OK Go has built its following entirely on video promotion. The ‘treadmill video’ for “Here It Goes Again” has something like 50 million views on YouTube and won the band a Grammy. But video is dead, right? MTV and VH1 barely play them, don’t they? For good or for ill, the music is the important thing. Right?
Wrong. The official video for the band’s new single “This Too Shall Pass” caused a bit of a stir when OK Go’s record label would not allow the video to be embedded, which limits its visibility (because people are more likely to hit play than to click through sight unseen) and also disempowers the band’s rabid online fanbase. Sharing is the currency of the internet, though, and limiting access to something online has the opposite effect of limiting access to something in practical media. And so there was backlash against the label.
Which is why the band, with external corporate sponsorship*, made a new video. One that’s embeddable. And, well, it’s certainly a hell of a video, a single-shot examination of an elaborate Rube Goldberg device. But I’ve watched the video three times now and I can’t tell you a damn thing about the actual song it’s promoting. Which is not to say that it’s a bad song or anything, just that I’m too distracted by all of the other stuff going on to notice. Here, watch it and let me know if you agree with me.
*And Kudos to State Farm for figuring out that the best way for a company like theirs to harness the web is to find good content that they can subsidize and support.
