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This Michigan-bred musician did zero out of 29 celebrity impressions. I was punked.

screen grab from Rob Cantor on YouTube, Microsoft Paint by Dustin Dwyer

I should have known. 

Two weeks ago, I was making a rare visit to our Ann Arbor office (I live in Grand Rapids), and I stumbled across a video I thought would be great for our website. The video featured a singer named Rob Cantor as he performed – or at least claimed to perform – 29 celebrity impressions in one song. And they were good impressions, crazy good. 

I know of Rob Cantor because I am a fan of Tally Hall, a band he formed with some classmates at the University of Michigan about a decade ago. And, since there was a Michigan connection, I thought it made sense to share Cantor's new video here on michiganradio.org. 

"Hey Mark," I said, turning to our web editor Mark Brush. "Want some fluff?" 

"Sure," he said. 

At that time, Cantor's video had only a few hundred views on YouTube. Since then, the video shot up to more than 6 million views. Thousands of you saw it because of my post

My bad. 

This afternoon, Rob Cantor posted the truth about the video on twitter.

In retrospect, of course, it seems like I should have known the video was a fake. For one thing, I work in radio. I edit audio every day. And while I'm clearly not as talented as Cantor and his crew, I know – or at least should know – what's possible. 

As a Tally Hall fan, I also should have known what user robpollard pointed out in our own comment section last week: 

Credit screen grab

Well, robpollard (if that even IS your real name), you were right. And I totally missed it. 

Dustin Dwyer reports enterprise and long-form stories from Michigan Public’s West Michigan bureau. He was a fellow in the class of 2018 at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. He’s been with Michigan Public since 2004, when he started as an intern in the newsroom.