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Calgary social media star Mane Yousuf among five Canadians participating in #YouTubeBlack Voices Fund – Calgary Herald
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Mane Yousuf was walking in downtown Calgary a few months back when he was suddenly approached by a fan.
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Yousuf’s energetic YouTube videos receive millions of hits, so it’s hardly surprising that he would eventually be recognized on the street. But the fan didn’t even have to look at the young Calgarian to know who he was.
“He recognized me by my voice,” says Yousuf, in an interview with Postmedia. “That was the one time where I went ‘What is going on?’ Word for word, he was like, ‘Oh, I recognize that voice.’ I couldn’t believe it.”
For the past three years, Yousuf has been posting a steady stream of energetic videos that feature his rapid-fire introductions, exuberant singing, a sparkling sense of humour and spirited dance moves as he interacts with pedestrians. In his most recent outings, posted two months ago, he challenged Calgarians to repeat lyrics from Kanye West’s DONDA back to him and win $100. But for the most part, his concept has been simple: Wearing headphones and singing along to popular tunes, he interacts with pedestrians in parks and on city sidewalks. He bounds over park benches, jumps on top of picnic tables, serenades cyclists on bike paths and occasionally instigates impromptu dance parties on the street.
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His YouTube channel now has more than 850,000 subscribers. Specific videos have received millions of views. In 2019, Yousuf based one around singing Lalala, the viral hit by American producer Y2K and Canadian rapper bbno$. Decked out in a beige-coloured suit, he dances and sings alongside amused if occasionally confused passersby along 17th Avenue and near Prince’s Island Park. He includes the boisterous, high-pitched laugh of a tattooed bench-dweller in the audio. So far, it has received 6.1 million views.
It’s impressive metrics for a guy who bounces around the city singing TikTok favourites and other hits to unsuspecting strangers. YouTube has been paying attention. In late January, Yousuf became one of five Canadians and the only Calgarian chosen to participate in 2022’s version of #YouTubeBlack Voices, a program that supports Black creators in the United States and Canada. Recipients get funding, promotion on YouTube and plenty of mentorship to help grow their channels, study analytics, test new formats and generally pump up the quality of their output. Yousuf will be debuting his first video from the program shortly, but the extra money and mentorship have led to him boosting production values and working with outside collaborators. He even hired a makeup artist.
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But he says the general tone of the videos will remain spontaneous, energetic bursts of dancing and music with plenty of charmed Calgarians eager to play along.
“If you had lived in the neighbourhood I grew up in in Calgary, you would have seen me walk through the neighbourhood with headphones on and basically doing what I’m (doing now) by myself,” he says. “I always had this passion of wanting to make music relate and I love music as a platform.”
Yousuf is a first-generation Canadian raised by Ethiopian immigrants in his hometown of Windsor, Ont. His family moved to Calgary when he was a teenager. A friend at Crescent Heights High School told him that he was destined to be big, suggesting his “personality would shine on the Internet or the world in one way or another.”
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The teenager took it to heart. He also went home and watched a video of Liza Koshy, an actress who became a YouTube star with her Dollar Store parody music videos in 2015.
“That same day I went home and opened my laptop and watched a YouTube video and said ‘This is what I want to do for the rest of my life after high school,’ ” Yousuf says. “That’s what I did. YouTube gave me the opportunity to truly bring my creativity and my strangeness into reality and just have fun with it and capture that timestamp of my life in ways that are beautiful for my generation to look back on.”
Along with the great numbers, Yousuf has also received at least one high-profile nod of approval. Upon watching Yousuf’s energetic take on his song Blinding Lights, The Weeknd tweeted the video and said ‘how am I JUST seeing this.”
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While Yousuf plans to continue feeding his YouTube channel he also has other ambitions. He is currently working with producers on his own music, which he describes as a mix between The Weeknd and the late Juice Wrld. One thing is clear, no matter what the medium, Yousuf wants to continue interacting with the public. While he acknowledges that he occasionally meets up with an uncooperative pedestrian, they tend to be in the minority and never make it into the videos. For the most part, people seem to connect to his fearless approach. Always an extrovert, Yousuf credits his time in retail as grooming for his public persona.
“It really shone through when I had my first job in Calgary, which was at Urban Planet at Malborough Mall,” he says. “I was working so hard to sell that pair of jeans and really give them the best jeans they could ever get. A guy asked me do you get commission?’ I didn’t know what commission meant. What’s commission? He said ‘if you sell something you get a piece of it. Because you’re working so hard.’ I was like ‘No.’ Ever since then I’ve been working in commission jobs.”
To watch Mane Yousuf’s videos, go to his YouTube Channel.
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Sometimes, you just have to return to the classics.
That’s especially true as Halloween approaches. While you queue up your spooky movie marathon, here are 10 iconic horror movies from the past 70 years for inspiration, and what AP writers had to say about them when they were first released.
We resurrected excerpts from these reviews, edited for clarity, from the dead — did they stand the test of time?
“Rear Window” (1954)
“Rear Window” is a wonderful trick pulled off by Alfred Hitchcock. He breaks his hero’s leg, sets him up at an apartment window where he can observe, among other things, a murder across the court. The panorama of other people’s lives is laid out before you, as seen through the eyes of a Peeping Tom.
James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter and others make it good fun.
— Bob Thomas
“Halloween” (1978)
At 19, Jamie Lee Curtis is starring in a creepy little thriller film called “Halloween.”
Until now, Jamie’s main achievement has been as a regular on the “Operation Petticoat” TV series. Jamie is much prouder of “Halloween,” though it is obviously an exploitation picture aimed at the thrill market.
The idea for “Halloween” sprang from independent producer-distributor Irwin Yablans, who wanted a terror-tale involving a babysitter. John Carpenter and Debra Hill fashioned a script about a madman who kills his sister, escapes from an asylum and returns to his hometown intending to murder his sister’s friends.
— Bob Thomas
“The Silence of the Lambs” (1991)
“The Silence of the Lambs” moves from one nail-biting sequence to another. Jonathan Demme spares the audience nothing, including closeups of skinned corpses. The squeamish had best stay home and watch “The Cosby Show.”
Ted Tally adapted the Thomas Harris novel with great skill, and Demme twists the suspense almost to the breaking point. The climactic confrontation between Clarice Starling and Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) is carried a tad too far, though it is undeniably exciting with well-edited sequences.
Such a tale as “The Silence of the Lambs” requires accomplished actors to pull it off. Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins are highly qualified. She provides steely intelligence, with enough vulnerability to sustain the suspense. He delivers a classic portrayal of pure, brilliant evil.
— Bob Thomas
“Scream” (1996)
In this smart, witty homage to the genre, students at a suburban California high school are being killed in the same gruesome fashion as the victims in the slasher films they know by heart.
If it sounds like the script of every other horror movie to come and go at the local movie theater, it’s not.
By turns terrifying and funny, “Scream” — written by newcomer David Williamson — is as taut as a thriller, intelligent without being self-congratulatory, and generous in its references to Wes Craven’s competitors in gore.
— Ned Kilkelly
“The Blair Witch Project” (1999)
Imaginative, intense and stunning are a few words that come to mind with “The Blair Witch Project.”
“Blair Witch” is the supposed footage found after three student filmmakers disappear in the woods of western Maryland while shooting a documentary about a legendary witch.
The filmmakers want us to believe the footage is real, the story is real, that three young people died and we are witnessing the final days of their lives. It isn’t. It’s all fiction.
But Eduardo Sanchez and Dan Myrick, who co-wrote and co-directed the film, take us to the edge of belief, squirming in our seats the whole way. It’s an ambitious and well-executed concept.
— Christy Lemire
“Saw” (2004)
The fright flick “Saw” is consistent, if nothing else.
This serial-killer tale is inanely plotted, badly written, poorly acted, coarsely directed, hideously photographed and clumsily edited, all these ingredients leading to a yawner of a surprise ending. To top it off, the music’s bad, too.
You could forgive all (well, not all, or even, fractionally, much) of the movie’s flaws if there were any chills or scares to this sordid little horror affair.
But “Saw” director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell, who developed the story together, have come up with nothing more than an exercise in unpleasantry and ugliness.
— David Germain
Germain gave “Saw” one star out of four.
“Paranormal Activity” (2009)
The no-budget ghost story “Paranormal Activity” arrives 10 years after “The Blair Witch Project,” and the two horror movies share more than a clever construct and shaky, handheld camerawork.
The entire film takes place at the couple’s cookie-cutter dwelling, its layout and furnishings indistinguishable from just about any other readymade home constructed in the past 20 years. Its ordinariness makes the eerie, nocturnal activities all the more terrifying, as does the anonymity of the actors adequately playing the leads.
The thinness of the premise is laid bare toward the end, but not enough to erase the horror of those silent, nighttime images seen through Micah’s bedroom camera. “Paranormal Activity” owns a raw, primal potency, proving again that, to the mind, suggestion has as much power as a sledgehammer to the skull.
— Glenn Whipp
Whipp gave “Paranormal Activity” three stars out of four.
“The Conjuring” (2013)
As sympathetic, methodical ghostbusters Lorraine and Ed Warren, Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson make the old-fashioned haunted-house horror film “The Conjuring” something more than your average fright fest.
“The Conjuring,” which boasts incredulously of being their most fearsome, previously unknown case, is built very in the ’70s-style mold of “Amityville” and, if one is kind, “The Exorcist.” The film opens with a majestic, foreboding title card that announces its aspirations to such a lineage.
But as effectively crafted as “The Conjuring” is, it’s lacking the raw, haunting power of the models it falls shy of. “The Exorcist” is a high standard, though; “The Conjuring” is an unusually sturdy piece of haunted-house genre filmmaking.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “The Conjuring” two and half stars out of four.
“Get Out” (2017)
Fifty years after Sidney Poitier upended the latent racial prejudices of his white date’s liberal family in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” writer-director Jordan Peele has crafted a similar confrontation with altogether more combustible results in “Get Out.”
In Peele’s directorial debut, the former “Key and Peele” star has — as he often did on that satirical sketch series — turned inside out even supposedly progressive assumptions about race. But Peele has largely left comedy behind in a more chilling portrait of the racism that lurks beneath smiling white faces and defensive, paper-thin protestations like, “But I voted for Obama!” and “Isn’t Tiger Woods amazing?”
It’s long been a lamentable joke that in horror films — never the most inclusive of genres — the Black dude is always the first to go. In this way, “Get Out” is radical and refreshing in its perspective.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “Get Out” three stars out of four.
“Hereditary” (2018)
In Ari Aster’s intensely nightmarish feature-film debut “Hereditary,” when Annie (Toni Collette), an artist and mother of two teenagers, sneaks out to a grief-support group following the death of her mother, she lies to her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) that she’s “going to the movies.”
A night out with “Hereditary” is many things, but you won’t confuse it for an evening of healing and therapy. It’s more like the opposite.
Aster’s film, relentlessly unsettling and pitilessly gripping, has carried with it an ominous air of danger and dread: a movie so horrifying and good that you have to see it, even if you shouldn’t want to, even if you might never sleep peacefully again.
The hype is mostly justified.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “Hereditary” three stars out of four.
Read the full review here. ___
Researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed from New York.
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