Latest news with #OKGo
Los Angeles Times
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
OK Go helped invent the viral video. 20 years later, virality has changed
On a spring afternoon in 2005, the members of OK Go dressed up in tacky suits, gathered in front of a video camera and awkwardly danced their way into history. The band's DIY single-shot clip for its song 'A Million Ways' — in which the brainy rock quartet moves through three and a half minutes of intricate choreography on the patio behind singer Damian Kulash's Los Angeles home — became one of music's first viral videos, racking up millions of downloads (remember those?) and helping to establish a new way for acts to connect with fans as the internet began to supplant MTV and Top 40 radio. OK Go doubled down on the approach in 2006 with its video for 'Here It Goes Again,' another bare-bones production that had the musicians dancing on eight synchronized treadmills, then went on to make increasingly elaborate clips featuring a Rube Goldberg machine, a zero-gravity plane flight and a pack of adorable dogs. 'As soon as the treadmill thing happened, it was like: Holy s—, we're pop culture now,' Kulash said the other day of 'Here It Goes Again,' which won a Grammy Award for best music video and has been viewed more than 67 million times on YouTube. Twenty years after 'A Million Ways,' the mechanics of cultural connection have transformed again thanks to social media and TikTok, where what you encounter as you scroll is guided by the invisible hand of data analysis. Said OK Go bassist Tim Nordwind with grinning understatement: 'The algorithm has become a bit more powerful.' 'Not a big fan of the algorithm as an arbiter of art,' Kulash added. 'It's sad to see optimization in a space that was once the Wild West.' Yet OK Go is still at it: Last month the group released its latest one-shot video for the song 'Love,' for which Kulash and his co-directors installed dozens of mirrors on powerful robotic arms inside an old Budapest train station to create a kind of kaleidoscopic obstacle course. The band's methods have grown more sophisticated since 'A Million Ways,' and these days it seeks out corporate sponsors to help bring Kulash's visions to life. But an adventuresome — and touchingly personal — spirit remains key to its work. 'What I love about the 'Love' video is the humans in the room,' Kulash said as he and Nordwind sat outside a Burbank rehearsal studio where OK Go was preparing for a tour scheduled to stop Friday and Saturday at L.A.'s Bellwether. (The group's other members are guitarist Andy Ross and drummer Dan Konopka.) 'The robots are only there,' the singer added, 'to move the mirrors so that we can experience that magical thing — so simple and beautiful — of two mirrors making infinity.' A wistful psych-pop jam inspired by Kulash's becoming a father to twins — his wife, author and filmmaker Kristin Gore, is a daughter of former Vice President Al Gore — 'Love' comes from OK Go's new album, 'And the Adjacent Possible,' its first LP since 2014. It's a characteristically eclectic set that also includes a strutting funk-rock tune featuring Ben Harper, a glammy rave-up co-written by Shudder to Think's Craig Wedren and a woozy existentialist's ballad about discovering there's no 'no deus ex machina working away in the wings.' (That last one's called 'This Is How It Ends.') 'We're old people who listen to sad ballads,' said Kulash, who'll turn 50 in October. 'That's what happens when you become an old person, right?' Wedren, who's known Kulash since the latter was a teenage Shudder to Think fan in their shared hometown of Washington, D.C., said that 'part of the beauty of OK Go is that they're so musically omnivorous — that all these things that wouldn't seem to go together always end up sounding like OK Go.' In Wedren's view, the band 'doesn't get enough credit for how exploratory they are as musicians — maybe because of the genius of the videos.' If that's the case, Kulash doesn't seem especially to mind. He knew nearly two decades ago that the viral success of the treadmill video — which the band recreated onstage at the 2006 MTV Video Music Awards between performances by Justin Timberlake and Beyoncé — threatened to make OK Go 'a one-hit wonder whose one hit was an exercise equipment stunt,' as the singer put it. 'Or it could be the opening to an opportunity to do more and weirder things.' Among the weird things the group ended up doing: the 2014 clip for 'I Won't Let You Down,' in which the members ride around a parking lot in Japan on personal mobility devices under the eye of a camera on a drone. 'I remember hearing that Radiohead didn't play 'Creep' for 10 or 15 years because they were too cool for that,' he said. 'Had we taken the path of being too cool for treadmills and homemade videos, I can look back and say —' 'We'd have had a much quieter career,' Nordwind chimed in. There's a way of looking at OK Go's emphasis on visuals that depicts the band as a harbinger of an era when 'musician' is just another word for 'content creator.' 'It's weird to think about a life in the vertical as opposed to the horizontal,' Nordwind said with a laugh, referring to the respective orientations of videos on TikTok and YouTube. 'What's difficult about social media is the question of volume — the volume and quality balance is off to me,' Kulash said. Creators, he means, are expected to churn out content like little one-person factories. 'Day after day,' Nordwind said. 'We like to take our time.' 'Also: When I fall in love with a song, I want to hear that song over and over again,' Kulash said. 'I will listen to 'Purple Rain' until I die. Do people go back and search someone's feed to replay the TikTok they first fell in love with? 'The relationship that I think people have to their favorite YouTube star or TikToker,' he added, 'feels much more like a relationship to celebrity than it does a relationship to art.' For Kulash, who made his feature debut as a director (alongside his wife) with 2023's 'The Beanie Bubble,' the pursuit of art is bound up in ideas of effort and limitation, which is why AI doesn't interest him as a filmmaking tool. 'When everything is possible, nothing is special,' he said. 'The reason we shoot our videos in a single shot is not purely for the filmmaking heroics. It's because that's the only way to prove to people: This is real — we did the thing.' OK Go's dedication to costly and time-consuming practical effects has led to partnerships with a number of deep-pocketed brands, beginning with State Farm, which spent a reported $150,000 to finance the band's 2010 'This Too Shall Pass' video with the Rube Goldberg machine. (Meta sponsored the 'Love' video and in return got a prominent spot in the clip for its Ray-Ban smart glasses.) Kulash said that kind of product placement was 'scary as s—' back in the late 2000s, when the fear of being perceived as sellouts haunted every rock band. 'Now, of course, it's like a badge of honor,' he added, among influencers eager to flaunt their corporate ties. To explain his position on the matter, the singer — whose band walked away from its deal with Capitol Records in 2010 to start its own label, Paracadute — tried out an extended metaphor: 'On the other side of the planet, tectonic plates are moving and the hot magma of corporate money is coming out of the ground. That's why the MTV Awards exist, that's why the Grammys exist, that's why everything you think of as a celebration of high art exists. It's all advertising dollars, every last bit of it. You're protected by these continents of middle-people, which let you feel like you're marking art. But if you can manage to be one of those microbes at the bottom of the sea that gets its energy directly from the thermal vents of the hot magma money, then you get to make something other people don't.' He laughed. 'There's no record label in the world that would ever be like, 'Hey, why don't you go to Budapest for three weeks and spend a ridiculous amount of money to make this music video at a time when there's not even a music video channel anymore?' 'But brands know that's worthwhile, and we know that's worthwhile,' he said. 'You just have to make sure you don't get burned by the magma.'
Metro
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
'I went viral on YouTube 20 years ago – I'd flop if I posted it now'
To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video The first video ever uploaded to YouTube is a three-part saga. At least, according to its creator. 'Intro', 'the cool thing' and the 'end' are the three chapters on the video, 'Me at the zoo', uploaded on April 23, 2005. Jawed Karim, one of the site's founders, chats to the camera as elephants flop around in hay behind him. 'Here we are in front of the, uh, elephants,' Karim says. 'They have really, really, really long' – he takes a suspenseful pause – 'trunks.' A little over 20 years later, YouTube now boasts an estimated 14 billion videos. That's one and a half clips for every person on the planet. Among those videos is one uploaded in 2006 of four guys doing an elaborate dance routine on motorised treadmills. It was a music video for the song, Here It Goes Again, by the American rock band OK Go. The video on YouTube, which has 67million views, is not the original clip the band uploaded. That was taken down by the band's record label, EMI, when it had just over 70million views, the band told Metro. Damian Kulash, 49, lead singer of OK Go, shot the video at his sister's house. One Grammy, three albums and nearly 20 years later, tens of millions have seen the four members get sweaty in wide ties and thick cardigans. 'Unquestionably, the last 20 years would have gone very differently for me – that video opened a whole new universe of creative possibilities,' Damian tells Metro between rehearsals for OK Go's And the Adjacent Possible tour. 'Or rather, it threw down the gauntlet with the greatest, most terrifying gift a creative person can be given: a truly boundless canvas.' The video helped OK Go become so famous for inventive, colourfully elaborate videos that the band's choreography has a separate Wikipedia page. 'We've made dozens more of those weird, elaborate videos, and racked up over a billion views for art projects that simply couldn't have existed in – or at least wouldn't have fit the model of – any prior era,' Damian adds. 'My favourite YouTube comment this week is on our video for Love, a single-shot, over-the-top spectacle of kaleidoscopes and infinity rooms made by 29 robots controlling 65 mirrors: 'Whatever. Whole thing was done with mirrors.'' How OK Go posted Here It Goes Again on YouTube in the era of slick, MTV-ready music videos played a big part in the band's success, he adds. 'One of the founders, Chad Hurley, personally emailed us to ask us to give [YouTube] a try,' he says, describing what posting a three-minute-long video did for the band as 'tectonic'. 'In a blink, it pulled the rug out from under the massive industry of legacy media and democratised the distribution of information to a degree the world has never seen before. 'I don't think anyone could have predicted all the ways the world would adapt and change, and those changes are so all-encompassing that I feel a little silly talking about what it meant for my band, personally.' YouTube, Damian adds, also provided the then-startup band OK Go with a way to reach fans in a way that TV channels (and before the days of Instagram Live Q&As) never could. 'One day we were a hard-touring indie rock band reliant on a record label, the radio industry, and being in a new city every night to connect with humans out there in the world,' the guitarist says. 'Then next, we had a direct line to millions of fans.' Tay Zonday could say the same. 17 years ago, he posted a no-thrills video of himself singing an original song, Chocolate Rain. With his deep bass voice and earnest delivery, Tay quickly became known as the 'Chocolate Rain Guy' as the clip tallied 140million views. The open mic singer was suddenly making guest spots on Good Morning America, having his song dubbed 'the most listened-to song in the world' and winning the YouTube Music Award. All while studying for a PhD in American studies at the University of Minnesota. 'My viral YouTube video changed my life,' Tay, whose real name is Adam Bahner, tells Metro. 'People connected with me because Chocolate Rain embodied novelty.' This was in 2007, the now 42-year-old voice actor stresses, when homemade videos in 240p like Chocolate Rain drew crowds of clicks. But the platform isn't what it was when Tay first joined. He questions whether Chocolate Rain would have been met with the same success it did back then if it were uploaded today. This is partly down to the YouTube algorithm, which decides what videos to suggest to a viewer. The recommendation system directly drives about 70% of views on the platform, researchers say. Some YouTubers say they approach the platform as if it were a science – from opening or closing their mouths in a video thumbnail to rarely taking a break from uploading – to please the algorithm. 'Today, loyalty determines content success. The most loyal audience that clicks and watches the most wins,' Tay says. 'Keeping people in loyal content bubbles is like feeding everyone sugar. YouTube makes perfect pastries, but should not have the power to decide the world's diet.' 'YouTube has beautiful moments, but it's Icarus flying too close to the business sun,' he adds. 'It must make changes that will be bad for business and good for humanity.' Damian similarly wonders how successful the band would have been if they had signed up for YouTube account in 2025. 'It's funny that we're only in our 40s, but we're already being treated as the grandfathers of a cultural form,' he says. 'But internet generations are fast, and I'm flattered by the recognition we've gotten from today's superstars.' As YouTube and the people who upload, watch, share, remix and meme videos continue to change, Damian doubts the band will change with it. OK Go projects can take nearly a year to create, making modern live streamers, next-day delivery shopping haulers and vloggers seem like 'speedy little creatures'. OK Go will never be as speedy as today's generation of YouTubers – and Damian's perfectly okay with that. 'The 20th century is the sea, and it's filled with gorgeous, venerable cultural creatures like painters, rock bands, journalists, movie directors, and the like,' he says. More Trending 'The 21st century is the land, now crawling with speedy little creatures like influencers and live streamers. 'OK Go is one of the delightfully weird creatures that crawled out of the sea in the first place, an amphibian that straddles both worlds and survives in a peculiar environmental niche we found in that transition between land and sea. 'We get to sink into our art projects with the effort and intentionality of the old world sea creatures, but it's the new ecosystem of the land animals that carries them off into culture.' Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ For more stories like this, check our news page. MORE: Boris Johnson's ostrich-like response to Adolescence was inevitable
Scoop
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Scoop
OK GO'S AND THE ADJACENT POSSIBLE – The Grammy®-Winning Band's First Album In A Decade
OK Go returns with And the Adjacent Possible, the band's ambitious fifth studio album and first full-length release since 2014's Hungry Ghosts. Even for a band known for pushing boundaries, the album is wildly eclectic—postmodern and genre-dissolving, with nods to Phil Spector, Toni Visconti, and Nile Rodgers sandwiched between the fuzzy, psychedelic opener, 'Impulse Purchase,' and the meditative, Zen-like closer, 'Don't Give Up Now.' Glued together by the distinctive mixing of the band's longtime collaborator Dave Fridmann (The Flaming Lips, Spoon, Tame Impala, MGMT), the twelve tracks collectively paint a portrait of a band comfortable in its own chameleon skin. Listen to And the Adjacent Possible, released via Paracadute here: The band will deliver an extra special performance of 'Love,' its new single, on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Tuesday, April 15. Like the album's first track 'A Stone Only Rolls Downhill,' 'Love' is written from a father's perspective, but the weighty concerns of the first song give way to wonder and joy on this soaring new anthem. Advertisement - scroll to continue reading Damian Kulash says, 'You know that dream where you're somewhere familiar, maybe your childhood home, but there's a door, one that was never there before, leading to some impossible magical place? Having children did that to my understanding of love. Suddenly, a huge new ballroom opened up off of the little apartment I've inhabited so long: a whole new wing of love, grand and soaring and utterly overwhelming. It is endlessly amazing that we exist — little, conscious clusters of stardust occurring, apparently by chance, in the vast emptiness of the universe. And we get to experience love. It is unbelievable.' And since this is OK Go, of course there is a mind-melting music video. It always seems like the band can't possibly top themselves, but with today's release of the video for 'Love,' they've done it again. The single-take video features complex choreography between the band, 29 robots, and upwards of 60 mirrors to create a dazzling — and this time deeply moving — spectacle of infinite reflections and human-scale kaleidoscopes. Shot in the faded glory of a Budapest train station, the clip was concepted in partnership with creative agency SpecialGuest, co-directed by Damian Kulash, Aaron Duffy, and Miguel Espada, and produced by 1stAveMachine, with technology integration by SpecialGuestX. View the video for 'Love' here: Always looking for new ways to document their elaborate videos, OK Go's Damian Kulash, Timothy Nordwind, Andy Ross, and Dan Konopka wore Ray-Ban Meta glasses throughout the production to capture behind-the-scenes footage - watch HERE: Learn more about the Universal Robots in the video HERE: For a more in-depth behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of the video courtesy of Project Management Institute - please view HERE: 'We're always drawn to spectacle and wonder,' says Kulash, 'and the goal, this time, was to take them somewhere more heartfelt and emotional than we have before. This song is so personal for me, and the infinite reflections bouncing between two mirrors are a perfect metaphor for the kind of overwhelming, reality-shifting love that I'm singing about. Two simple things come together, and new dimensions burst from them into existence. Magic unfurls endlessly. It's the impossible, right there before you. That's the kind of wonder that can bring me to tears.' Combined views of OK Go's previous video, the stunning moving mosaic for 'A Stone Only Rolls Downhill' that features 64 videos playing across 64 phones, has already surpassed five million. Directed by Kulash and Chris Buongiorno (Star Wars: Skeleton Crew), it required more than a thousand takes, and over two hours and twenty minutes of single-take clips which are condensed into the final frame. Filmmaking magazine Shots marveled, 'Whenever a new OK Go video drops, the creative community's mixture of anticipation and professional jealousy is palpable." The album packaging also demonstrates boundless creativity and meticulous attention to detail. The first vinyl pressing, limited to 3,000, is a two-LP set on 180-gram, 45RPM discs in a foil-stamped gatefold with full-color inner sleeves. A 3-dimensional sculpture pops up when listeners open it. The packaging was designed by Yuri Suzuki and Claudio Ripol from Team Suzuki with 3D sliceform design and popup structure by Wombi Rose, Hà Trnh Quc Bo, and Emilio LaTorre for Lovepop. To listen to And the Adjacent Possible is to be taken on an emotional rollercoaster… in the best way possible. While the music is largely upbeat, the lyrics can be dark. OK Go's sardonic wit drives 'Impulse Purchase,' a playfully direct address to the algorithms that will choose its audience: 'Now, as a practical matter it's pointless/to address you directly here/Any probabilistic adjustments/will dissolve in the sea/of the everything-everyone-everywhere-ever-has-done that you swallowed before.' Even the brightly titled 'A Good, Good Day at Last' features lines like, 'Anger, she's more loyal/than her fickle sister Hope.' Yet rays of hope ('Love,' 'Don't Give Up Now') also abound. Track Listing – And the Adjacent Possible Impulse Purchase A Stone Only Rolls Downhill Love A Good, Good Day at Last Fantasy Vs. Fantasy This Is How It Ends Take Me with You Better Than This Golden Devils Once More with Feeling Going Home Don't Give Up Now
Yahoo
05-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
FKA Twigs Cancels Coachella Performances, Remaining Tour Dates Over Visa Issues
Due to visa issues, FKA Twigs has to drop out of her scheduled live performances. On Friday, Twigs took to Instagram to announce the cancellations. 'I'm devastated to share the news that due to ongoing visa issues I am not able to see through any of my scheduled tour dates for the remainder of April across North America, including Ceremonia and Coachella,' she captioned the post along with a carousel of photos from the Eusexua Tour. 'It pains me to say this because I am so excited to bring you a creation that I have poured my soul into and I believe is amongst my strongest work.' More from The Hollywood Reporter OK Go's Damian Kulash On Two Decades of Making "Ridiculous" Viral Music Videos StubHub IPO on Pause Amid Market Turmoil Prosecutors Bring Third Superseding Indictment Against Sean "Diddy" Combs She continued, 'I know this news impacts so many of you that have already made plans and spent money in order to see these shows.' View this post on Instagram A post shared by FKA twigs (@fkatwigs) However, the British singer-songwriter encouraged fans that she is 'working to reschedule the affected dates as quickly as possible.' She said, 'For headline shows, please refer to your point of purchase for details and refund information. Back to you all with more updates as soon as I have them.' The news comes as she was expected to perform at AXE Ceremonia this weekend. Also canceled, were her performances at both Coachella weekends later this month and the remaining dates of her North America tour. 'Eusexua,' released in January, is Twig's third studio album. In February, it reached No. 1 on Billboard's Top Dance Albums Chart, which marked her fourth career No.1. When the album dropped she thanked it for 'bringing me back to life.' Best of The Hollywood Reporter Most Anticipated Concert Tours of 2025: Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar & SZA, Sabrina Carpenter and More Hollywood's Highest-Profile Harris Endorsements: Taylor Swift, George Clooney, Bruce Springsteen and More Most Anticipated Concert Tours of 2024: Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, Olivia Rodrigo and More
