As a companion to my story this week:
“Making a rock video is the biggest promotional gamble you can take as a label or a band. You spend $100,000 on something that most likely will not get played in any capacity to sell records for you. Billy Bragg, who’s one of my favourite people of all time, was on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson last week, and did his song “Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards.” He’s changed the lyrics to make them kind of contemporary and at one point , ‘One leap forward two leaps back/ will YouTube give MTV the sack?’ and I thought, I fucking hope so. I certainly think it’s a far better outlet.”
While he professes to being yet another believer in the church of YouTube, the rise of online media, of course, has its downside. Like most “new” “big” “things,” this new phenomenon has perhaps already passed its zenith now that big media has begun to figure out how to co-opt it.
“Yahoo and MSN and RealNetworks and every fucking website that has any kind of video content needs you to come by and play a couple acoustic songs. They want to film you backstage. It’s all this completely phoney, embarrassing façade of trying to present a performer in a real way, but the reality is that it’s going to come up in a three-by-three square on your computer, playing two songs through your cable modem. It’s just ridiculous.”
–From Coast alum Brendan Murphy‘s Hour cover story about Death Cab for Cutie this week.
Check out Directions, the video companion to Death Cab’s Plans, here.
This article appears in Oct 26 – Nov 1, 2006.
Oooooooooooooo. Scary!