Long before the video revolution, The Beatles put out promotional videos and obviously made movies, so we have a ton of great footage of the band. Here’s the promo video for “Something” written by George Harrison featuring the band and all their gal pals. With the London Olympics starting today we had to give you something from an English band – right?
In a tribute to Joe Strummer and The Clash, Dave Grohl, Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen and Steve Van Zandt got together at The Grammy Awards in 2003 to perform The Clash’s “London Calling.” Pete Thomas joined them on drums and No Doubt’s Tony Kanal is also there playing bass. It’s a pretty incredible performance.
It also created the inevitable flame war in the YouTube comments, with some youngsters taking shots at “dad rock” some punk fans expressing outrage that traditional rockers like Springsteen would cover The Clash. More knowledgeable fans then pointed out that Joe Strummer always admired Bruce, and once said, “Bruce is great. If you don’t agree with that, you’re a pretentious martian.”
They may have had a leg up on getting a record deal thanks to their parents – they’re the daughters of producer Tony Berg and Elvis Costello drummer Pete Thomas, and their original bassist calls producer Mitchell Froom daddy – but there will be no cries of nepotism when people hear their new single “He’s Not a Boy.” Hooking up with white-hot ’60s revivalist Mark Ronson, the Like have turned in one killer slice of ’60s pop, and shot a gorgeous black-and-white video to go with it.
The guys in the crowd look like the Strokes doing their best Beatles impression (for all I know, those are the Strokes), and the girls, well, that ’60s mod look is catnip for me. Lead singer Elizabeth “Z” Berg and keyboardist Annie Monroe in particular make me gooey. Isn’t it funny how girls are actually sexier when they show less skin? I’m personally burned out on the whole ‘stripper teen’ thing. This clip is a sight for sore eyes, on a number of levels.
When I posted the latest simple-but-awesome video from OK Go to my Facebook page, a friend joked, “No hot tubs? Bitches and hos? Gold chains/teeth? Money being thrown in the air?”
Exactly.
Truth be told, it’s hard to believe that all of those hip hop video cliches still exist. The money they’re throwing? Not real. Hot tub? Only if you want to contract hepatitis. The women? Well, most of them are ho’s, if that one woman’s tell-all book about her life as a video vixen is to be believed. Either way, none of those clips stand apart from the others, and if your video doesn’t stand apart, then odds are your song won’t, either.
OK Go clearly knows this, because they have made a game out of constructing music videos that are easy on the eyes – in that they don’t include a million jump cuts – yet impossibly complex. Their last clip, the Rube Goldberg puzzle “This Too Shall Pass,” set the bar impossibly high, but damned if “End Love” doesn’t rise to the challenge. Using the stop-motion photography that Zbigniew Rybczyński made famous in his clip for the Art of Noise’s “Close (To the Edit),” OK Go shoot a clip that appears to be taking place in real time…really lengthy real time, like 24 hours. And then, just to be cute, they include a couple of super slo-mo shots and at least one shot at normal speed. And check out the goose that follows them everywhere.
