as “Mr. Harding was the subject of a high-profile biopic starring Margot Robbie that depicted the controversial skating champion as the troubled victim of abuse, first from her mother and then from husband Jeff Gillooly. Fay, alas, is still widely seen as a doofus who ran amok in Singapore and then was punished viciously and disproportionately for his youthful transgressions but Harding and particularly Bobbitt are seen in a vastly different light these days. In the decades since the single’s release our understanding of two of these curious, sordid figures, these walking punchlines, has shifted tremendously.
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