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Toe Tappin’
By Corvus | December 1, 2005
I realized that my ‘Music Things’ category only linked to a single post which contained a reference, among other things, to a Nursery Rhyme I like. Following the principle that you shouldn’t have an outline level with only one point, I thought I’d add some feed to the fodder.
The guys who hooked up my cable based internet access only sipped the end of the straw to make sure the glass had juice in it. They didn’t look in the glass itself to see that I was actually drinking, not just orange juice, but a Tequila Sunrise. Regardless, the last tenant drank cheap tequila and the only cable channels available to me are local network, local access, a few PBS channels (hooray!), a few Spanish channels (Ole!) endless channels perpetually trying to get me to put down the remote and pick up the phone (“Yeah, I’m interested in your flat panel television for $1200… what’s that? No HD? No DVI? No HDMI? Tell youwhat: why don’t I just glue this money to a wall downtown instead?” *click* Buzzzzzzzz.), and… MTv 2.
Narrative videos still seem to be popular, even when the narrative has only a tenuous connection to the song, or when the song wouldn’t be remotely interesting without the video (and in most cases, not even with the video does it hold my attention). There’s the occasional amusement such as the Korn video for “Twisted Transistor” wherein Korn is portrayed by Snoop Dogg, Lil Jon, Xzibit, and David Banner (link: Korn Media Player (you’ll need to click the link for the video)). My favorite moment of that video is at the end when Snoop says, “This song ain’t about no booty, it’s about transistors. Ya dig?” Mostly, however, MTv 2 seems to be the same 10 music videos, behind the scenes interviews with people who ought to stick to producing music and avoid behind the scenes interviews, tours of the overly lavish homes of hip hop stars, and shows about people who beat up cars and/or classmates.
So imagine my surprise yesterday morning when I saw, not one, but two videos that rival the delight of watching Fatboy Slim’s Weapon of Choice video starring Christopher Walken (link: Astralwerks WOC page). Well, almost rival it anyway.
The first video is for Beck’s Hell Yes, which can be found on Beck’s site (link (you’ll need to navigate to the video yourself unfortunately)). It features dancing robots. Not, mind you, dancing animated robots, but actual robots. Dancing. A while back I discovered the Robo Garage (link: Robo-garage.com (Japanese language site)) and been duly by video footage of Kyoto University’s ambulatory robots. But these little guys rock. Some digging revealed them to be QRIO robots from Sony (link:official QRIO site. I also found a 14 month old link to a video of the QRIOs doing a Geisha dance (link: WMV file) over on Wonderland (link: Alice’s post).
The second video (admittedly an older one, but I’m a bit behind the times) is for the White Stripe’s Fell In Love With A Girl (link: official site). This video is entirely animated with LEGO building blocks and it’s brilliant. The painstaking effort that went into bringing this gem to the screen is impressive (link: LEGO.com feature).
Sadly, we’ve now returned to our standard fare and I’m watching videos of people standing around singing and prancing around as centaurs.
Ah well. I ought to turn the television off and read one of the ten books I have checked out of the library anyway!
December 1st, 2005 at 1:32 pm
Hey Corvus:
At least you can catch up on Arrested Development Season 3 episodes on Monday night. They start again on the 5th of December, what great timing. Unfortunately, there are only about a half dozen episodes left now that Fox has cancelled the rest of the season. Blah!
December 1st, 2005 at 2:49 pm
Here are some interesting tidbits:
Apparently the four QRIOs featured on Beck’s video is actually the only four in existence. Also, as far as I know, the QRIO are a follow-up to Honda’s ASIMO, which in fact are the world’s very first completely self-balancing bipedal robot. Here’s a link: http://www.honda-robots.com/index_ori.html
I’m not sure what robotics have to do with my undying love of Beck’s music, but it piqued my interest when I saw the video.
The female voice you hear in the song is in fact the voice of actress Christina Ricci. She is credited on the album as “girl,” but other referrences name her as “Kurisutina,” the Japanese way of saying her name.
December 3rd, 2005 at 6:24 am
The new White Stripes video is rather cool too, seeing as it was all done in one take: http://stream.qtv.apple.com/qtv/v2music/whitestripes/denialtwist_ref.mov
(Got the link off of Simon Carless’ blog. Props to him.)