Exclusive Excerpt from Austins new book, Just How It Happened! Chapter 3: Shoot Us Down It’s amazing what can happen when you’re bored. My best friend AC and I spent a lot of time together. We’d go online and watch videos we found of rappers we liked and funny stuff people were posting on YouTube, and then, finally, right at the end of eighth grade, we decided to start a YouTube channel of our own. We called it Lavender Koolaide, because we thought it was funny. We filmed some footage of us fake ninja fighting, and then at the end, just going nuts and throwing stuff at each other. And that was it: our first video. Even I have to admit it was pretty random. I think it got five views. We decided to make a second version of our “ultimate fighting” video, and that one did a lot better: It got ten views. Progress. The first videos we made were all pretty much like that, and we did a lot of them. We made so many videos of us doing stupid stuff: videos where we danced to songs, which all ended with one of us pretending to punch the other one or throwing him down on the ground; videos of AC riding dirt bikes; videos of AC solving a Rubik’s Cube (in one minute and five seconds—he’s good). It’s not like I’m embarrassed by anything stupid I’ve done in front of a camera, but let’s just say I don’t think it’s the worst thing in the world that a lot of those first videos have been lost. In fact, we took some of them down ourselves because they were just so bad. No one was really watching anyhow back then, but it was fun. That summer was my trip to NYC, and after I got back, I kept thinking about the time I’d spent hanging out with Mac while we were there. And how cool it would be to write songs and record them with him someday. But someday was a far-off thing, and I had this feeling of wanting to do something now. That July, AC and I decided to get serious about what we were doing on YouTube. On July 10, 2010, we launched the channel that finally stuck, Shoot Us Down. We named it for this Lil Wayne song we liked, “Shoot Me Down.” Only we called it “Shoot US Down,” because there were two of us. Mostly we were still making random videos—they were almost like comedy skits of us play fighting, or just generally goofing around. And then one day, I decided to sing for our next video. Even though I was interested in maybe getting into the music business like Mac, it wasn’t like I thought I was a singer or anything. It just seemed like a cool thing to do. We were sitting at AC’s computer in his room, hanging out in front of his webcam, and I belted out Chris Brown’s “With You” while AC lip-synched the words along with me. AC was in charge of the video, which is why he kept leaving the frame—he was trying to record us, too. That video did a little better than our skits, and that got our attention. It’s not like we expected anything to ever come of the videos, but we decided to see how many subscribers we could get, just for fun. We talked online with some other people who were into YouTube, and they told us that the way to get more subscribers and build our channel was to post new videos constantly. So that’s what we did, and that’s how we ended up doing more music videos. They were easy and fun and seemed to get a good response from people online. Plus, I really liked singing. Then we got disciplined. We made a rule that we had to put up a new video every week. Also, now that we were actually trying to make our videos not be the worst and get people to see them, AC and I started thinking about how to get more views. One weekend when we were at my house, we had a brainstorm. We printed out a thousand small flyers promoting our Shoot Us Down channel on YouTube, and we went into the kitchen to find my mom and ask her if she’d take us to the mall. She was always good about driving me back to San Antonio, just like she’d promised when we first moved to La Vernia and I was nervous I’d miss my drum lessons and my friends. So of course she said yes. AC and I piled into the backseat of her car with this big stack of flyers. She drove us to North Star Mall in San Antonio, where we knew that kids liked to hang out. She dropped us off and said she’d pick us up in a few hours. We found an empty table at the food court and left a bunch of flyers, which were nothing fancy, just something to get our name out there: basic black and white with the words shoot us down in big, bold letters across the top, and then a photo of us, and the link to our YouTube channel. We left them in stores. We even left them on the ground—anywhere we thought people might pick them up. The whole time, we were laughing and joking around with each other about the flyers, because we had no idea if they were going to cause anything to happen or if we were just wasting our time. But at least we were trying to make something happen. On Monday after school, AC and I were in his room, as usual, when we went to our YouTube channel like we did every day. Only this time, the page looked a little different. There were actually a bunch of comments now: I saw your flyer at the mall. I like your videos. Found your flyer. Cool videos. We looked at each other and started laughing. Sweet, it worked, I said. After that, we went to the mall every weekend we could get my mom to drive us. We’d always wanted to hang out there because there was nothing to do in La Vernia, but now it felt different. Like we were really doing something. Then we noticed a change at the mall. We were there one Saturday afternoon when a group of girls started following a little ways behind us, and they were clearly talking about us. We didn’t recognize them from school, so we figured maybe they had us confused with some other guys they knew. We slowed down until they finally came up to where we were. One of the girls stepped in front of the others, and the rest of them laughed, like they were nervous. You’re those two guys on YouTube who do the hilarious videos, she said. At first I thought she was saying my singing was hilarious, as in bad, but then I figured she was giving us a compliment, so she must mean that she’d seen and liked the videos of us goofing around and having fun. AC and I looked at each other. We had just met someone who liked what we were doing! Thanks for watching, I said, trying to be cool. And then it hit us: We might have some fans. And they didn’t just think we were funny, either. I could tell from the comments posted on our music videos that they really liked my singing. Not long after that, I was thinking about how some musicians had nicknames for their fans, like how the really big Justin Bieber fans were called Beliebers and Katy Perry fans were called KatyCats. And then it came to me. If I ever had a lot of fans, they would be Mahomies—you know, like my name, Mahone, and my friends, “my homies.” I didn’t think I’d ever have real fans, but hey, at least there were those girls at the mall. Maybe they could be Mahomies. AC and I joked a lot about having fans. Because who actually thinks something like that is going to happen to them? Austin’s book, “Just How It Happened” comes out December 9th! Preorder it barnesandnoble/w/austin-mahone-austin-mahone/1120423010?ean=9780316286800 for 50% off!
Posted on: Sat, 06 Dec 2014 12:08:06 +0000
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