Works & Days
Sabia (right) in the recording studio. “History of Jazz Piano” was released April 22 on YouTube.
The producer By Zachary Jason Digital remix artist Joe Sabia ’06
photograph: Donna Alberico
Joe Sabia doesn’t have an office or a studio. He doesn’t even have a desk in his SoHo apartment. He has a laptop, and every morning he opens it to a list of ideas, some seven years old. “No idea deserves to die,” he says. Sabia creates videos—for clients such as Condé Nast, Google, the 2012 Obama campaign, and BBC America, and for fun. His productions have been seen on YouTube more than 58 million times. Ebullient and habitually attired in a white T-shirt and skinny jeans, Sabia calls himself a digital remix artist. In 2007, he crammed 77 hours of HBO’s series The Sopranos into a seven-minute short covering every plotline. Last year he recapped the 1950s—politics, culture, inventions— in a campy three-minute music video for Vanity Fair’s centennial. His style, Sabia says, expresses a “mix of A.D.D., insecurity that I’m boring people, and my urge to overwhelm.” In 2004, at the start of his junior year, the economics and political science major made the first full-length episode of The BC, a spoof of the Fox melodrama The OC. What had begun as a two-minute clip became a “six-hour-a-day obsession,” says Sabia. With cameos by Doug Flutie ’85, newsman Tim Russert, and well-known
Jesuits, the online series drew more than 500,000 viewers and national press. YouTube launched the same year. “I was set on law school,” he says, “but I’d built a skillset that the world made into a career.” After two years on HBO’s interactive media team and one year at MySpace in Los Angeles, Sabia switched to freelancing full-time in 2009. He films about once every two weeks, and spends most of his time on his bed or couch or in cafés editing, writing, and “concepting.” In 2011, Sabia convinced a composer and an audio engineer he had just met to help him bring off a years-old idea from his list, a music video called “The History of Lyrics that Aren’t Lyrics” (from “Do Wah Diddy” to “Mmm Bop”). YouTube then funded the trio to launch a series of comedic medleys. Filmed mostly in a wood-paneled recording studio in Times Square, and featuring recent conservatory graduates performing bits from as many as 40 songs in a single take, titles include “The History of Misheard Lyrics,” “Epic Key Changes,” and “Wooing Women in Public.” CDZA, short for Collective Cadenza, has so-far produced 36 videos. “To survive online today,” Sabia says, “you have to do things that have never been done.”