YouTube Radio

I just got back from seeing Henry Rollins, so this seemed like a good time to blog about YouTube, as that is where I discovered my love for him.

Some of you know that I came to punk rock in kind of a roundabout manner. First, I liked the Ramones, but I didn’t really think about it a lot until the first time I heard “I Wanna Be Sedated”, which moved me from passively liking them when they were around to actively seeking them out and being amazed. It’s a cliché, but if I am going to a desert island and can only take one album, that album will be Ramones-Mania.

So fine, I like one band, no big deal, and then one day there is this amazing song on the radio, and I only hear a little bit, and my sister confirms that it is the Clash, but she doesn’t know what song. Up to that point, I only knew them for Rock the Casbah. I had heard Should I Stay or Should I Go, but I didn’t know it was them. So in the process of discovering that I was looking for Train in Vain, I discovered London Calling and Bank Robber, Rudy Can’t Fail and Lost in a Supermarket, and the list goes on. Suddenly I was aware of another great band.

This was when I started wondering if, like Sheena and Judy, I was a punk or punk rocker. I mean, here are two cornerstones of the movement, but looking at them individually they didn’t really fit into the stereotype. So, I was not sure, but there was this song I liked, Fall Back Down, by a group called Rancid. Actually, I found I liked multiple songs by them. Have you seen them? Pink mohawk, orange mohawk, and shaved head with a clown tattoo on the skull. Well, those styles change actually, but nonetheless, it is clearly punk. Also, all of these other bands that I was looking up because I was intrigued with them were getting punk+ labels. That sounds weird, but I think it was that Violent Femmes were called Hillbilly Punk (if you ask me, punkabilly flows better), AFI was probably called Goth Punk, and it seems to me that Green Day and the Presidents were in there too.

So fine, I’m a punk. At least I now finally have a justification for my studded leather wristband, and I still feel perfectly comfortable in my disdain for the Sex Pistols, because I can. But it led me to wonder, is there more? What am I missing?

I had also discovered that you could often find original music videos, live footage, and tribute videos at www.youtube.com. So I would want to hear a song, and I would just bring up the video and I didn’t have to watch it. It is more work than a real radio, or an iPod, because you need to keep choosing the next song, but I have it on my computer, it is easy, and seeing the other submissions and related videos keeps me finding new things. (Newest find: Sacrifice by London After Midnight. I don’t seem to like anything else by him, but that’s okay, this song rocks.)

I had started using it to find stuff that I knew, but at one point I realized I could also use it to explore unfamiliar territory. Sometimes it is mind-blowing. Warren Zevon was a name I heard all the time, might as well look him up. How could I have never heard Werewolves of London before? You would think it would at least get play on Halloween if nothing else. There was even a video for it.

This leads me to a quote from School of Rock, “And there used to be a way to stick it to the Man. It was called rock 'n roll, but guess what, oh no, the Man ruined that, too, with a little thing called MTV!”

I loved MTV and VH1 back in the day, when you could actually watch music videos—that was great. But having a national audience instead of just a local audience like a radio station is an amazing thing, making the decision of who gets airtime even more important, and I wonder who made those decisions and how. Maybe it did kill music, though I believe it is coming back to life.

So in terms of studying my punk history, School of Rock is also helpful in that there was an amazing flow chart, and it provided some other names to look up. Okay, I didn’t really like the Buzzcocks, but Husker Du is cool, and there are plenty of others to check. One music reviewer mentioned the Descendents and Stiff Little Fingers, and they have clips on YouTube. Hank mentioned at least four other bands tonight, and that is where it comes full circle actually, because I was looking up Black Flag when I stumbled upon some of his spoken word footage and that is where the crush happened. He’s really personable when he’s talking—more so than when singing, I would say.

The other thing that I am feeling is a desire to get more to the history of how it all developed. A while back, Little Sister M came in and said she was playing the Stooges. It was not completely true, in that she bought an Iggy Pop 2-disc set, and one disc was him with the Stooges, but the one she was playing was not. Nonetheless, points to her for knowing the name would impress me. Anyway, after she got done playing “Candy” over and over (I do that with new songs too), I asked her to play “Real Wild Child” for me, and I noticed for the first time some similarity in it to “Shake it Up” by the Cars.

What may be most interesting there is that the version I own of “Real Wild Child” is by Peter Ocasek, Ric’s son, so it all comes full circle indeed, but I started thinking about musical influences. Back in the 80’s, when I loved pop music (I still love those songs), I would always be surprised by the favorite bands of my favorite bands. Really? A-ha and the Doors? Now, I can kind of see where maybe the organ playing on “Light My Fire” is only a few steps removed from the electronic keyboards in “Take on Me”. Maybe it’s a stretch, but I would like to explore it more—the evolution of pop music over time and how it reflected and influenced society.

I’ll just make one other point about YouTube, which is that I think it could be a more effective marketing tool for emerging bands than MySpace. Amateur music videos (AMVs) are very popular. Generally they focus around a television show, a video game, or an anime of some kind, and often the focus is on a specific couple. So here is what you do:

1. Take your most romantic and beautiful song.
2. Get someone to make a video for it using clips from something popular.
3. Make a regular video for the same song showing you and how cute you are (straight performance is probably easiest).
4. Make sure the information with both videos points to your web pages, ideally where people can buy your music and learn more about you.

The most popular TV couple seems to be Clark and Chloe on Smallville. For movies, Ron and Hermione from the Harry Potter series are big. For anime, unless you have one you are passionate about, I don’t know. Naruto might have the most but it is hard to keep track because there are so many. For video games, there are a lot of Kingdom Hearts videos, but the comments always say that they came for the song and did not know about the game, and that is not what you are going for. Stick to Final Fantasy VIII or X.

I know the first songs I looked up were “Here Without You” by Three Doors Down and “Rest in Pieces” by Saliva (I was feeling maudlin that night), but that led to me seeing more about Samurai X and Final Fantasy Advent Children. I think what finally led me to Final Fantasy VIII was Evanescence, “Bring Me Back to Life”, but that led to Sacrifice, and finding also a Kingdom Hearts AMV for it and one from The Crow which is excellent, though a bit bloody.

Anyway, it’s one more way to reach out. But I personally don’t have any video capture software, or any obsessions with fictional couples for that matter, so I probably can’t help. When I learn how to use my camcorder, I will film the performance video. Just ask.