This week Saturday Night Live is celebrating the end of its’ 37th season on air (yes, you read that right) by pulling out the usual bags of tricks. That includes rock god Mick Jagger taking on hosting duties, while Arcade Fire and the Foo Fighters provide the marquee music interludes (plus there will be comedy sketches…at least I think they still do those).
But while the cast and crew will mostly be sticking to the traditional SNL formula for success, they are throwing one new variable into the mix for this monumental occasion. That comes in the form of a partnership with the Facebook app Color.
Some of you may remember Color as the app that allowed you to share your photos and short (about 30 seconds) live video clips with a network of your closest friends. More likely though, you remember the story of how the program managed to raise $41 million dollars for its launch, only to fade into obscurity sometimes after that. It’s not that the program didn’t work; it just didn’t manage to catch on in the ever growing app market.
But now, thanks to a new partnership with Verizon, Color is looking to make a big comeback. Not only will Verizon start making the app standard on all new Android phones, but Color has also beefed up its’ own services, particularly in the video area which now has a better broadcast quality, sound with your live feed (for Verizon customers), and the ability to notify your friends immediately for live broadcast.
To celebrate (and most importantly, to promote), Color will be teaming with SNL to have the actors, crew, and guests take backstage footage of the evening, and fill in the breaks and commercials with exclusive footage that will be broadcast to anyone who friends Verizon on Facebook.
Color certainly seems more focused this time around. It’s no wonder either considering the recent $1 billion Instagram acquisition by Facebook, and how Facebook itself is preparing for the richest public offering anyone has ever seen. But if you’re looking for the new Color’s greatest motivation…that may actually be Twitter. It’s a smart move to try to set up a service that could be similar to Twitter, but uses video instead since that would seem to be the logical progression of the medium.
If you’re interested in the footage,you just have to like Verizon on Facebook, and download the Color for Facebook app on your mobile device. While Verizon customers are the only ones that get sound with the feed, anyone can sign up for it.
It’s easy to see that the team behind Color believes in their product, and their dedication to getting their name out there shows that. If the SNL show is a success, it’s easy to imagine the public imagination taking hold of this app and making something unique out of it.
And , maybe Mick will even sing “Start Me Up” for them.
In late February, we had some fun daydreaming about what hot bands — translation: the bands that had new albums out or coming out in the next couple months — might be included in this year’s Lollapalooza lineup…and we went hitless. So much for our dream to see Lemmy and Motorhead wipe the floor with the kids a third their age. Likewise, so much for seeing 2011 comback band of the year Duran Duran show the kids how to put on a show. Pity.
We get the sense that the festival organizers received a lot of criticism about last year’s lineup, because this year’s batch of bands skews decidedly younger and, dare we say, hipper than years past. Sure, it has the token appearance by this or that modern rock trailblazer — namely, the Cars and Big Audio Dynamite — but look at the names just underneath the headliners, which we’ll get to in a minute. Deadmaus (sorry, we’re not printing the ‘s’ as a 5)? Are they really that high up on the food chain, as high as My Morning Jacket and Cee Lo Green? Likewise, is OK go really that low on the food chain, that Ratatat, Atmosphere and Beirut would be listed ahead of them?
All in all, this is a strange group of bands, a blend of popsters (Cee Lo, Lykke Li, Ellie Goulding), screamers (Deftones, Manchester Orchestra, A Perfect Circle), and even some alt-country guys (My Morning Jacket, Bright Eyes, Ryan Bingham). But it looks as though that is the point: this year’s Lolla will not be like the others, and the headliners alone make that abundantly clear.
There are four of them this year.
As expected, the early leak announcing that Eminem, Muse and the Foo Fighters would headline this year’s festival turned out to be true, but Coldplay is playing as well. This suggests that some serious stage shuffling is in the cards, because the way the stages have been laid out the past few years, it just isn’t possible to have more than two top-tier bands playing at once. All of the other stages are simply too small to support them, or the visibility is too limited to handle the crowds. It will be very interesting to see how they schedule eight bands over three nights.
As for the overall lineup, well, we’re nonplussed. There are usually multiple bands at each level that we’re excited about seeing. This year, not so much. This is not the first time this has happened, nor do we suspect it will be the last, but it’s still disappointing when it does. On the plus side, our Estonian crush Kerli is performing, and for that, we are happy.
All videos should be this low-tech. The leadoff single from their upcoming Butch Vig-produced record Wasting Light (the first time Vig and head Foo Dave Grohl have worked together since Nevermind) is a hilarious throwback to the early days of music video, with a simple story and simple edits. Even better, it has Lemmy, drinking and driving and scoring some weed. Then, out of nowhere and for no reason, a beautiful babe appears. The nonstop screaming in the vocals is a bit much, but everything else about this video is awesome.
