On the Verge: Big Data takes 'Dangerous' risk

When paranoia pays off: For someone who creates his music electronically and promotes his music via social media, Alan Wilkis, best known as Big Data, is pretty uncomfortable with the World Wide Web. "Voyeurism on the Internet is unsettling," says Wilkis, 32. "My music is about how social media has changed every part of our existence." His hit single Dangerous (featuring Joywave), a dance song about how we're tracked and watched on the Internet, peaked at No. 1 on USA TODAY's alternative airplay charts, and put him squarely on the mainstream radar. He can expect to be Googled a lot more in the near future.

What's the big idea? Himself, really. Although Wilkis collaborates with different people, Big Data is a solo act. He not only writes his own music, he also creates music videos to go with it. He pays for it with his earnings as a music supervisor in films and a creative director for publishing licensing. He works with different vocalists on each song but "at the end of the day, I am Big Data."

Check out the big brain on Alan: Wilkis, who was an English major at Harvard, witnessed the birth of Facebook, a big inspiration for his music. "I got the idea for the name at a friend's wedding, Jeff Hammerbacher, who is a data scientist and worked at Facebook in its early days and then went on to co-found a big data company called Cloudera," he says. "At the time, 'big data' wasn't as ubiquitous a term as it is now. But as soon as I decided on the name, the lyrics really started writing themselves. My music was dark and electronic, but I hadn't started writing about the NSA watching yet."

Making his point: To demonstrate that Big Data's message isn't just a conspiracy theory, Wilkis teamed with artist Rajeev Basu to create an interactive music video, Facehawk. Set to Dangerous, Facehawk, which launched in August 2013, hijacks your Facebook page, taking all those cute photos of your kids, your pithy posts and catty comments and blowing them across the screen like a pile of leaves. Then it reassembles them in the shape of a hawk. "It's a reminder about how much of your information is just out there. It's creepy," he says.

Back to a happy place: Within 24 hours of premiering Dangerous on the Internet, it became No. 1 on HypeMachine, a site that tracks music bloggers' content, so it seems that Wilkis has this whole Internet thing down pat. Does that mean social media isn't that bad after all? "Social media is just how things are. I hope that Dangerous can make social media a positive thing," he says. His full album, 2.0, will be out this fall, and he'll hit the road with Fitz & the Tantrums on Nov. 3.