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OK Go employs some mighty fancy footwork as it walks the tightrope between music’s well-funded past and uncertain future. Whether filming viral videos with NASA nerds, custom-designing laser guitars or launching its latest sonic missile, Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, the band brings plenty of brains to the battle for success in the internet age.
But now the Los Angeles band finds itself in a very public skirmish with an unlikely foe: EMI Group, which owns Capitol Records, the label for which OK Go records.
“We’re stuck between two worlds,” vocalist and guitarist Damian Kulash wrote Sunday on the band’s official site, after EMI proclaimed that the group’s genius videos would no longer be embeddable on YouTube. (Strangely, the band’s newest clips, embedded below, are freely available on Vimeo, at least for the time being.)
The controversial move to disable YouTube embedding cut the legs out from under the very channel that allowed fans to share the choreographed brilliance of OK Go’s viral video for 2005’s “A Million Ways,” a breakthrough clip that launched the band’s career as you know it. Now OK Go finds itself torn between the “world of 10 years ago, where music was privately owned in discreet little chunks (CDs), and a new one that seems to be emerging, where music is universally publicly accessible,” according to Kulash.
Negotiating that transition has been the specialty of OK Go, which, like EMI, declined to comment on the YouTube snub. Since the rampant success of “A Million Ways,” the sartorially splendid tech-rock band has thrived, thanks to its diamond-sharp internet and scientific instincts, and its uncanny ability to crank out Pixie-fied pop.
But it’s harder than it looks, especially in the digital age.
“With all this new space opening up, it’s easy to mistake new ideas for good ideas,” Kulash told Wired.com in an e-mail interview that took place before EMI flipped the switch on the band’s YouTube videos. “A lot of energy gets put into being cutting-edge, or being the first to try something, or looking like a genius because you’ve got some clever new twist enabled by a new technology. But it can be pretty hard to distinguish the thrill of novelty from the thrill of good work. Sometimes they’re sort of the same thing.”
OK Go’s members — Kulash, bassist and vocalist Tim Nordwind, drummer Dan Konopka and keyboardist, guitarist and vocalist Andy Ross — keep pumping out good work and great ideas. The band’s viral video experimentation continues unabated in the saturated reels for “WTF?” and “This Too Shall Pass.”
Future videos will be shaped by JPL and NASA smartypants from Mindshare, which Kulash describes as “the nerd club for the engineers, designers and brainiacs of Los Angeles who want to use their considerable cranial firepower to make cool shit when they’re off the clock from their real jobs.”
The OK Go hits, and the video views, keep coming. Wired.com chats with Kulash, who testified before a congressional task force on the necessity of net neutrality and pens columns for GQ , about the new music industry, video innovation, William Gibson and much more in the extensive interview below.
Come for the pop music, stay for the nerds. Why? Because “nerds really are the new rock stars,” Kulash said.
Wired.com: You’re a pioneer in leveraging the internet to fortify a creative career. What are the best things artists can do online to sustain themselves financially and creatively?
Damian Kulash: The amazing thing about the internet, with regard to creativity and making things, is that it erases (or at least resets) all sorts of rules and boundaries and bottlenecks. Take music videos, for example. The form evolved in the incredibly harsh selective environment of MTV — only a handful of videos would get aired on the channel, and any video that didn’t get selected may as well not have existed.
So a very particular thing emerged: slick, expensive, glamorous and consistent, highly optimized for the approval of the largest possible audience (or what the advertisers and overlords of MTV perceived as such). There’s nothing about setting a short film to music that requires anything like that set of guidelines; they’re a product of the means of distribution.
Now that MTV’s been replaced by YouTube, those guidelines are completely irrelevant. There are new ones (like making things that make sense in a 2-inch box), but the really oppressive restriction — namely, that videos be aimed at the largest, youngest, most glamour-hungry audience — is gone. Now, as long as what you make is interesting to someone, it has a life.
Which is not to say, “Go forth and make crap” — on the contrary, this is an argument for making things that are just plain good, regardless of production value, budget or adherence to an established format. Basically, what I’m saying is a version of the long-tail idea: We need not be tethered to the center of the bell curve anymore, so worry about what you make, not who your audience is. Finding an audience is far easier than ever before, so what matters more than ever is if your ideas are any good. And with the strict guidelines of production eroding fast (and this is across the arts — not just in music and videos), there is plenty of new elbow room for good ideas.
Wired.com: What do artists waste time on?
Kulash: There’s definitely an art to understanding how to reach your audience and what will keep them engaged. But I think people definitely err on the side of the novel, and waste a lot of time and energy on it. Bands think that distributing their album in a new way will actually make people like the music; artists think that making their art with a new technology will give the art some inherent value. When new technologies allow for new ideas, great. But scrambling to simply use new technologies for the sake of using them is a waste of time.
Wired.com: You’ve promoted net neutrality. Any thoughts on its evolution?
Kulash: I’m ashamed to say that in the whirlwind of making and promoting our new record, I’ve stopped following the net neutrality battle details as closely as I’d like. But in my global elation at Obama’s victory, there was a very specific sigh of relief that the FCC would be appointed by the good guys, and as best I can tell, that’s been a huge, huge boon to progress. The question now, it seems, is how to write the rules (what is “reasonable network management”?), and who should have the authority to enforce the rules.
Wired.com: Why is net neutrality crucial?
Kulash: From a citizen’s perspective: The rough meritocracy of the network is what makes it so powerful and so giving. People not only have the freedom and the power to innovate, but they want their ideas to spread, so in general there is a strong pressure for innovators to make their work accessible, useful, cheap and democratic. If you let the corporate agendas of the network’s physical infrastructure change the rules, you very quickly wind up with a network that looks a lot like cable TV: The corporations who laid the lines get to choose what goes over them. That is, lots of information, but none of it very useful, and a strong pressure for things that help the bottom line of one company, not the public.
Then, from a musician’s perspective: We’ve lived with a system of gatekeepers and bottlenecks since the music industry began a century ago, and at no time was that system operating in the best interests of the musicians, or the music, or even the consumers. We certainly don’t need more of that.
Wired.com: Where do your cool video ideas come from?
Kulash: Our video ideas come from anywhere. Some of them are ours, sometimes our friends’. Generally we’re looking for really simple ideas with a lot of room for play. We work best when we set pretty strict boundaries and then try to work within them single shots, or a really specific visual idea or something. When it goes right, what you see is the band actually doing something. Most of the videos are a document of an actual event, so what you see is kind of like a live show, the members of the band working together in systematic harmony to create something. Hopefully you see our own creativity at work, rather than the slick tools of the man behind the curtain.
But coming off my high horse, the videos are really an excuse to try out crazy shit and meet crazy people and work on collaborations that would otherwise have no reason for occurring. What’s so great about music videos these days (as I got into in your first question) is that there’s only one requirement: They [must] be interesting. So basically anything that fascinates us we now have an excuse to go play with.
Wired.com: What’s it like working with NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratory nerds?
Kulash: The NASA/JPL folks are actually part of an L.A.-wide creative collective called Mindshare. It’s pretty much a nerd club for the engineers, designers and brainiacs of Los Angeles who want to use their considerable cranial firepower to make cool shit when they’re off the clock from their real jobs. I have always loved Rube Goldberg machines, and have fantasized about making one for a video for a long time, and when I started seriously throwing the idea around with my roommate Jamie Zigelbaum, who was a Media Lab Ph.D. candidate at the time and has his finger on the pulse of nerd-dom, he got me in touch with Mindshare. Nerds really are the new rock stars, so it’s a perfect fit. We shoot the video in February and it should be incredible.
Wired.com: I read that William Gibson gave you props. How’s that feel?
Kulash: Being on the radar of William Gibson is wild. It feels a little bit like it did when the The Simpsons parodied us. You feel like you’re watching yourself in a dream; this must be someone else’s life.
Wired.com: OK Go worked with Dave Fridmann on your new record, Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, which was released earlier this month. What did that production savant do to your sound? He exploded Sleater-Kinney’s The Woods , one of Wired.com’s favorite albums of the decade.
Kulash: He’s a genius. What’s most incredible about Dave is that he can do anything that any other top-shelf producer or engineer can. I truly believe that if you went into his studio trying to get the sound of ’70s Genesis or ’80s Bobby Brown, you’d come out with exactly what you want. But he can also do something that no one else can. That three-dimensional psychedelic universe that people think of as Dave’s sound, no one else can really do that. And it’s not so much that he pushes his sound on anyone, it’s that he opens the door to a sonic space that other people just don’t have access to. Everyone does something a little different when they’re in that universe.
I personally don’t think MGMT or The Flaming Lips or us sound all that similar, but obviously we all got to go on a romp in a very special place that only Dave has the keys to. He keeps his equipment broken exactly the way he wants it, and he uses a mix of the world’s nicest and the world’s crappiest gear. And he’s a real musician, which is rare for someone of his formidable technical skills. Most people with the temperament to wade through years of anal physics and wiring and careful mike adjustment are not also built for thinking truly musically and spontaneously – lateral, left-brain creative stuff. Dave is that rare guy.
Wired.com: What are your tech and culture predictions for the coming decade?
Kulash: Sheesh. I have no idea. The music industry will continue to implode; at least one of the majors will go down. People will start to get bored with user-generated content. Rupert Murdoch will try to buy Facebook. Has he already? Homemade 3-D movies will become the rage. Something amazing will happen with LEDs. A high-art museum will feature a piece made out of hundreds of dead iPods. My band will tour like a motherfucker.
Wired.com: Fair enough. What are you looking forward to?
Kulash: What I’m looking forward to is making more stuff this year. We’ve got a lot of incredible projects coming up. We made laser guitars with Fendi and Moritz Waldemeyer for Design Miami, and we’re hoping do even more involved collaborations for Fendi in Milan and Basel, for Salone Del Mobile and Design Miami/Basel. There’s the Mindshare project in Los Angeles in February, and we’re currently working on a video involving animated food with a students from CalArts and MIT.
We’re also hoping to collaborate with Arthur Elsenaar, the Dutch researcher and artist famous for electrocuting his face, and we’ve been working on a time-bending idea with Jeff Lieberman, who you’d know from his Discovery Channel show Time Warp.
We’ve also got plans to make another video with my sister, Trish Sie, the world’s most creative choreographer and director, and if things work out right, we might get to work with architect and designer Greg Lynne at a sail factory in Nevada. We’re trying to set up a performance at the Maker Faire, which would be rad, to say the least, and of course, there will be tons of touring and festivals, and if I’m lucky, a few weekends off to go hiking with my dogs. Beyond all that stuff, I have no room for further excitement.
Image courtesy Capitol Records
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