In 2004 I took on the worst project of my professional life; worst in the sense that it was miserable and time-consuming and also in the sense that I did it very badly. A certain mobile phone company wanted to know what their rivals were doing online to keep young customers happy and asked my bosses to find out; I had to sign up to all their various customer clubs and ‘online communities’ and report back. I ended up with a drawer full of cheapest-option PAYG phones, an unusable inbox full of phone spam, and a report full of different ways to say “nobody is in the Samsung Fun Club, let alone having any fun”, all equally useless to the client.
One of the things you could do in the Samsung Fun Club (and I did) was buy ringtones. In fact it was the only thing anyone was actually doing. The ringtone economy was booming, an early proof of concept for the idea that people would pay a lot of money and download a lot of stuff on their phones, and the profit margins were staggering: “Round Round”, back in 2002, made more money off its ringtone than the actual single. Ringtone money was projected to overtake CD single sales – looking at the parlous state of CD singles in 2005 it probably did, for a while. The NME started a “what’s your ringtone?” column. The PR people whose job it was lied about polyphonic tones being “an orchestra in your pocket”. Journalists wondered what they meant for the state of music.
Twenty years on we can answer that one at least: not very much. Ringtones were a music-shaped collectable, sonic pogs. They’re a harbinger of how willing people would be to download full songs, in that brief upcoming window when data transfer speeds and phone memories and the lack of streaming made it viable. But as a cultural phenomenon there’s not a lot to the rise and fall of the ringtone: people will pay for digital tat, and they will stop when different or perhaps even better tat comes along instead. Fair enough.
The ringtone era produced one enduring cultural figure, though, and we’re listening to him. The Crazy Frog is a manic grey lump with long, skinny limbs and the shiny, wet-clay texture you see on digital art to this day. His pupils are asymmetrical and wild, his eyes wide above a long, curved mouth, gap-toothed and always on the point of grinning. He wears an old-school motorcycle helmet, straps undone, but his actual bike is invisible, or perhaps non-existent. What is visible – at least in his adverts and the original 2003 animation; it vanishes in the “Axel F” video – is his small but unmistakable cock.
This cock was the subject of concern. A few dozen people wrote to the Advertising Standards Authority to complain about on-screen Crazy Dick, and their complaints were rejected. The Frog, and his paymasters Jamster, had already been censured by the ASA and exiled to post-watershed commercial breaks only; no children would see the flapping grey genitals. The ASA might also have pointed out that almost all children already had: Jamster’s strategy was the ad equivalent of carpet bombing, buying up over 70,000 cheap slots on every possible small-audience channel as well as on the main terrestrial ones.
Just as ringtones fill the gap between the development of the mobile internet and the smartphone boom, this ad blitz is another example of how the Crazy Frog fits into, and epitomizes, a narrow, specific moment in internet history. Short video clips spread rapidly online; bluetooth makes them immediately shareable; but YouTube as a centralising platform doesn’t exist yet, so to get its video seen by everybody Jamster has to swamp the existing, broadcast advertising ecosystem. This gives it a level of immediate ubiquity almost no conventionally “viral” clip ever had.
Fortunately the Crazy Frog is loved by all so nobody really minded. Well, OK, some people minded, though “Axel F” sold 500,000 copies so the little grey cutie had a genuine, momentary fandom of sorts. The plague of frog ads isn’t the reason the ASA got involved, though: their ire was raised by the fact that the ads weren’t selling ringtones at all, but subscriptions to a ringtone service. So you bought your crazy tone and found yourself on the monthly hook for Jamba’s stable of equally obnoxious, and far less memorable, characters.
Predatory advertising? Media overexposure? That’s not in the spirit of the Crazy Frog, you might think, or at least you might if you were Erik Wernquist, the animator who created the character. Wernquist’s objections started with the name – “it’s not a frog and it’s not particularly crazy either” – but a 2005 interview strikes a note of general disillusion: “I would never do something like this again”, he says, stressing that the Frog was never intended to be commercial.
What was it intended for? Crazy Frog’s original name was “The Annoying Thing” – in the “Axel F” video, robot cops on flying scooters are hunting “the most annoying thing in the world” – and Wernquist posted him revving his imaginary bike to a board called CGTalk, where computer animators swapped tips and posted personal projects. Posters went back and forth suggesting changes to the creature, like the mismatched pupils to make him look more crazed, and The Annoying Thing became a hit. The stats Wernquist gave an interviewer are a reminder of the pre-YouTube scale here – hits on the animator’s site topped out at a “very fast” 6000 a day.
It wasn’t the animation alone that made The Annoying Thing a success (or annoying); it stood out because of what Wernquist paired it with: a sound his animation turned into the creature’s nasal voice, a kind of deranged, high-speed scat-singing babble and whine. The noise it made was in time with the revving of the invisible bike, and before Jamster saw (and heard) its ringtone potential the clip was just another bit of internet flotsam, a momentary distraction from school or office boredom.
We’ve been here before, back in 1999, when Baz Luhrmann turned a bit of stray glurge into the emetic “Sunscreen Song”. Just like that, “Axel F” is built around online driftwood, bits of silly fun accreting until suddenly it becomes a thing someone can make money off. The ultimate origin here is a Swedish teenager recording his party piece, an imitation of a two-stroke bike engine starting up. Daniel Mamedahl performed it on TV, and someone turned that into an MP3, which drifted around file-sharing networks under half a dozen names, all uncredited. A website in 2001 used it on a page called The Insanity Test (“If you start laughing consider yourself legally insane”). Mamedahl’s bike noises are the first thing you hear on “Axel F”: when he first saw Wernquist’s animation he rang the animator up and did the noises down the phone to prove his credentials.
There’s an innocence to Mamedahl’s and Wernquist’s activities, a poignant reminder of the early days of the consumer internet, which was full of mildly diverting bullshit, but, in general, bullshit nobody was making billions of dollars off. The story of the Crazy Frog is a story of the public internet’s development from people dicking around and making stuff for friends, through forums and file-sharing networks giving said stuff a way of circulating, onto people making a dubious buck out of the stuff, and stopping just before hardware and platform giants turn stuff-distribution into a machine to hoover up advertising money and squeeze producers ever harder.
Wernquist made no money off the Crazy Frog ringtones; Mamedahl doesn’t get a writing credit on the record. By the time we meet the Frog he is what he is, whatever sentiment you can wring out of his origins left long behind. So forget all that: is “Axel F”, the third highest-selling UK single of 2005, any good?
Or perhaps the question should be: is it meant to be? Whatever else you can say about Crazy Frog, he understands the brief. His job, as the video tells you upfront, is to be the most annoying thing in the world, a trickster figure disrupting your phone, your commercial breaks, your charts. So one way of looking at this song is to ask – once the decision was taken to do a Crazy Frog record, could it have been any better than this?
I think the answer is probably “no”. Whoever at Jamster came up with the idea of using a remix of “Axel F” for this – the songwriter credit goes to Wolfgang Boss, who went on to become Sony’s top A&R man – they did a good job. For a start, “Axel F” in its original form is a banger, one of the catchiest instrumentals of the 80s but hard-edged enough to work as a beat as well as a song. Which is the role it’s used for here, with Crazy Frog as an ersatz MC, finding space in and around the track, yanking away control with his signature “nim nim”s. But should you become sick of him – and let’s be honest, it’s a possibility – the original chassis of the track is well-constructed enough to get away with it.
There’s a balance here – too much Frog and the track stops working on any kind of ‘enjoyable song to dance to’ level; too little and why are we even doing this? I think they get it just right, letting the Frog be an agent of chaos who can grab “Axel F” without actually ruining it. Leave aside your visual image of the beast – it’s not easy, I know – and savour how weird this angry-wasp scat-vocal on a Number 1 hit is, honestly like little else we’ve heard.
It’s easier to be kind to “Axel F” amongst a list of Number 1 records that is so moribund that the most exciting thing we’ve heard in months is the Stereophonics. I think “Axel F” is surprisingly well crafted but I don’t much want to hear it. But then I don’t want to hear any of these records: it’s harder to make a case that the world needed a sixth Oasis LP than a first Crazy Frog one. The annoying thing is as abrasive as you’d expect an obnoxious grey flasher on an invisible moped to be, but I don’t think he’s markedly worse than any of the four records either side of him. The frogs we get we deserve.
Score: 5
[Logged in users can award their own score]