Sci-fi Music Videos Week, Day 3, The Darkness - I Believe in a Thing Called Love
This video is campy 70s scifi goodness. A David Bowie-like singer circa-Ziggy Stardust sings in falsetto while battling a tentacle monster with his laser guitar. What more could you want?
This song is The Darkness's one hit. Its fun, sounds like Queen, and gets stuck in your head.
Sci-fi Music Videos Week, Day 2, Sigur Rós - Untitled #1 (Vaka)
Vaka truly illustrates the potential of the music video as an art form itself.
Sigur Ros is a prolific Icelandic band that you have probably heard in a movie, if you have heard an album. They have a very distinct sound, ethereal and atmospheric with very high-pitched vocals. Jónsi Birgisson sings both in Icelandic and Hopelandic, a nonsense language made up of syllable from the Icelandic language.
They started on Iceland's most well-known label, Smekkleysa (Bad Taste). It's a label started by the Sugarcubes, Iceland's indie gods from the 80s who helped shoot the lead singer, Bjork, to international fame. Iceland is a tiny island nation with a population smaller than Minneapolis, but they produce a lot of good music.
The video shares the sullen beauty that is exemplified in the song. School children bundle up to go outside and play in the flurries of ash of nuclear winter. Wearing WW2 style gas masks, they throw ashballs and make ashmen. The video ends a young boys mask falls off and he slip away.
The ending is very peculiar for a music video. The song ends nearly a minute before the end of the video, and the rest is done in silence, as if giving priority to the video and not the song. However, I don't believe this is the case. They are giving priority to the experience. The music and the visuals are interwoven to create a new work that conveys a new message and elicits a different emotional response. The absence of sound in the last minute is no longer silence, but a part of the song and completes the final product, the music video.
Believe it or not, but this group started as a black metal band called Skull. They were part of the Swedish metal scene and they reinvented themselves in early 2000. In order to set themselves apart from their roots and the rest of the Swedish grindcore bands, they chose the name Teddybears.
Cobrastyle has been around since 2004 and you have probably heard it somewhere. Its been in television shows, movies, advertisements, videogames, corporate shopping background music, and sports games in between clips of 2 Unlimited's Get Ready for This and Techtronic's Pump Up the Jam. It is one of the most recognized songs that you don't know who sings and you don't know the title.
Other than being inserted as the background of every form of mass entertainment, there is another reason that you recognize this song. Cobrastyle is the result of mixing several songs from 80s artists like Sugar Hill Gang and Fine Young Cannibals. Kid Rock refenences some of the same songs in his song Bawitaba. So even if its possible that you haven't heard this song, you have heard the songs that make up this song.
The video is a great commentary and on the excesses of rock and roll of the 80s. Its a documentary style Spinal Tap-esque video with giant teddy bear heads. Its funny with great references to famous rock and roll scandals. I also love that they are playing an Atari game that is 8-bit. (Atari is only 4-bit for those of you not nerdy enough to know.)
I now this post is sounding negative, but I am not anti-Cobrastyle. There is a reason that this song is so ubiquitous, its catchy and fun. Its a mix of styles and time periods. While there is a lot of 80s elements in this song and video, it doesn't sound or look like the 80s at all. Its unique in a familiar way.
Seeed is a multi-instrumental reggae group from Berlin, Germany. They may have a reggae flare, but they are upbeat, dancey music.
The music is fun, but the video is the highlight. Claymation animals at a dance club getting wasted and hooking up. What is better than an animated ape getting wasted? Animated badger boobs, thats what.
The Dead Weather is a super group made up of the best people in two good bands, White Stripes (Jack White) and The Kills (Alison Mossheart) and supporting members The Raconteurs and the Queens of the Stone Age. They don't really sound like any of those bands, but if you mixed them altogether it would pretty much sound like The Dead Weather. They play dark, brash, garage rock.
The video is gritty and visceral. It is an interpretation of a Clint Eastwood styled Western shoot out with a dark and sultry, modern day veneer. Automatic rifles and leather jackets instead of pistols and ponchos. One of the coolest parts of the video is a reminiscent of a shoot out from Sam Raimi's "The Quick and the Dead". We see the light shining through the bullet holes peppered across the duelers backs. Sexy.
St Vincent is Annie Clark, a veteran of two multi-member multi-instrumental bands: the creepy, religious cult-looking band Polyphonic Spree and also the band of 2005, Sufjan Stevens. Her first solo album earned here some indie acclaim. This song is from the second, more eclectic album called Actor.
The video is half comedy act half music video. It is silly to the point of almost being annoying but it has some endearing aspects. The video features the relatively new comedy team thunderant, which is comprised of Fred Armisen of Saturday Night Live and Carrie Brownstein of the now defunct all-girl rip roaring rock band Sleater-Kinney. While Brownstein is an amazing guitarist and songwriter, I can't say much for the comedy team.
However, the music video has its shining moments. The video highlights some of the things a musician has to endure when playing small venues. Other than the terrible job of promotion some organizers do, Armisen and Brownstein act out some of the more annoying things people in small crowds do. Things like closely staring at the guitarists fingers, talking loudly over the songs, walking around the performer, lounging on amps behind the musicians. Some of these things aren't so bad when you are in a crowded club, but are really accentuated in a small venue.
Perhaps the only people that will get the humor in this video are musicians an I guess people that like blunt, repetitive SNL comedy. Either way, the song is good.
I had to close out the Boy Band series with a music video from the downfall of the Boy Band.
I thought about posting a video from O-Town. They were a band created on the reality television show Making the Band by the Boy Band godfather himself, Lou Pearlman. They are the ultimate, demographically tested, cookie cutter Boy Band. The problem isn't that their stuff is terrible, it is just painfully boring and uninteresting.
LFO is much more interesting. They make no pretensions about being good. The song is a completely failure. The video is a failure. The album is a failure. The band is a failure. The whole LFO concept is a failure. Even the band's name, Lyte Funky Ones, is a failure.
This song is Boy Band in its glorious down fall. The lyrics are terrible. They make no sense at all. They are just pop culture references intertwined with a girl and the summer. Also, this video is a commercial for Abercrombie and Fitch, which at that time was the symbol of vapid, douchieness. So enjoy the pinnacle of suck.
*NSYNC is perhaps one of the greatest stories in Boy Band history, if not one of the greatest stories in pop music. I know what you are thinking, but hear me out. To understand *NSYNC, to understand Boy Bands, you have to know about Lou Pearlman.
There are two reasons why there was a Boy Band craze of the late 90s. Two reasons why we as a society had to endure the nearly half a decade of sappy, overproduced music from the likes of Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, LFO, O-Town, and non-Pearlman spin-offs like 98 Degrees.
The Boy Band craze happened because of Ponzi schemes and pedophilia. Boy Bands were created to hide Lou Pearlman's 300 million dollar Ponzi scheme and to satisfy Lou Pearlman's desire for young boys.
Lou Pearlman is the father of Boy Bands. The term Boy Band was coined to describe the band model that Lou Pearlman invented and perfected.
Meet Lou Pearlman.
This is the face of the Boy Band. What a cutie.
Lou Pearlman is just as sleezy and creepy as he looks. He is currently serving a 25 year sentence in prison for heading one of the longest-running Ponzi schemes in history. (It was the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, but Bernie Madoff out did Pearlman 200 times over). Pearlman has decades of scams that include insurance fraud, consumer fraud, investment fraud, bankruptcy fraud, and stock market scams. Oh and Boy Bands. Did I mention Boy Bands?
Aside from fraud, Lou Pearlman is also pedophile. Vanity Fair ran story in 2007 about the sexual deviance ofthe man all the boys called Big Poppa. Here is a bit from the article:
Some, especially the teenagers, shrugged and giggled when he showed them pornographic movies or jumped naked onto their beds in the morning to wrestle and play. Others, it appears, didn't get off so easily. These were the young singers seen emerging from his bedroom late at night, buttoning their pants, sheepish looks on their faces. Some deny anything improper ever happened. But the parents of at least one, a member of the Backstreet Boys, complained. And for any number of young men who sought to join the world's greatest boy bands, Big Poppa's attentions were an open secret, the price some paid for fame.
"Some guys joked about it; I remember [one singer] asking me, 'Have you let Lou blow you yet?'" says Steve Mooney, an aspiring singer who served as Pearlman's assistant and lived in his home for two years. "I would absolutely say the guy was a sexual predator. All the talent knew what Lou's game was. If they say no, they're lying to you."
To a number of his former band members, Pearlman seemed so enamored of his male singers that it called into question his motivations for entering the music business in the first place. "Honestly, I don't think Lou ever thought we would become stars," says Rich Cronin, lead singer of the Pearlman boy band Lyte Funky Ones (LFO). "I just think he wanted cute guys around him; this was all an excuse. And then lightning crazily struck and an empire was created. It was all dumb luck. I think his motives for getting into music were very different."
In this article, the mother of Aaron Carter and Nick Carter, member of the Backstreet Boys, said about Pearlman, "Certain things happened and it almost destroyed our family. I tried to warn everyone. I tried to warn all the mothers."
So what does all have to do with *NSYNC? Well, we are almost there.
In the late 90s, Big Poppa Pearlman decided that the New Kids on the Block were great way to make money. He decided that he wanted to recreate the success of NKOTB by building a similar band. Lou did a nation wide talent search and assembled a band of five teenage boys that would be called Backstreet Boys. They soon climbed the charts and made Lou tons of money.
What the members of the Backstreet Boys didn't know is that Pearlman was robbing them. This story isn't new. Band managers and producers have been ripping off the artists since the beginning of the music industry. New artists sign themselves into musical indentured slavery get screwed. They Suck Young Blood.
After receiving only $300,000 of the hundreds of millions being made, the band sued Pearlman and won.
So we get to *NSYNC. They were basically a carbon copy of the Backstreet Boys. Five young men with dreams of stardom were assembled by Lou Pearlman, being ripped off, and who knows what else. After their first album and with the success of the Backstreet Boys in the lawsuit, *NSYNC got smart. They sued Pearlman and tried to get out of their contract before the release of the second album, and they won.
This was no small feat. For years, artists have been getting screwed over by unscrupulous record companies and producers. Most of the time, these artists are unable to recover the any of the earnings made on their backs. The Backstreet Boys may have won, but they were on the downslope. Their popularity had already peaked. *NSYNC, on the other hand, were just about to reach the peak of their career. They won when it mattered the most.
Bye Bye Bye the first single off of the album No Strings Attached. It was the fastest selling album ever (until knocked out by the Beatles One compilation). The album cover was no normal Boy Band motif of young guys, looking hot and cool, it was making a statement. It features all of the members of *NSYNC on a stage but being controlled by a marionette. They are referencing the control that the commercial music industry has over musicians, and specifically the control that Lou Pearlman had over *NSYNC. The album title No Strings Attached is speaking about the freedom from contractual bondage.
Bye Bye Bye video was the embodiment of this struggle. The song was a sarcastic farewell to Big Poppa. The music video is the album cover played out. The band is being controlled by a puppet master. She cuts the strings and the members of the band try to escape, but escape is futile. They think they have slipped away but in the end they are still dangling from strings. They may have cut ties with Lou Pearlman and RCA, but they signed to Jive Records and new puppet master was holding the strings. Sure, there is the standard choreographed dancing and the song is treacle pop, but it also insightful and self-reflective.
Bye Bye Bye is the pinnacle of the Boy Band. It was all down hill after that. This is song is perhaps the most well-known, the most important, the most loved, and the most hated Boy Band song.
Ratatat will be releasing their fourth album LP4 in May and I am looking for to it. They play a mix of guitar and 8-nit sounding electronic/synth. They are one of biggest names in a burgeoning genre called Electronic rock. I say burgeoning, but there has been electronic rock since the 60s.
The genre has morph quite a bit throughout the years. From the early days when it was basically the rock with a moog to the growth of the synth in the 70s to the 80s. In the 90s it was more dark and brooding, ala Nine Inch Nails and Chemical Brothers.
Ratatat represents a new generation with Crystal Castles, HEALTH, and a bunch of 8-bit bands like Anamanaguchi. The focus is on using simpler, blockier electronic sounds reminiscent of MIDI music used on old gaming console (Nintendo, Sega, Atari). The music is primarily post-rock and usually lyric-less.
Ratatat does something cool with video in their live show. They project scenes from old movies and psychedelic images manipulated and spliced to go with the songs. I believe this music video is the same video they use when they play the song live. So this is really a little slice of their live show.
Its a throwback video to go with their throwback sounding song. Ratatat uses cheesy explosion scenes that move with the beat from the movie Predator with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Even cooler, it features Predator-vision!
I am a little obsessed with 8-bit chiptune music and Anamanaguchi is my favorite. They use a hacked Nintendo (NES) and a Gameboy as synths, but unlike most chiptune, they also they use guitar, bass and drums. Swoon.
