Last October, Justin Bieber did a simple and ingenious thing: He chose not to appear in his own video. In his place was Parris Goebel, and her dance crew, ReQuest, who gave Bieber's "Sorry" an uncomplicated treatment—kinetic but not overpowering, goofy but precise, full of vivid outfits and playful sing-alongs. The result was a juggernaut: The clip has been viewed more than 1.7 billion times on YouTube, making it the fourth most-viewed video of all time on the platform.
"We had to do it so quickly," Goebel says while visiting her PR company's office in Manhattan. "I just panicked. I was like, 'We have no time, no budget,' so we choreographed it in a couple hours. Sent it off, whatever. Then it just blew up."
Though the massive success of the video came as a surprise, Goebel is not letting this momentum go to waste: In October, roughly a year after crafting the "Sorry" visual, she will release her debut EP. With Run & Tell Your Friends, she aims to join the small group of artists who made the jump from dance to music. The club includes the funk act Shalamar and the singer Jermaine Stewart, who started as dancers on the show Soul Train in the '70s, and Paula Abdul, who choreographed for the Jacksons. One of the most recent artists to cross the divide is FKA twigs, who danced in a number of music videos for Jessie J and Kylie Minogue before breaking out as a critically lauded solo act.
"I don't have the urge to become a pop star," Goebel says. "I just want to have a voice. I want people to listen and pay attention. I think that's the only way to change things. I am really passionate about the entertainment business. Growing up, it changed my life."
Goebel is from New Zealand, the youngest of four kids and the only performer in her family. "In New Zealand, there's not really an industry," she explains. "No pathway to become an entertainer of any type. There's no dance scene, or there wasn't when I was growing up."
What others might see as a handicap, she turned into a strength, experimenting and absorbing with the freedom of an outsider. She's entirely self-taught, learning from a diet of MTV clips. "Growing up not in America or the industry, you don't really know what's right or wrong," she says. "You're not surrounded by what people think is cool. To you, anything is cool. In New Zealand, we're so far away. That's helped me to be me."
Goebel started showcasing her dancing at halftime shows for the basketball team her father coached. "I would take it so seriously," she remembers. "Choreograph the routines, mix the music: That was the spark of it all." She formed the ReQuest crew when her dad suggested she create her own group, and at age 15, she dropped out of school.
"When you're a 15-year-old and you don't go to school, you have all the free time in the world," she recalls. "It's an opportunity to either be a bum or get up and do something. It made me really determined: I've now gotten rid of all my gateways to education. All I can do is do something with my talent." After ReQuest started having success in competitions, the crew fund-raised to head to the World Hip-Hop Dance Championship in Las Vegas, which Goebel describes as "the Olympics of hip-hop." ReQuest won in 2009 and 2010.
Goebel also started posting dance clips online. "YouTube kind of saved my life," she says. "Without YouTube, people on the other side of the world wouldn't be able to see my work. I was so passionate about putting together these dance-concept films. I feel like I was one of the first people to start doing that. Now it's a big craze."
She has roughly 100,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel these days, and that was where someone from Jennifer Lopez's team stumbled across her moves. Lopez, of course, is another member of the dancer-turned-singer club: She got her start as a Fly Girl on the show In Living Color before moving into acting and releasing her debut album in 1999. Lopez's management called Goebel and brought her on to choreograph the singer's 2012 tour. Goebel has worked with Lopez twice more since then and choreographed for Nicki Minaj and Janet Jackson. At the most recent VMAs, Goebel helped mold Rihanna's dance routine for "Bitch Better Have My Money."
But success and exposure brought a new set of anxieties. "I was in a place with my dance crew where I was comfortable," Goebel says. "I wasn't being creatively challenged. I was on holiday listening to music, and I was like, 'Why don't I make music?' It was a whole 'nother world for me. I felt dumb, and I love that feeling. You know how you feel like a fish out of water? I enjoy that."
Her experimentation spawned a skeletal and energetic EP that mashes together multiple forms of club-centric music. It's full of programmed handclaps and buzz-saw synths; in "Nasty," which overflows with ideas, Goebel quotes Drake, slides into patois, and sluices around a gunshot beat. Naturally, she's put together dance videos for all the tracks: Swaggering group affairs, these clips are brusque and tightly wound, more aggressive than the visual for "Sorry."
Goebel sees her music as a way to kick open the door for others to follow her path. "I feel obligated to change [the industry], so that I can change other kids' lives as well," she says. "So they don't have a dream and then fall into an industry that's kind of crap."
"I don't think it's that hard," she continues. "If you set an example, people follow." After what she's accomplished so far, how much harder can choreographing a transformation in the entertainment business be?
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