I
slipped in a link to a huge listing of
80s music videos a few weeks ago, the vast majority of which were hosted by You Tube. I haven't talked about it (or much of anything else) since, but I've been really enjoying YouTube and their user-uploaded archive of music videos from the 80s, and 90s, and more.
At first I just used that 1500 videos list, but lots of the links were broken, or the one song they had per artist wasn't the one I wanted them to have, I began searching up others. And I found them. Oh did I find them.
Warning! Once you start searching for stuff on You Tube, your evening is just about over. I haven't found everything I've gone looking for, but I have found the vast majority, in one form or another, and the time sink-ability of that site is astonishing. Hours vanish in a blink, and for someone who's deadly committed to finishing the vast and ever-expanding editing job on my novel before September, lost hours are kind of a bad thing.
In addition to hosting a video of some sort for virtually every hit song over the past 30 years, You Tube has tons and tons of related goodies. Live versions of songs, random user-created versions of songs with the music over them, appearances by the stars on talk shows or E! biographies, and on and on. One of the most common and oddest things are anime compilations set to music videos. They call them AMVs, and the concept sounds bizarre, but there are literally tens of thousands of them on YouTube, and you can actually use them to judge the popularity of an artist with today's teen audience. If a band is big with the computer-savvy kids of today, (or at least has some
appropriately-angry music) they'll have dozens of songs set to scenes from
DragonBallZ, or
Full Metal Alchemist, or
Slayers or other anime series most of us have never heard of. If that's not a demographic their fans skew towards, then not so much. Unsurprisingly, there aren't a lot of AMVs to Rolling Stones or Led Zepplin songs.
These homemade movies are damn handy, too. None of the anime ones I've watched are any good, in terms of matching up nicely with the music or adding anything to the song. They generally have pretty good sound quality though; certainly better than any of the concert videos, and who knows, you might enjoy watching some of the anime scenes. Anime's good for splicing into four-minute chunks too, since the TV series especially have a tremendous amount of dead time, filled by still shots of backgrounds, characters talking without anything approaching exact lip synch, etc. It's economics; they've got about a $25,000 budget for a 22 minute cartoon while Disney cartoons (back when they still drew them) cost $50,000,000 for 90 minutes. (And
reused lots of stuff too.)
In short, anime TV shows can't afford the time or expense to fully animate every scene, so they've got to cut corners with style and only draw every frame of a few dramatic moments in each show. And those tend to be what people cut out and stick into the AMVs, which means you're essentially seeing the best action moments from an entire DVD of shows in one four-minute,
set-to-Disturbed, block. For better or for worse.
YouTube's also great to catch the greatest hits of popular artists you're only slightly familiar with. I only ever heard Limp Bizket and Kid
Country Rock and Eminem and various other early 00s popular artists on the radio or very occasionally on Mtv, but not so much either of those, since I haven't much bothered with the radio in at least 4 years, and I gave up on Mtv back in the mid 90s, when they decided to focus on the 14 y/o girl market and quit playing rock (which was several years before they quit playing music entirely).
Now though, thanks to their enduring popularity (sort of) and YouTube, I can see all of their videos with a few mouse clicks. Yesterday, after perusing and (for the most part) enjoying Kid Rock's and Limp Bizket's faux-rap hits (I'll get to Korn and Slipknot and ICP and all the others eventually.), I was all set to write an entry on the sociological implications of their short-lived popularity (as rap/metal acts, at least). Today I can't see the point, but it is remarkable how essentially identical all of their popular songs were.
Basically every one of their songs are pretty much the same, with a catchy chorus, several verses without rhyming words you don't need to spend any time thinking about, and two or three short bursts of infectiously-head-banging riffs, which often serve as the chorus(es). Also, and this is key to their popularity, they always have some slow, melodic sections, which always build slowly to an explosion of stomping/head banging energy. Limp Bizkit follows this exact strategy in
Break Stuff,
Take a Look Around,
My Generation,
Rollin',
Nookie, and quite a few other songs I can't be bothered to mention at this point.
The key, and their great advance over their thrashing death metal predecessors, are the slow parts, and especially the build up. Every Limp Bizkit song has a shouting/thrashing segment about 3/4 of the way through, and it's always announced and led into by a slow section, which Fred Durst always ends by chanting the same word or two over and over again, while the music cranks up to the inevitable explosion. Check the links if you doubt; it happens in every single song, as predictably as clock work. And the crowd loves it; as documented in all of their concert videos on YouTube the entire pit is leaping up and down in the thrash parts, looking like a hungry human tide.
You see that sort of pit savagery in death metal/thrash concerts, but since those forms of music tend to be unrelenting, the fans can't keep up with it. You've got to be truly psycho to stay up for an entire 4-6 minute thrash song, much less a whole concert of them. It becomes exhausting and limits their audience; hardly any women like that type of largely-humorless music, and even amongst their fans, few can headbang for that long. Limp Bizkit though (and other rap/metal bands, and all of the Nu Metal bands that were big 5 years ago and are gone now) have those thrash moments, but they keep them short and space them out.
I don't have any idea what hard rock bands are popular today, but it seems to me there will always be a need for this sort of music. Teenaged males, the white, over privileged ones especially, always have bottled up rage and frustration (justifiably or not), and always want/need music they can vent to/with. The lyrics and image hardly matter; guys (and some girls) just want to rock out at times, and whatever the new thing is that lets them do that will be popular. It's a trap for the bands though, since you can satisfy that need for a while, but once your fans get older and sick of the same sound, you're unlikely to resonate with 5 or 10 year younger fans, who've grown up listening to a different style of music. Which is why these bands always release 2 or 3 records that go multi-platinum, and then suddenly vanish, or completely change their sound (which, while bold, usually has the same result).
Oh wait, I said I didn't have the sociological analysis in me today, didn't I?
There are plenty of other genres and artists on YouTube as well, of course. I had some humor tonight while trying to remember songs to look up. Some advice, as suggested by Malaya. Make a list of the bands/songs you want to listen to the instant they come into your head. I'm constantly thinking of some old song/artist while watching another video, and by the time that song ends I've forgotten it. Worse are the songs you can't quite remember, and therefore can't look up.
I spent 15 minutes last night trying to remember who did that song with the really croaky vocals, and lyrics that went something like:
there was this kid who, blah blah blah
and there was this girl who, something something somethingI knew it was about tragedies and some guy's hair turning white, but I could not remember who did it, or enough of the exact lyrics to look them up via Google. I even sung some of it for Malaya, and she said it sounded familiar, but couldn't recall either. Finally, to my semi-dismay, I remembered an accurate stretch of the lyrics, and immediately got search hits for Crash Test Dummies and their much-loathed
MMM MMM MMM MMM song. A title I announced to Malaya, to an instantaneous reaction that went something like, "Oh my god I hate that song! No wonder I blocked it out of my memory!"
I had to listen to it, after all that, and yeah, it was pretty much what I remembered.
The video, which I'd never seen an instant of, did nothing to add to the seemingly-somber song though, with cheesy scenes of an olde timey school play and way too many pointless shots of the parents reacting in the audience.
The funn(ier)y part was that I remembered lyrics about some guy who was alone and sad and mopey and wanting to "crash here tonight" before they "drove around this town." Happily, that confusion was soon rectified when I found that song was
Hey Jealousy, by the Gin Blossoms, which doesn't really sound anything like MMM^4. Further Googling informed me that the songs both came out in 1993, when they were on the radio twice every hour, and thus forever joined in my vague memories of them.
You get weird stuff too, especially with one hit wonders. I've long enjoyed the Toadies song,
Possum Kingdom, but never got the CD since that was literally the only decent song they ever did. And it's more than decent; I'd put it in my top 10 faves from the 90s brand of limply-alternative rock. Yet when
I searched for it on YouTube, I found only random junk, a few live recordings of it with predictably-awful sound quality, and
this full length, good sounding, near-professional quality home made feature... with scenes from
Interview with a Vampire set to the song. Five minutes and two seconds of them.
As someone famous once said, "WTF?"
Actually, it sort of makes sense. The song's clever lyrics are about seduction by a vampire, and while scenes of Tom Cruise in lace and a horrible wig aren't exactly what I would have set to this song, that's what multiple Windows and the minimize feature is for.
Or
take these scenes from
Firefly, inexplicably and inexpertely set to an Audioslave song. Is there any explanation, other than some guy liked the song and had the series on DVD and was bored one night?
I'll save a discussion of amusing and horrifying 80s clips for another post, but I have to mention one now. I was looking at Marilyn Manson songs, saw his recent cover of Depeche Mode's
Personal Jesus, and remembered
not liking it very much when it debuted a couple of years ago. I watched again of course, and had about the same reaction. Good song, but his cover is way too similar to the original. Manson masterpieced
Sweet Dreams and
Tainted Love by creeping them up a great deal and distorting the original, relatively wholesome essence with his style of goth metal. Not so with
Personal Jesus, and thanks to the magic of YouTube, you can
easily watch them back to back and see for yourself.
Of the videos, I have to strongly recommend the Depeche Mode one, since as I said in my post about this two years ago, it's laugh out loud funny. Unintentionally, I assume, but it's got to be the campiest gay theater I've seen this side of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. The four ambiguously sexual Depeche Mode guys are in some sort of Old West/Mexican town with a whorehouse, and while the girls are pretty (though not at all Mexican) there's zero heterosexual eroticism about the video. The Depeche Mode guys are all in these black leather cowboy outfits, with leather chaps and fierce cowboy hats. They mince around town, leading horses (but not riding, of course) and wearing sunglasses, with leather vests open to display their hairless chests, they crack whips, they pout, they look yearningly, and so on. You've never seen a gayer cowboy on screen, and that includes
Brokeback Mountain and the one in the Village People.
They eventually end up in rooms with the whores, but the fact that we never see any interest in the women from the men, and no exposed skin, and not even any simulated kissing, sends a pretty clear message. I do not know if any of the guys in Depeche Mode are actually gay or not, (no one else seems to either, though it's
a popular online topic). I don't really care either (I disliked them because of their wimpy music back when they were popular, and have mellowed enough to enjoy their music while not caring enough to own any of it now.) but in any event, I consider their
Personal Jesus video a masterpiece of gay camp, and just watched it three straight (ba-dum!) times while stifling laughter. The panting-in-silhouette segment is probably my favorite, though the lead singer doing that limp wrested whip cracking while posing in his leather chaps, motorcycle cop glasses, and chest-baring leather vest is definitely a close second.
If not for this classic,
hysterically-misguided Billy Squier video (with the roll-on-the-floor dance moves, belly-shirts, and legendary ripped pink tank top straight from Richard Simmons' closeted closet), I'd say DM's PJ was the gayest, non-gay video ever.
Feel free to make YouTube suggestions in the comments; songs or artists, since it's fun to catch up on classic disasters, as well as all I've missed while avoiding the radio for the last decade.
Labels: music, you tube
