What makes you haha
How Masketta Fall’s laughing One Direction cover went viral and left them behind
Masketta Fall aren’t a well-known band. They currently have about 18,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, which isn’t a lot, and they’ve never scored a chart hit in any country, including Australia, where the group formed circa 2011.1 Until yesterday, I had never even heard of them — but I had heard them.
On February 22, 2012, Masketta Fall uploaded a cover medley of One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful” and Justin Bieber’s “Baby” to YouTube. Both of these songs were massive hits and Masketta Fall were far from the only artist to cover them, but their version had a twist: instead of singing the lyrics, they sang “ha, ha ha, ha ha, ha ha ha” to the tune of the songs.
The song (at least the “What Makes You Beautiful” half) quickly went viral, and within a month, it had made it all the way to One Direction themselves, who heard it when a radio host played the song for them. The host just calls it “this laughing cover that’s on YouTube of the kids doing the ha ha ha ha ha ha”, so even though One Direction seem to find the cover funny, they never learn who performed it — and they weren’t alone. The “What Makes You Beautiful” cover was posted and reposted all across the internet, usually with the “Baby” portion of the song cut, and in most cases, it wasn’t attributed to Masketta Fall.
The original YouTube upload got a lot of attention and currently has over three million views, more than any of Masketta Fall’s other videos,2 but reposts account for even more views, and the vast majority of them don’t credit the band. If you search masketta fall what makes you beautiful on YouTube, you’ll find the original video, the video where One Direction hear the cover (also uploaded by Masketta Fall’s official YouTube channel) and a few unofficial uploads that credit Masketta Fall in the video title, but the view counts for the reposted videos range from the low hundreds to 6,000 views. Meanwhile, one reposted video that doesn’t mention Masketta Fall in the title or description has over a million views, and there are many others with views in the tens or hundreds of thousands, ultimately adding up to more than the original video’s three million views — and that’s just on YouTube.
On February 26, four days after Masketta Fall posted their original video, a SoundCloud user named paynecakes uploaded the “What Makes You Beautiful” part of the song to SoundCloud, titled “What makes you haha”, where it has over 600,000 listens, and another SoundCloud upload from a few months later has over 400,000 listens. The audio also went viral on Tumblr, a site that is notoriously difficult to search, so I haven’t had any luck finding popular posts from 2012 with the audio, but I found one post from 2016 referring to the song as a vintage Tumblr meme, and that post has nearly 200,000 notes, so clearly a lot of people remember it.
Looking through the notes of that Tumblr post, along with the comments on a number of the YouTube videos, three things stood out: one, many commenters refer to it as “What Makes You Haha” or “whatmakesyouhaha.mp3”, a name that the song only acquired after it was divorced from its origin — the original Masketta Fall video was titled “One Direction & Justin Bieber LOL-Cover”, and the SoundCloud upload that presumably coined the name “What Makes You Haha” didn’t mention Masketta Fall. Two, several commenters mention Homestuck, a webcomic that was very popular among Tumblr’s userbase circa 2012, and further digging led me to a couple of Homestuck fan videos on YouTube with 500,000-plus views each that used the audio. Also, the second Soundcloud post I linked above was uploaded by user named Tipsygnostalgic, which is a Homestuck reference. The videos and the Soundcloud audio were all posted in May 2012, which appears to be when the song went viral in the Homestuck fandom. The third and most important thing — to me, at least — is a comment linking this audio to another vintage meme from 2012.
The whole reason I did any of this research is that for the past eleven years, I’ve had this song in my music library under the title “Ridiculously Photogenic Guy Laugh Song” because that was what it was called when I downloaded it off of Tumblr. Recently, when I realised that didn’t seem to be the song’s real title and Ridiculously Photogenic Guy, aka Zeddie Little, didn’t seem to be the real artist, I was determined to find out who it was really by and why I thought that in the first place.
Working out that the song was originally by Masketta Fall was not straightforward. I started by googling “laugh what makes you beautiful”, which doesn’t bring up Masketta Fall’s video but did give me several search results referring to the song as “What Makes You Haha”. I then googled that term, which gave me a number of YouTube and SoundCloud results, the earliest of which was the February 26 SoundCloud post that I linked above. I thought that the SoundCloud user was probably the creator of the audio, but I still didn’t know whose laugh it was, only that it definitely wasn’t Ridiculously Photogenic Guy, whose photogenic photograph was taken on March 31, more than a month after the audio was posted. I decided to search “What Makes You Haha” on last.fm, a website where users can track the music they listen to and view others’ listening statistics.
As you can see, the top search results mostly attribute the song to One Direction, but it’s also been credited to Tumblr, Fucking Tumblr, and paynecakes, the SoundCloud user who was probably the first to repost the audio, but there was also an unfamiliar name on the list. I searched “masketta fall what makes you haha” and found their video, and when I saw that it predated the SoundCloud upload by several days, I knew I’d found the original. I was suprised to learn that they were a band who had actually sung the hahas to the tune of the song, because I had spent the previous decade-plus assuming it was one “ha” that someone had repeated and edited and autotuned to fit the pitch and melody of the song. I was fascinated not so much by the fact that a legitimate artist with an album and several EPs of professionally recorded songs had their biggest impact with a joke song — that’s not uncommon — but that it happened without most listeners ever knowing who they were. Another meme song from the same year, Rob Cantor’s “Shia LaBeouf”, is better known than any other songs by Cantor or his band, Tally Hall, but if you search “actual cannibal shia labeouf”, you immediately find out that Cantor is the artist behind the song. Not so with Masketta Fall, which led me down the research rabbit hole that inspired me to write this post.
Still, even after working out how and why “What Makes You Haha” took on a life of its own, it wasn’t until I saw Ridiculously Photogenic Guy mentioned in that Tumblr reblog that I had proof that anyone had ever attributed it to him. Finally, safe in the knowledge that my memory was right and this wasn’t some kind of Mandela effect, I started looking into how and why that misattribution came about, and I think I’ve found it. I believe the origin is probably a YouTube video posted on April 8, 2012, just over a week after the Photogenic Guy photograph went viral, which is titled “Ridiculously Photogenic Guy Laugh.wmv” and has the following description:
I found this song on Tumblr
Put a picture to it
Mainly for comedic reasons.
I own nothing.
It sounds like the uploader, Remee Roze, combined the laugh song (which was by then already going around the internet without Masketta Fall’s name attached) and the Zeddie Little photograph just to be funny, but some viewers came away from the video thinking that it was his laugh and further spread that misinformation. That video has 20,000 views, and there’s a SoundCloud upload titled “Ridiculously Photogenic Guy Laugh” with 15,000 listens. I’ve only found one Tumblr post from 2012 attributing the laugh song to Ridiculously Photogenic Guy, and it only has 10 notes, but again, Tumblr is very difficult to search, so it’s far more likely that another post or posts made the rounds than that I actually saw that specific 10-note post. However, since the vast majority of laugh song content makes no mention of Ridiculously Photogenic Guy, it seems that the misattribution didn’t have a very wide reach.
I thought that all of this was worth documenting because of what it demonstrates about media in the internet age. Masketta Fall are far from the only people to have their work passed around online without their name attached. Most online memes spread this way, with only sufficiently popular ones having their origins documented on sites like KnowYourMeme and Wikipedia. When things aren’t documented immediately, the passage of time can make it even harder to trace a meme or other piece of media’s origin, especially on sites with poor search functions, like Tumblr, or platforms that were discontinued entirely, like Vine.
Examples of this phenomenon can be found as long ago as the early 2000s, when comedy songs on filesharing sites like LimeWire were commonly misattributed to Weird Al Yankovic, and as recently as this decade, when a TikTok dance invented by a 14-year-old girl named Jalaiah Harmon was credited to Charli D’Amelio, the TikTok star who popularised but did not create the dance. Progress has been made regarding both of those examples — if you download a Weird Al song on iTunes or stream it on Spotify, you can be certain that it actually is Weird Al, and TikTok introduced new attribution tools in response to the New York Times’ profile of Harmon, but often, online media goes viral and experiences the natural fade from relevance that all memes eventually do without the creator being widely identified or benefiting from their work.
Even if Masketta Fall had been universally identified as the band behind “What Makes You Haha”, it was far from the biggest meme of that period, so they probably wouldn’t have gotten that much of a career boost from it. Maybe if they’d done some things differently — say, released the song on iTunes, or posted more laughing covers of other popular songs on their YouTube channel — it could have led to bigger and better things for them, but it’s likely that if the song was spread around Tumblr with their name attached, they would have had the exact same career path. You can never be totally sure, and it’s not as if One Direction themed joke songs going viral on Tumblr never lead to successful music careers, but I kind of doubt that the members of Masketta Fall — who have been inactive since 2017 due to guitarist Daniel Molivas’ chronic fatigue illness — are out there regretting that they didn’t push harder for credit when the song went viral. And for what it’s worth, I still find their song funny all these years later.
Some sources, including Wikipedia, list 2012 as their formation date, but the oldest video on their YouTube channel was posted in September 2011 and follows the band’s visit to a Sydney recording studio in July 2011.
Their next most-viewed video is a cover of The Killers’ “Mr Brightside” with 300,000 views, a tenth as many as the laughing cover, and their other top-viewed videos have half that number.