“Shake it”: did Outkast’s ‘Hey Ya!’ help revive the Polaroid camera?
Back in 2003, most millennials had never even heard of Polaroid. The company that invented instant film cameras had filed for bankruptcy two years earlier, as it ceded virtually the entire market for instant photos to digital. It seemed there was no way back. Until Atlanta hip-hop duo Outkast came along with their new single, that is.
Although ‘Hey Ya!’ was actually written as a riposte to the optimistic idealism of love songs, its upbeat rhythms, killer melody, and earworm of a chorus made it instantly loveable. It topped the charts in several countries and made the top ten in more than 20 before going on to become an all-time dance classic.
Alongside the song’s music, André 3000’s slick yet wonderfully simple lyrics are brimming with quotable lines. No lyric from ‘Hey Ya!’ has endured in popular consciousness more than “shake it like a polaroid picture,” which has actually entered several dictionaries as a descriptive phrase for both the term “shake it” and the word “polaroid”.
The iconic video for ‘Hey Ya!’ includes audience members taking pictures of 3000’s fictional band with Polaroid cameras and then shaking their instant-film pictures in the air. This vintage technology, which had seemed archaic and certain to die out before the song’s release, was suddenly exposed to a whole new generation.
A totally different picture?
“We certainly have enjoyed the publicity,” a Polaroid spokesman said at the time. “We’re very thankful for the different brand exposure the song has given us.” Suddenly, retro seemed relevant in the world of cameras, and the floundering company tried to hammer home their marketing opportunity by paying Outkast to bring Polaroid cameras on stage with them for every televised performance of the song.
Unfortunately for the Polaroid corporation, this exposure didn’t prevent them from further bankruptcy in 2008, after which they stopped producing instant film for their vintage camera models. Dutch businessmen Florian Kaps and André Bosman stepped in, founding the Impossible project and purchasing Polaroid’s manufacturing equipment to ensure the film could continue to be produced.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the Polaroid Corporation’s main competitor in the instant camera market since the 1980s, Japan-based Fujifilm, was about to experience a dramatic transformation of fortunes. From an all-time low of less than 100,000 sales between 2004 and 2006, Fujifilm’s Instax instant cameras would begin selling in the millions from 2011. By 2014, the company was selling a whopping 3.87million Instax cameras a year.
Polaroid BV, the phoenix company that came out of the Impossible project, has even partnered with Fujifilm over the past decade to brand some Instax models as Polaroid cameras. For many instant cameras, the two brands are interchangeable. The important thing is that they get their photo film instantly after taking the picture and get to shake it as it says in the song.
Ironically, Polaroid had to put out a disclaimer when Outkast released ‘Hey Ya!’, advising customers that they no longer needed to shake Polaroid film for it to work. In fact, shaking the film could even damage your photo!
A touch of nostalgia
The instant camera business continues to go from strength to strength, reaching a total value of $1.3billion by the start of this decade. On the other hand, sales figures for digital cameras – which were supposed to spell the end of the Polaroid picture – have completely collapsed since 2010. As smartphones with high-quality cameras have taken over the digital market, physical photo lovers are turning to retro Polaroids for instant, tangible, and affordable yet priceless pictures.
It’s very difficult to attribute even a small part of the revival of Polaroid pictures to the famous Outkast lyrics. After all, the upturn in Fujifilm’s Instax sales began nearly four years after the release of ‘Hey Ya!’.
Instead, we can equate the return of the instant camera, particularly its more vintage models, to the uptick in vinyl record sales. There is a nostalgia-driven rise in the demand for analogue physical media as an antidote to our often alienating, virtual and digitised world.
What’s not in question is the immeasurable impact of André 3000’s turn of phrase on popular culture. Wherever you are in the world, when someone tries out an instant camera for the first time, the chances are you’ll hear someone in the room suddenly break into song with the words, “Shake it like a Polaroid picture.”
