Music Video Saturday

Some people have their random Fridays where they post 10 random songs to their blog or what have you, I instead shall have utterly non-random posts about music videos (and they shall not necessarily occur on Saturdays).

I’ll begin with Jarvis. That wasn’t the plan at all, but the video to don’t let him waste your time is simply hilarious. In terms of songs I would have preferred to give you running the world but the video is nowhere as funny, though I really like the lyrics (which is why I really gave you the links to both videos). The first time I’ve heard the song was when he played at fm4 = 12. What can I say, I still think fm4 is the best radio-station in the entire world (hey someone’s got to be number one).

Next, I’ll give you Mika with Grace Kelly. It’s a classic pop song. It’s so good millions of people will hate it by the time radio takes it off their A-playlist. One reason why I chose this song is this little interview nugget; this is what Mika said about the song: “It was a fuck-off song to the music company that I was working with at the time, it is where the line ’shall I bend over, shall I look older, just to be put on your shelf’ comes from. I was so angry. That company had every resource except a soul.” This reminded me of other artists who didn’t seem to make it until they decided to no longer create a product that should sell and instead focused on creating art that they cared about, in a sense telling the industry to fuck off. The most notorious example being Chuck Palahniuk who got rejected several times for earlier works of fiction as they were found to be too disturbing, even though he had held himself back. So eventually he decided to really give them a disturbing story, Fight Club, full well expecting it to be rejected. In a sense it was meant as his last fuck-off to the industry (though in a sense I’m just paraphrasing from an interview I can’t find anymore).

But I’m not going to give you the old do what you love and the money will follow speech. The one thing I believe played a more important role in these artists becoming successful as they created what they wanted to was specificity. When you create art as a product you’re inclined to make love to the entire world, simultaneously trying to please everybody while not offending anybody and Kurt Vonnegut already pointed out that is unlikely to work.

Anyway, I’d better get back to what this post was supposedly about and so I give you Pop Levi with Sugar Assault Me Now. This song rocks and it is no surprise it made it to 4th place in this week’s fm4 editorial charts.

I’ll end this post by giving you a link to Rote Raupe where you can find music videos by German and Austrian bands. I like their reason for uploading these videos; they point out that since MTV & co. prefer to broadcast ring-tone commercials and the like there should be another platform where people get to actually see music videos. They shall be thanked many times over.