YouTube videos bring two seniors campus fame

Seniors Brice Fox and Daniel Weber gave IU an anthem when their first YouTube hit debuted in the fall.

But Fox and Weber want to be more than frat brothers that can sing or white boys that can’t dance.

And they definitely want to be more than a pair of mustaches and an anthem.

Their newest song, “This is Indiana,” turned into a campus sensation, playing at bars, fraternity parties and even during IU Athletics events. It became an unofficial anthem, with the You-Tube video receiving more than 300,000 hits in its first month.

The duo first became popular during the fall 2010 release of “The IU Anthem,” a song all about the things that make Indiana the campus it is, such as breakfast buddies at Gresham Food Court and Hoosier Daddys.

They’ve made a career out of what IU is all about. And IU is where it all started. During the fall of 2009, Fox and Weber met behind the scenes of sorority Zeta Tau Alpha’s philanthropy, Big Man On Campus.

The two seniors are a long way from the tunes that started both their music careers in high school. Fox, who started tapping rhythms to make fun of his friends, now produces all the duo’s beats.

“Then, after I got over my vocal insecurities, I finally got serious about it,” Fox said. Weber started belting out notes in music class his senior year in high school.
“I have to admit it,” Weber laughed, “I was the dorky choir kid.”

Once at IU, they became inspired by the people around them. Neither enrolled in the Jacobs School of Music, but each took a music course — an introduction to voice class for Fox and The Music of the Beatles for Weber.

“It really helped tune my rap skills,” Fox said about his voice class with a joking tone. “But seriously, I’ve never had any vocal training.”

“I think rap skills are secondary,” Weber added. “We’re both primarily musicians and singers, and the rapping is kind of a fun thing to do.”

Since Big Man On Campus, they’ve rapped it out and laid down the beats. Fox, a Bloomington native, and Weber, a Chicago-suburb native, spent two months writing, recording and producing their second YouTube hit, “This Is Indiana” — complete with a Cook Hall party and former IU coach Bob Knight flashbacks. But the traditions of Indiana don’t end there.

“Rumor has it that the next big video that we’re working on is geared toward the Little 500,” Fox said.