Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britian

The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain plays the theme from "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly".

Land of 1,000 Dances and WWE

At the request of Keith...

Rock-afire Explosion

The Rock-afire Explosion was the robot band that performed at Showbiz Pizza during the 1980s. I remember them from birthday parties held at Showbiz Pizza when I was growing up in New York. Apparently the company that made them still programs them and they started releasing videos to Youtube...here's a Nine Inch Nails performance. It's bizarre...

Michel Gondry

I may have posted early about Michel Gondry, but it's probably been about a year, so I think I'll post about him again. He is a director that has done some very interesting things with the work he picks up. Like a few other directors that got their start around the end of the 1990s and beginning of the 2000s, he achieved recognition with music videos before he went on to make movies (like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).

Although he has many very interesting pieces, here is one that I always come back to and marvel over. It's a song by Kylie Minogue called Come Into My World. Mr. Gondry noticed that the chorus repeats at roughly 1.11, 2.11, and 3.11 and made the video repeat around that mark in time. I always wonder at how he arranged for all the extras and video editing to capture each revolution of the camera and the corresponding chaos around that intersection. This copy of the video isn't the best quality, but I have seen the full version on dvd and it is seamless. It's really quite impressive.



Here's another video he did for a Daft Punk song. The introduction of new music elements as groups of dancers is so simplistic, yet creatively managed.



Here's a vid of him explaining his thought behind the video:


And just to keep it all updated, this is a trailer for his new movie, Tokyo. I guess he films a portion of the film, but if it's like all his other work, I'm sure it's creatively bizarre to warrant securing a viewing.

Girl Talk

If you haven't heard, a number of music critics have listed Girl Talk's Feed the Animals as one of the top 10 albums of 2008. Girl Talk is some kind of computer engineer that has created an album that is composed of samples from 167 different bands and musicians from the past 45 years. I don't believe he plays an original note on the entire album.

It's pretty interesting to see where sampling in popular music is going. Four or five years ago Danger Mouse released the Grey Album, which mashed up music from the Beatles' White Album with Jay Z's Black Album and was very well received. Feed the Animals feels more like flipping through radio stations than it feels like listening to a coherent piece of music. Some of it is whimsical, some of it is annoying, some of it is pretty good. I suggest listening yourself and coming to your own conclusions.

It is free to download the album (click here), but he asks for a donation. If you do download it and listen to it, pull up the Wikipedia page here and follow along.

And perhaps even more audacious, somebody on YouTube has "created" (is that the right word? or just edited? are they the same now?) a video that is a compilation of the videos made for the samples used in Feed The Animals. Below is one of them.



Here's the sample breakdown, courtesy Wikipedia:
10. "In Step" - 3:23

* 0:00 Roy Orbison - "You Got It"
* 0:00 Drama - "Left Right Left"
* 0:00 Jermaine Stewart - "We Don't Have to Take Our Clothes Off"
* 0:30 Arts & Crafts - "What a Feeling" (which samples "Jam on the Groove" by Ralph MacDonald)
* 0:47 Salt-n-Pepa - "Push It"
* 0:57 Deee-Lite - "Groove Is in the Heart" (which samples "Get Up" by Vernon Burch)
* 1:02 Nirvana - "Lithium"
* 1:15 Thurston Moore - "See-Through Play/Mate"
* 1:38 The Gap Band - "You Dropped a Bomb on Me"
* 1:43 Fergie featuring Ludacris - "Glamorous"
* 1:44 Michael Jackson - "P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)"
* 1:44 The Spinners - "Could It Be I'm Falling in Love"
* 1:45 Earth, Wind & Fire - "September"
* 1:53 INXS - "Need You Tonight"
* 2:00 Kraftwerk - "Tour de France"
* 2:51 Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine - "1-2-3"
* 2:53 Diddy featuring Keyshia Cole - "Last Night"
* 2:53 The Beach Boys - "God Only Knows"
* 3:16 Snoop Dogg - "Sexual Eruption"
* 3:21 Bizarre Inc. - "I'm Gonna Get You"

Edit - Looking at this post, I'm struck by how oddly music, videos, and information have collided with each other.

Anthropological YouTube

Kunga!

Here's a video I should have uploaded a long time ago, but I forgot it was on an external drive backup that sat in a closet for storage.   Finally uploaded to youtube three years later!  Got more videos on the way, too.

Rick Astley

20 years ago on March 12, Rick Astley's song 'Never Gonna Give You Up' hit the number 1 spot on the Billboard Top 100. Oh, 1988, it seems like just yesterday...

Bleubird

duct tape rub(bear)room- video by shortfacedbear!