Dio, Wu-Tang, Fiery Furnaces...
Check out Pitchfork Media’s Top 100 awesome vids
Anthony Augustine
100 Awesome Music Videos—
pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/36588/Staff_List_100_Awesome_Music_Videos/—
Video may have killed the radio star, but over the past few
years the medium has suffered as music lovers have stopped
watching TV and parked themselves in front of their computers.
With the explosion of sites such as YouTube, MySpace and G-Vid,
along with the emergence of personal media players, videos
have once again become an integral part of our pop-culture
landscape. Nearly any song or video you can think of now is
almost instantly available, and there has also been a noticeable
shift in the way people interact with digital content. Gone
are the days of waiting in front of the TV to see the video
you want. Now you just have to find it indexed somewhere.
If you just can’t get enough of Organized Rhyme’s
classic Check the O.R. video and want everyone to know it,
you can slap it up on your MySpace profile. If you want to
e-mail your buddy about how crazy the new NIN video is, chances
are it will be pretty easy to find and send on YouTube. While
MuchMusic, MTV 2 and Fuse will continue to be outlets for
new videos, artists who want to push the envelope or want
to use the viral effect a good video clip can generate will
look beyond TV. Over at Pitchfork, the folks behind one of
the web’s most influential music sites have spent hours
and hours sifting through videos that have been uploaded to
YouTube, and they’ve come up with a pretty decent list
of 100 of their favourites. While there are some glaring omissions,
I just did a few quick searches of my own and found most of
what I wanted to see anyway. Proceed only if you have a few
hours to kill. I almost didn’t get this column done
on time. (Ed.’s note — Again!)
Daft Punk — Live @ Even Furthur—
video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4275660658800832791
—Back before French electronic producers Thomas Bangalter
and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo were turning out album after
album of bland, coked-out disco beats, they were blowing minds
with their tweaked analogue techno and filtered French house.
Prior to the release of the landmark 1997 debut Homework,
Bangalter spent a lot of time on the road honing the snap-bolted
beats, robotic whirls, chaotic breakdowns and screeching acid
trip outs that would make up their highly influential first
release. This slightly dark, single-camera video of Bangalter
playing live at Wisconsin’s legendary Even Furthur festival
in 1996 may not be of the best quality, but it’s easy
to understand why this performance has become one of the defining
moments in the halcyon days of the early U.S. rave scene.
Only a few hundred diehards witnessed the original gig (ex-Winnipegger
DJ Fishead being one of them), but this performance continues
to circulate and be discussed through the increase of indexing
and archiving of video on the web.
Anthony Augustine is a freelance music and pop culture writer
who spends way too much time in front of the computer. He also
hosts a weekly two-hour electronic music program on CKUW 95.9
FM Got a site you think he should see? E-mail him at anthony.alloneword@gmail.com. |
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