The Hollerado Video
Yesterday it was at 50,000, today it’s at 175,000. Virality in action.
Although high budget videos like GaGa’s can still triumph, there’s a whole other paradigm of making videos based on sheer creativity, that not only wow the audience but have people thinking…how’d they come up with that?
Kind of like music, if you think about it. Not so different from the Ramones or Elvis Costello or even Backstreet Boys. When each emerged, they sounded nothing like what came before, and each was good. And the Ramones album was incredibly cheap to make. Backstreet Boys more expensive. They were the GaGa of their day.
So don’t rail against the big corporations. Don’t complain that no one’s giving you any money. Stop trying to be like everybody else and get creative.
I don’t anticipate we’ll be riveted to every digital video creation a few years hence, but right now we’re in an era equivalent to the early days of MTV, when people tuned in just to feel/see the excitement.
This video was e-mailed to me multiple times yesterday and today, by viewers with no investment in the band. They not only wanted to turn me on to something, they wanted to do it first, they wanted to own it, they wanted to build an act outside the system.
The music?
I’m not saying I want to hear it again…
Then again, OK Go built a whole career on videos matched to songs few people wanted to hear again.
OK Go is the progenitor. Now acts are riding their coattails. Expect the majors and the wannabes to ruin the paradigm, but isn’t it funny how something new and different and creative rings our bells?
The video paradigm may fail, but we’re always interested in new and different quality songs. Don’t try to be like everybody else, try to be something different, yourself. Although know that most people who are something new were one time something old. In other words, it’s hard to be different if you didn’t play all those covers, if you didn’t practice everybody else’s material. The Abstract Impressionists could draw, but they weren’t limited by this. They jumped off and created a new paradigm. Do we expect Diane Warren to create the new paradigm? Of course not, that’s not her game!
Yes, it’s all about songs. But they don’t have to sound exactly like what came before or what’s on the radio. And what lasts longest is that which is different. Yes was on tour this summer, still doing business decades on WITH A DIFFERENT LEAD SINGER!
Then again, Journey tours quite well with a different lead singer too. But that band had conventionally great songs and a great singer. The paradigm waiting to be resurrected is a band with catchy songs with bridges and great vocals. Once upon a time, they called it the Beatles. Backstreet Boys was close, but the lyrics were vapid and the band didn’t write the material. How could they? They were too young and hadn’t lived life! But the Beatles had those years in Hamburg… In other words, greatness comes after paying your dues. Just like a symphony violinist practiced for years, the great rock and rollers picked out notes and riffs long before you ever heard of them. The instahits are usually frauds, creatures of the string-pullers. And in today’s era, we hate the machine. Or don’t believe in it. Which is why you can have a hit on Top Forty radio and no one wants to see you live or even listen to your next single. They know it’s not YOU!
