Wish on a Star
She comes out of that little pixilated square on YouTube, in videos she made in her darkened apartment by the light of a broken desk lamp, singing into a Kodak digital camera--not even a real video camera--propped up on her television. She doesn't have a band; she sings to karaoke tracks from her stereo. If pop culture in the wired world has a Ground Zero, this is it.
Her stage name is Ysabella Brave, except she has no stage beyond the punk proscenium that YouTube offers. She is 27, a fraud and security analyst for Yahoo. She lives in the Bay Area and goes to school at San Jose State. She has two cats and no boyfriend. She likes horror movies. She's a person of faith, and often refers to herself as a "young lady" in a way that suggests a finishing school she never went to.
And she's going to be a star.
I discovered her like hundreds of thousands of others have: late at night, meandering through the cheap laughs and pitiful self-made spectacles of user-posted Internet video. In a little more than a year hers has become one of the most-subscribed YouTube channels, with not quite 25,000 people waiting for her next zero-production video--"I just press the button on the camera and go," she tells me over the phone. She's posted at least 80 performances, most of them American standards and the best of them torch-singed cries from the soul, like her exquisite "Meu Fado Meu." Her rendition of Cole Porter's "Let's Misbehave" has been seen by 660,000 people in four months.
Her fame, such as it is, is just now beginning to pour over the broadband borders. "I was recognized yesterday," she tells me. "I had just stepped out of my house in my pajamas!"
In a way only the semi-anonymous and disinhibited Internet allows, the connection between Ysabella and her fans has been deeply intimate. "I've had people tell me they've played the videos at funerals and weddings," she says. "Three people said they played 'Landslide' at funerals, and it cheered people up."
Not everyone has been so positive. There are lots of people out there who think Ysabella--her real name is MaryAnne--is a fraud, like last year's Lonelygirl. She tries not to let it get to her. "If you're crazy, you get a YouTube account," she says. "If you're crazy and under 18, you get five YouTube accounts."
