2.2: "HMV Playlist Sampler April 2003" - Various Artists

Oh god, it's one of these again.  I can't imagine a bigger test of my will to continue again that being presented with this musical barnacle, barely one step up from a free single on the front of a copy of Smash Hits, and yet, here it resides within my pile, waiting for my judgment.  

"Why don't you throw it away?" you might reasonably ask.  

I don't throw CDs away.  I just don't.  And I understand in this most modern era people's strong desires to declutter their spaces; all of this, this coffin-sized collection of plastic jewel cases and shiny discs could be ripped, encoded, and stored on a USB stick, and I would be free of them - and that would just be for the ones I cared about.  Would this even make the cut, some hastily slapped together amalgam of alternative up-and-comers from 16 years ago?  Almost certainly not.  

But when the Black Swan Event devastates the nations of the earth, and the King of Spotify is cast down and music exists once again in only physical media form, I'll peddle my bike for days to charge the dynamo for long enough to play the first 45 seconds of "There Only Is" by Vendetta Red, and all this time keeping them around will have been worth it.  You'll see.

With one exception, I replicated the track list for your listening pleasure here.

So what do I say about this?  You'll not be surprised to learn that I don't have very strong emotional attachment to this particular CD.  I tried to speculate as to what I might possibly have bought in April 2003 that this would have come for free with but that was very much in my Relentless Music Purchasing phase and it could have been anything.  

Before I forge on to talk about the bands and the music here, I just want to take a moment to say how crazy it is in hindsight that a company would make and press these CDs and give them out for free as a promotional gambit.  This thing has a four-page, full colour insert detailing all the bands.  From production to printing to design to shipment for this?  For a month?  How much money was HMV making at the time that they would consider this a good return on their investment?  Truly it must have been a magical time before reality so rudely intruded on brick & mortar music businesses.

There are 12 bands on this CD, and rather than review them individually, I am going to save time and group them together based on the fact I listened to this album an hour ago and looking at the back of the CD case now already half of them have vanished out of my mind as if their contribution to this album was a cover of John Cage's "4:33"

The First Circle - In One Ear, Out The Other

Sorry, Mew, Sugarcult, Caesars, The Warlocks and The Hidden Cameras.  Your music just failed to register in my memory for some reason, I've never heard of you or anything by you outside of the context of this album, and sadly, that means you are all dead to me.  I'm sure you are all very fine and talented people really - I am the problem.

The Second Circle - Bands I Will Only Remember Because Of Inconvenience

The Detroit Cobras' track from this album is not on Spotify, which meant I had to spend time on Google looking to see if I could find this specific track, otherwise I was going to have to put an actual CD in a CD player and I can tell you for free that none of my current computers have CD drives any more, so that would have been a challenge.

I did manage to track it down here, and it's saved from my eternal scorn because it kind of slaps and it's only two minutes long.

The Third Circle - Yes, These Are Definitely Bands

Now we are reaching into the back catalogues of bands who penetrated the zeitgeist at the time enough for me to have retained something of their name.  Harry I vaguely remember because they were a modern alternative band whose lead singer kind of looked like Debbie Harry from Blondie hence their name.  I'm mostly certain I saw Athlete play at a music festival while waiting for...Moby maybe?...to come on stage.  

The Libertines

I never got the excitement over the Libertines.  Some part of that has to be that I was more aware of Pete Doherty because of his tabloid coverage and his Kate Moss dating long before I actually heard any of their music, by which point I was predisposed to not like them.  

(As a sidebar here, I did get to the end of that paragraph above, and then have to quickly check that Pete Doherty was not dead of some dreadful overdose before I felt reasonable about publishing it, which probably illustrates my mental image of him better than anything else I could say.  He's fine, by the way.)

I assume there must have been some intrinsic link between his press coverage and the bands popularity, because 15 years on and I still could not be less excited about this track.  It certainly doesn't make me think I am missing anything by having let them pass me by, but feel free to email me and tell me I am wrong and they are great with some songs to listen to, and I might do that.  

I'll not hold my breath for a flood of emails though.

Har Mar Superstar

More people should listen to Har Mar Superstar, and this is a genuine bop.  I've loved Har Mar Superstar since I got randomly recommended his first album way back in 2001, and somewhere in amongst the pile should be my copy of "You Can Feel Me", which is a great album which I viciously pirated off the internet and burned on to a CD.  No, I am not proud, but I was poor and needy.  

To make it up to him, I'm going to strongly recommend you listen to  his first and second albums, because they are great and funny at the same time.  

OK Go

Were the previous 1000 words just a preamble so I could talk about my complicated feelings about OK Go?

Yes.  Yes they were.

I've waxed lyrical about the value of the music video, including in my most recent article before this.  I think its an amazing complementary art form which can bring something else to the music which is at its heart.  For me, there are music video images and sequences which are instrinically called to mind whenever I hear the song.  They are a unified whole, made more than the sum of their parts.

OK Go are a band who, as far as I can tell, exist as a band purely for the opportunity to make music videos.  They're famous/notorious (delete as appropriate) for it. They've made videos with a dance routine choreographed on 4 treadmills, they've build a giant Rube Goldberg Machine inside a warehouse and filmed it in one take, they've made a song by driving a car past hundreds of pianos, they've used reams of coloured paper and printers, they've shot an entire music video in 4 seconds then shown it in slow motion, and they've been on the goddamn Vomit Comet to shoot a music video in true zero-g.

All of them are technical, and entertaining, and often amazingly intricate.  There is no doubt that the reason OK Go are known for their videos is that they put a ton of work into trying to find something outlandish to do, and seeing if they can make it work.  But here's the thing, gang.  Every great, seminal music video I can name, and I could pull twenty out right now without breaking a sweat, I can tell you artist and song title for each of them.  When I was putting together those links above, I had to google "That OK Go video in zero g" and "OK Go video slow motion".

I'm going to tell you to watch the videos, because they're generally well done and the zero-g one especially is not only the best video, but arguably the best song of the bunch as well.  But let me state my thesis clearly.

OK Go don't make music videos.  They are the Top Gear of the music world, looking for a whacky challenge they can do, and then write a forgettable soundtrack to put over it which can also, hopefully, but used in a car commercial in the future.  I honestly am not sure OK Go are even a band in the same sense as the 70+ other bands I've covered in this blog.  They're just a marketing department with a drumkit and an unlimited budget for dumb video projects.

And where does that unlimited budget come from, you ask?

Nothing more Rock and Roll than Corporate Sponsorship!

OK Go to Hell.