This is a music video collaboration put together by will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas. The concept is basically just putting music to Barack Obama’s famous ‘Yes We Can’ speech and having various celebrity guests do voice-over. It sounds like kind of a lame idea but the video/song actually came out pretty good.
Familiar faces you might spot in here include: Scarlett Johansson, Jesse Dylan, common, Tatyana Ali, John Legend, Herbie Hancock, Kate Walsh, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Adam Rodriguez, Kelly Hu, Amber Valetta, Eric Balfour, Aisha Tyler, Nicole Scherzinger and Nick Cannon.
This is a classic Wu-Tang Clan video from their 1997 ‘Wu-Tang Forever’ album. The Wu-Tang Clan is a New York based hip-hop collective featuring RZA (aka Bobby Digital), GZA, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Method Man, Raekwon, Gostface Killah, Inspectah Deck, Masta Killa and U-God. Since the release of their first album, ‘36 Chambers: Enter the Wu-Tang’, most of the members of the Wu-Tang clan have gone on to release successful solo albums. Their latest album, ‘8 Diagrams’ is also worth checking out.
Genghis Tron are a three piece band from Philadelphia that do an impressive job of combining two very different styles of music: extreme metal and electronica. It doesn’t sound good on paper, but after hearing this song, Board Up The House (from their album of the same name) I was sold.
The video just captures their elaborate live show. To compensate for the fact that their live performance is more or less just three dudes playing with computers, they play with a bunch of visual/light effects sequenced to their music. Pretty neat.
Pulley was something of a pop-punk supergroup with members of Ten Foot Pole and Strung Out. The band was started after singer Scott Radinsky was kicked out of Ten Foot Pole for not having enough time to commit to the band (in addition to being a singer, Radinsky was also a Major League Baseball relief pitcher.)
The song ‘Cashed In’ is from their 1996 debut, Esteem Driven Engine. The song outlines Radinsky’s reaction to the commercialization of punk music. Radinsky (along with most of the other members of Pulley) was a veteran pioneer of the pop-punk movement before it was commercially viable and the historical importance of their former bands is often overlooked because they didn’t strive to achieve mainstream success.
Midnight Juggernauts are a Melbourn, Australia-based indie rock/electronic band. After a series of EPs they put out their debut album ‘Dystopia’ on Siberian Records in 2007. It’s a great album start-to-finish, my favorite tracks were ‘Nine Lives’, ‘Ending of an Era’ and ‘Road to Recovery’ The band features Vincent Vendetta, Andy Juggernaut and Daniel Stricker; they often draw comparisons to David Bowie and Kraftwerk.
A friend sent me this video for MGMT’s song ‘Time To Pretend’ and both the video and the song have really been growing on me. MGMT, consisting of Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden just released an album on Columbia called ‘Oracular Spectacular.’
If you pay close attention to the video, you’ll notice a reference to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s psychedelic opus, The Holy Mountain, about halfway through. The video itself is pretty psychedelic itself, they seem to have deliberately used some crappy editing to finish the effect. I really like the backing bass/synth in this song, I just wish there were live drums instead of the drum track. The lyrics are obviously meant to be ironic, poking fun at the typical idea of rock star success.
The Trons are an all-robot band from New Zealand; this isn’t just some video expirement, they record original songs and play live gigs, in fact, recently they played the Hamilton’s Ignition Fringe Festival. They are comprised of various junk parts and you can even read an interview with the Trons here.
I dig their sound, it’s kind of a mellow surf rock, reminds me a little bit of early Van Morrison (in fact the beginning of this song really reminds me of the classic Van Morrison and Them tune, ‘Gloria’.) Hopefully the Trons will one day be taken on tour through the states cause I would definitely like to see them.
British Sea Power are an English indie rock band whose sound has been compared to that of Joy Division, the Cure and the Pixies. The mix a lot of very melodic, sappy sounds with a little bit of dissonance. This song is from their latest album entitled ‘Do You Like Rock Music?’ Ironic title as this song is not very rockin’, but it’s a catchy song and the puppet-heavy video is cool to watch.
Crystal Castles (Ethan Kath and Alice Glass) are an electronic indie band from Toronto that utilize a lot of retro sounds; this genre is often referred to as ‘chiptunes.’ Crimewave is from their 2008 self-titled album and is actually a remix of a song by HEALTH.
The group was actually formed as an accident, when Alice Glass recorded some vocals over an instrumental track by Ethan Kath as a test, which eventually ended up in the hands of record label executives who offered them a deal.
Recently there has been some controversy surrounding them, as apparently Ethan has been accused of lifting sounds from other electronic artists. It’s hard for me to really care about this though, because the entire genre of electronic music is founded on people stealing the sounds of others.
The Bronx is a pop-punk band from Southern California. Normally this kind of music isn’t my thing, but they have kind of an old rock and roll sound that made them grow on me. They have put out two self-titled albums and, oddly enough, will be putting out another one soon.
White Guilt is on their second self-titled album, this video reminds me of my high school Summers when my friends and I would go hang out at Venice beach, where this video was shot, and running away from bike cops.
