Sarah Brand's "Red Dress"

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About

Sarah Brand's "Red Dress" refers to a song and music video by an English student and amateur musician which drew the fascination of the internet for its consistently off-key singing and low-budget music video, drawing comparisons to "Friday" by Rebecca Black.

Origin

On July 7th, 2021, Sarah Brand, a sociology student at Oxford University, released the music video for her song "Red Dress." She consistently sings off-key throughout the song, and the music video depicts a woman at a wedding in a white dress (played by Brand) getting interrupted by a woman in a red dress (also played by Brand). The video gained over 689,000 views in less than a month.

Spread

The video took roughly three weeks to start growing popular online. On July 12th, it was posted to /r/crappymusic,^[1] where it gained over 160 points. On July 26th, it was posted on Decider,^[2] where it was reported to have over 210,000 views. Decider posited the video may have been a social experiment, given Brand's field of study.

Will Brand eventually reveal that the joke’s on us and this was all just a gag, or will there be more videos from this budding pop star who could use a little polish, but she’s going to keep on pushing regardless? Or, perhaps, this song is just some sort of grand sociology experiment slash master’s thesis created by a burgeoning academic about the nature of virality in our social media age?

After the Decider article, the video gained over 460,000 views in the following week, as well as much more news coverage. The video was covered by AV Club^[3] and Newsweek^[4] on July 29th. AV Club called it "the new 'Friday.'" Newsweek interviewed Gordon Gronbach, the freelance videographer who worked on "Red Dress," who said there was "no hint" of the song being a joke on the set. "I gathered it was an exercise in becoming a video director," he said. "She did say she wanted to be a director and it was obvious she wasn't a great singer, with a few off notes, but it was okay and I guess she did it for showreel purposes, and so I respect that."

On August 1st, the BBC^[5] posted an interview with Brand, who said, "The style in which I sing the song was important because it reflected the story. The vocals don't seem to quite fit, they seem out of place and they make people uncomfortable… and the video is this outsider doing things differently and causing discomfort and eliciting all this judgement."

After the video went viral, viewers discovered that Brand had performed an acoustic version of the track on YouTube. The video has over 32,000 views as of August 2nd, 2021 (shown below).

On YouTube, commenters on both the video and acoustic version marveled at how Brand was able to stay consistently off-key throughout the song. For example, commenter dj mad wrote, "I wonder how long it took her to be able to sing off key. To be able to stay off key all the way thru I would have to say that she’s a master musical genius with perfect pitch. Waiting for her plan to reveal itself."