When even the Associated Press is sending up trend-story signal flares about the current, crappy state of the world, there’s only one song to sorta-fit the collective mood: Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day,” which I have come clean about enjoying before and which has an attendant YouTube comment section that’s 45% semi-anonymous support group, 35% incoherent assholes, 20% comments along the lines of “I’m eating chips right now! Wow that was random lol,” and 100% desperately in need of The Elements Of Style being thrown its way:
When Weezer’s YouTube-“inspired” video for “Pork & Beans” initially came out, it had one unintentionally hilarious aspect: Its official version wasn’t embeddable, a policy that was in keeping with the semi-walled garden YouTube policies of the band’s major-label overlords, Universal Music Group, but seemed odd given that the whole point of the video was for it to become a meme and garner lulz from people who still think Tay Zonday is worth a chuckle. Shortly after this bit of cognitive dissonance was pointed out, Universal took the embed blocks off the clip, “Pork & Beans” hit it big on Digg, and all was well–until Weezer’s latest self-titled album got a sales beatdown from Disturbed on the album charts. (Aww.) Fast-forward to last night, when the Silicon Alley Insider noted that the clip’s no longer embeddable! What gives, man? I thought Weezer was for the geek-children!
The director of Weezer’s “remember that thing on YouTube? wasn’t that funny?” video for “Pork & Beans” speaks about his, ahem, “inspiration” for the clip: “When I heard ‘Pork and Beans,’ I loved its non-conformist message and felt like it was a natural anthem for the self-expression that’s been… More »
By now, you’ve probably heard that Prince put his own spin on Radiohead’s “Creep” at Coachella last month. However, any recorded evidence of the cover has been removed from the Internet faster than you can say Prince and the New Web Sheriff Generation. (One copy might remain below the cut.) But does Prince actually have the right to ask for removal of the clips?
At least on YouTube, where searches for his name came in second only to “sex” during last month. Compete.com has released the top 25 search terms on the video-sharing site for last month, and there is some good news for the music business buried within: music-related search terms made up 16 of the 25 top queries, with the number of hunts for Chris Brown and “No Air” even beating out the number of searches for “porn.” (OK, so people looking for that sort of thing are probably over at YouPorn, but never let it be said that searching for sex on the Internet isn’t something of an eternal quest.) Full list after the jump.
If episode 3–with its stalling narrative and repetitive dialogue–was the filler episode of the ongoing Jobromance series, episode 4 is its tour-de-force masterwork. Emogurl810 kicks things up a notch with yet another love subplot, and an almost entirely indecipherable (and therefore possibly brilliant?) match-making sequence in the park, complete with slapstick clichés and an amusing accidental double-entendre.
The JoBromance–the YouTubed Jonas Brothers homage that combines the art of the cobbled-together tribute video with the hair-raising creepiness of fan fiction–continues full steam ahead in episode three, as the gang investigates a mysterious dispute, and emogurl810 once again eschews the conventions of the narrative form.
If you’ve been on YouTube today, you may have noticed that the front page is curiously devoid of videos like “Todd’s Oscars rant” and “Monkey eats cheese.” Instead, Iceland’s second-most-famous weirdo musicians, Sigur Ròs, have taken over the site for the day, and anyone can watch their tour documentary Heima in its entirety (for free!). They’ve also selected ten fan-made videos submitted to the Minn Heima contest to be featured on the front page. Most of the videos use leftover footage from Heima, but at least one out of ten Sigur Ròs fans is going to be artsy enough to dabble in stop-motion animation. Let’s review a few of the more notable entires.
The above clip for Cansei de Ser Sexy’s “Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex” isn’t an official clip by the Brazilian glitch outfit–it was made by an Italian music blogger who decided to take some viral-video contest footage and set it to the song that was made middlingly famous by an iPod Touch ad a few months back. Somehow, the clip has become the most-watched video in the history of YouTube, racking up 89,750,739 views and overtaking the (really stupid) “Evolution Of Dance” for the top spot. Lest you think that this success is a testament to the power of Apple’s music placement, Andy Baio at waxy.org is here to let you know: The clip may have actually cheated its way to the top. No, really. This is what the world has come to, everyone.
In light of what they see as Clive Davis’s neglect toward the promotion of Kelly Clarkson’s My December, the Kelly Clarkson Express–a group that sounds like it should serve as a dual-purpose fan club for the first American Idol and trains–has put together a video for the song “How I Feel,” which its members think should be the next single. This is but one facet of the How I Feel Project, a campaign to get the song played on the radio, or maybe very quietly in the background of an MTV show. While strong fan support is essential when you’re a pop star being ignored by one of the world’s most powerful music bigwigs, that devotion can come with a price–and in this case, that price is a well-intentioned but sadly incompetent tribute video.
