There's a lot to love about silly Internet memes and fads, and one reason is that they can dig up something old and make it cool again. Music is no exception: anything from a '70s rock anthem to a '90s one-hit wonder can be given new life if the YouTube or 4chan hordes get their hands on it.
The complication is that, thanks to the rise of user-generated content, a song can suddenly become in-demand again without any kind of official marketing push (like placement on a movie soundtrack, for example). And that's an interesting issue for the music industry: When a song from decades ago starts to hit the ears of a generation that might not have been exposed to it before thanks to a grainy video of a tone-deaf guy eviscerating it at an open mic night, does the record label with the rights to the song embrace it as free publicity or flag it as unauthorized content?
One thing's for sure. The sheer amount of content on the Web makes it tough for anything to break through from obscurity into the mainstream. But when something hits it big, it gets really big. You can go ask the guy we put at the top of this list.
10. "Say It Ain't So," Weezer
Weezer, which was doing the nerd-rock thing way before it was cool, is no stranger to revivals: considered by much of the mainstream to be a '90s novelty act after its hit single "Buddy Holly," the alternative-rock band bounced back in the early '00s with songs like "Island in the Sun" and "Beverly Hills." More recently, the band enlisted YouTube stars to star in its video for last year's single "Pork and Beans."
But Weezer got an additional push of digital buzz when its songs proved to be some of the most popular on video games "Guitar Hero" and "Rock Band." The 1994 song "Say It Ain't So," in particular, has seen a resurgence in party playlists all over. On one hand, it really is one of Weezer's best tracks. On the other, a dark and painful song about addiction and domestic abuse has officially made the leap to drunk frat-boy karaoke staple. So it goes.
9. "Take On Me," A-Ha
Speaking of karaoke, "Take On Me" will always have a place in pop culture as the song that's impossible to sing at a karaoke bar without botching it beyond belief--even a decent singing voice will make those high notes of the chorus sound like fingernails on a chalkboard.
But it hit the viral video circuit when some enterprising online comedian rewrote the lyrics so that they say exactly what's going on in A-Ha's odd music video for the song. The "Take On Me: Literal Version" video has been a moderate hit, and thankfully, the singer manages to hit the high notes without too much trouble.
8. "(Don't Fear) The Reaper," Blue Oyster Cult
To be fair, this 1976 song never really disappeared from the classic-rock airwaves, and the reason that it's on this list technically has to do with television, not the Web. A 2000 "Saturday Night Live" sketch starred Will Ferrell as a fictional member of Blue Oyster Cult (the cowbell player) and guest Christopher Walken as a record producer who seemed to think Ferrell's instrumentals weren't forceful enough.
But thanks to the proliferation of the aforementioned "SNL" clip online several years later, it's now almost impossible to extricate "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" from Walken's insistence on "I gotta have more cowbell!" and the phenomenon has gone from forgotten TV catchphrase to full-out Internet meme.
"SNL" network NBC has been notoriously protective when it comes to unauthorized clips of the Walken sketch (and anything else it's aired) circulating around the Web, and an ambitious project to make the entire comedy show's archives available online hasn't yet gotten off the ground. Until then, scattered pirated versions are available--as well as hilarious high school talent show re-enactments, coming from a generation that probably never knew of Blue Oyster Cult before it was associated with "more cowbell."
7. "Heartbeats," The Knife
This one's sort of cheating, since "Heartbeats" wasn't a huge hit to begin with. But it's a fascinating story about the way media can make its way all over the Web: Late in 2006, The Knife was a little-known Swedish indie band that had been around since the late '90s when another artist's recording of their 2004 song "Heartbeats" became a viral hit. Acoustic singer Jose Gonzales had covered the track for his album "Veneer," and it rose to popularity as the soundtrack of a commercial for Sony Bravia televisions. The Bravia ad, which depicted hundreds of colorful bouncy balls descending on San Francisco, was never televised in the U.S., and therefore received most of its buzz from clips on YouTube and elsewhere across the Web.
Fans of the Gonzalez song soon learned that it was actually a cover; the Knife started getting extra momentum, and now the band is a favorite of edgy music bloggers and DJs all over.
6. "Flagpole Sitta," Harvey Danger
This Seattle-based band put out several well-received albums but only hit the mainstream with "Flagpole Sitta." Almost a decade later, digital comedy powerhouse CollegeHumor taped a video in which the entire office (mostly a bunch of twentysomething hipsters) lip-synced to the song in a single take.
The wildly popular video also spurred a fad of other "lip dub" videos among the Web's young and camera-happy. As for CollegeHumor, the beer-pong-friendly office became the subject of a fictionalized miniseries on MTV earlier this year.
5. "YYZ," Rush
This instrumental track, originally released in 1981, is one of the most difficult songs to play in "Guitar Hero" and now "Rock Band," so it's become a sort of a geek milestone. That was only enhanced when a video of a really, really, really enthusiastic guy nailing the song in "expert" mode became a huge hit on YouTube.
Called "How Guitar Hero Was Meant To Be Played," the video has chalked up more than 6 million views and features a guy named "Freddie" getting off a motorcycle, stripping off a leather jacket, introducing himself with "What's up, Internet?" and having a friend equip him with the guitar console. If that's how "Guitar Hero" was meant to be played, I know lots of people who are doing it wrong.
4. "Don't Stop Believin'," Journey
This song is a classic, no matter what. And its use in the final episode of "The Sopranos" only solidified that. But it deserves a spot on this list because of an embarrassing incident that (at least temporarily) associated it with the dissolution of happy-go-lucky Web 2.0 mania in the aftermath of last fall's financial collapse.
Here's what happened: A bunch of young dot-com entrepreneurs all went on vacation together to an estate in Cyprus, and filmed a poolside "lip dub" video much like the one orchestrated several years earlier by the CollegeHumor team behind the "Flagpole Sitta" video. The single-take video of twentysomethings cavorting in bathing suits to "Don't Stop Believin'" was clever and well-done, if a little silly. Unfortunately, this happened to be October 2008, right when things were getting really bad on Wall Street. Gossip blogs lambasted the creators, and the video was eventually pulled.
About a month later, MySpace enlisted L.A. nightclub regular DJ AM to work the turntables at its party at the Web 2.0 Summit confab--a large-scale party that had undoubtedly been put together pre-recession. When he played a remix of "Don't Stop Believin'," there were more than a couple of sheepish looks on the dance floor.
3. "You Make My Dreams," Daryl Hall & John Oates
There aren't a whole lot of bells and whistles in the music video for this 1980 pop song by Philadelphia duo Hall & Oates: it's pretty much just the two of them bouncing around against a black background with their backup band. Which, of course, made it the perfect video in which to embed "Keyboard Cat," a ubiquitous Internet clip of an orange tabby cat jamming away on a keyboard. Bonus: the cat is wearing the same color T-shirt that John Oates sports in the "You Make My Dreams" video.
The digital revival of "You Make My Dreams" may have been stunted, however, as YouTube pulled the audio from the clip due to the fact that it doesn't have the proper licensing agreement in place with Warner Music Group, which owns the rights to the song. It's a testament to the complications that can arise when a unauthorized use of a decades-old song suddenly thrusts it back into mainstream pop culture.
"You Make My Dreams" might've just gotten an extra kick from outside the Web, though: the song has a notable role in the romantic comedy "500 Days of Summer," which was released this month.
P.S.: The Keyboard Cat video is still up on Funny or Die.
2. "The Final Countdown," Europe
This 1986 song by Swedish rock band Europe has always been notorious for its corniness, making the cut on lists as varied as "Most Awesomely Bad Songs Ever" and "Run For Your Life! The 50 Worst Songs Ever (as well as, to its credit, VH1's "Top 100 Hard Rock Songs" list). It also had a regular role in cult sitcom "Arrested Development" as the theme song used by Gob (Will Arnett) for his magic show.
But "The Final Countdown" achieved new notoriety on the Web when a video of an abysmally bad cover version by a band called Deep Sunshine started to circulate on YouTube. Geek community site Fark co-opted the song as a sort of in-joke, and it's racked up well over a million views.
Comments on the video range from "LOL can someone please tell them that they suck?" to "my ears are bleeding" to "I'd do anything to see them live."
1. "Never Gonna Give You Up," Rick Astley
Of course this was No. 1--really, what else could we have picked? The only thing sillier than the lyrics of this 1988 song is the music video for it, in which British pop singer Astley spends a good deal of time wiggling his hips in a trench coat. For some reason or another, the video became central to an online prank called "Rickrolling," in which mischievous Web users in forums, blogs, Twitter posts, and instant messages would send over a link to something they claimed was a highly anticipated video (usually a movie or video game trailer) but linked to the Astley video instead.
The prank grew so mainstream that at the annual Macy's Thanksgiving parade last year, Astley was enlisted to surprise spectators and TV viewers by coming out of a float singing (OK, lip-syncing) "Never Gonna Give You Up," effectively Rickrolling the entire country. Around that time, many people concluded that the Astley revival had more or less worn out its welcome. (It should be said that one of the co-writers of "Never Gonna Give You Up" wasn't too thrilled that he wasn't making much money off the YouTube fame.)
But the Rickroll really hasn't gone away: recently, a German DJ posted a "mashup" video that proves just how eerily the lyrics of "Never Gonna Give You Up" synchronize with Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Ladies and gentlemen, the miracles of digital media.
Well, the Golden Globe nominations are out and everyone's buzzing about how Tom Cruise's fat-suit performance in Tropic Thunder is up against the late Heath Ledger's turn as the Joker in The Dark Knight. (Gee, wonder which one will win.)
But on the Web, there's another set of awards announcements making the rounds. The AOL-owned meme-culture blog Urlesque has announced the winners of its first annual "Urlies." The goofy categories include "Make It Stop" (winner: Rickrolling), "Breakout of the Year" (winner: the "Puppycam" craze), and the "WTF of the Year" (winner: the photo of the "Montauk Monster").
The best part, however, is an Oscars-inspired tribute to the Internet's veritable glut of funny cat videos. Worth a watch, embedded below:
It seems like the only complaint that the cranky digital-media press can come up with for MTVMusic.com, the legendary pop-culture brand's new music video hub, is, "Why wasn't this here years ago?"
Yeah, yeah, we know. There are licensing issues, especially for all those campy '80s videos that haven't seen the light of day in years. And launching a product prematurely could have led to bad press, as opposed to the "wow, we like this" response that MTV Music seems to have gotten thus far.
The issue, of course, is that most music videos are already available on YouTube, and it's not clear yet whether people will change their browsing habits and actually go over to MTV Music for videos now.
Viacom-owned MTV Networks has built in community features through its Flux technology, so that members can comment on videos, rate them (not surprisingly, Rick Astley's 1988 song "Never Gonna Give You Up," which has experienced a wild surge of Internet-meme popularity in the past year, is near the top of the chart), and share them on Facebook, MySpace, and blogs.
There are a couple of ads for Rhapsody, MTV's music retail partner, but I haven't seen any actual "Buy This Song" links accompanying videos. That'd be a good move for MTV.
So I leave you with Weezer's "Buddy Holly," one of my favorite videos of the '90s, back when we all thought they'd turn out to be a dweeby, one-hit-wonder novelty act:
One piece of advice that should've been obvious to participants of last weekend's Rental Car Rally from Long Island City, New York, to Montreal, Quebec: use GPS.
Or so I figured, as one member of a three-person team equipped with a MacBook, an EVDO card, a GPS navigator, a backup GPS navigator, and a radar detector to know when authorities were nearby in case we, uh, pushed the speed limit a little bit. (We only used that in New York state, though, because radar detectors are illegal in Vermont and Quebec.)
The surprising truth? A large number of the driving squads had nothing but paper maps on them, making the overnight rally--with six backroad checkpoints, most of which were marked with nothing but a set of coordinates, to ensure that you couldn't just take I-87 the whole way--a pretty difficult affair.
But even with GPS, there was some head-scratching when everyone's Garmins and TomToms navigated them right to the shores of Lake Champlain and recommended that they take a ferry. The gadgets were right: teams that drove onto the Grand Isle ferry arrived in Montreal hours before teams that chose to drive around the lake.
As for the teams that opted for maps over GPS, most of them made it...eventually.
... Read moreNEW YORK--There are video crews gearing up at the Fifth Avenue Apple Store for the iPhone 3G launch in just under two hours, but the line is only about a quarter the length of last year's.
And, to boot, many of the eager Apple customers near the back of the line got here within the past half hour. Clearly, a five-day wait isn't necessary this time around. (It wasn't last year, either, as customers soon learned.) The line continues to get longer as more people show up, but it's gotten obvious that the wait for the iPhone 3G won't be any longer than the wait for a moderately popular concert or movie premiere.
So who gets the first iPhone? Well, the concept of "first" has been muddled a bit in this case, because the first spot in line hsa been occupied by a rotating group of sustainable-agriculture activists from Waiting for Apples since July 4.
software engineers for a video in collaboration with Beet.tv.
Note: The spelling of Derek Gottfrid has been corrected.
(Credit: Beet.tv)
The New York Times has added a new feature to its Web site that takes a few cues from Facebook and Digg: TimesPeople, now in beta.
TimesPeople users can build up friends lists and can see a "news feed" of which stories their friends are recommending, sharing, and commenting on. Times online readers have been able to comment on stories, as well as rate reviewed restaurants and movies, for some time now, but recommending is new.
The TimesPeople drop-down menu, with a news feed and people search.
(Credit: NYTimes.com)TimesPeople is currently available only as a Firefox browser plug-in, but software engineers told CNET News.com that it would eventually be more widely available and without a download required. New features will be added too, but don't expect the venerable newspaper to try to compete with Mark Zuckerberg: Engineers stressed that the Times will always be an information source, not a social network. That's why the TimesPeople application is extremely light and minimal--profiles are limited to locations and user icons, and content from the social feature is limited to a "news feed" page and a drop-down menu. However, at some point, a "Most Recommended" tab may join the popular "Most E-mailed" story list that the Times' site displays.
The TimesPeople iPhone interface.
(Credit: NYTimes.com)Outside NYTimes.com, you can subscribe to a feed of an individual's activity using RSS, or browse your friends' updates with a specialized iPhone interface; TimesPeople members can also push their updates to their Facebook profiles by syncing the two. And if you'd rather just be an observer, you can subscribe to friends' updates on NYTimes.com while leaving your own feed updates turned off.
Many print publications have been working on social-news projects, primarily by partnering with existing sites like Digg. Conde Nast's Wired Digital went ahead and acquired Reddit. Critics might say that by building a social-news technology in-house, the Times is hurting itself by not tapping into the user base of an existing site.
But here's the catch: while NYTimes.com content is free, it requires a log-in to read more than a story or two at a time. The Times, consequently, has millions of user accounts already on file.
This story was researched and reported in collaboration with Andy Plesser of Beet.tv, who produced the video.
Firefox Mobile Concept Video from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
Update 10:20 a.m. PDT: This was updated to clarify the point about mobile browser alternatives.
The buzz about Firefox these days might be focused on the impending Firefox 3, but the folks at Mozilla are already thinking beyond that browser--and beyond the PC. A blog post on Wednesday from Mozilla Labs' head of user experience, Aza Raskin, shows off a video of a conceptual Firefox Mobile.
Designed for touch-screen interfaces--not multitouch, like the iPhone--the mobile Firefox browser opens up to reveal a bookmarks list and a "plus" button to open a new window. The browser controls are located to the left of the window and are accessible by panning horizontally.
Firefox competes reasonably well with Microsoft's dominant Internet Explorer on PCs, but the battle lines are only now being drawn in the mobile device browser war. One notable power is the open-source Webkit browser engine, used in the iPhone's Safari browser and Google's forthcoming Android software.
A firefox: 'I'm the cutest thing ever, and I'm coming to your cell phone!'
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy)"We're driven by demand," Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, said in a May interview when asked if he was interested in bringing Firefox to Android. "We've been concentrating on other platforms that don't have (a) browser or didn't have a good one."
The mobile Firefox is code-named "Fennec" after a small species of fox with unusually large ears. Ironically, the animal sometimes referred to as a "firefox," better known as a red panda, is more closely related to skunks and raccoons.
CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland contributed to this report.
NEW YORK--If there were a meter of Internet "fameballing," as Gawker likes to dub those fine folks who get famous on the Internet for something and keep getting more and more notorious even though most people aren't really sure why, it would've been flying off the charts on Sunday night.
The reason? Two of the tech-gossip circuit's most popular poster boys, dapper Mashable exec Pete Cashmore and eccentric Vimeo founder Jakob Lodwick took the stage together in a game of Rock Band.
The performance of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Maps," with Cashmore on vocals and Lodwick on guitar, took place at an Internet Week New York party thrown by video studio Next New Networks and blog platform Tumblr. Emcee Justin Johnson, a video producer at Next New, had encouraged a band full of Rock Band newbies to amass for the evening's final performance. With some prodding, Lodwick and Cashmore took the stage along with Mashable blogger Alana Taylor and Tumblr user Maria Alegre.
They didn't exactly rock out, as the game classified the performance as a "fail." But hey, they looked great in the process--and it'll certainly provide some fodder for tech-industry gadflies who like to poke fun at Cashmore's suave-Brit attitude and Lodwick's hipster philosophizing.
I guess it was impossible to shake off that South by Southwest geek-turned-rock-star fever. On Wednesday night, New York's new-media nerds had no problem taking center stage at a Chinatown karaoke outing.
Case in point: this video of two dudes and an unidentified female rocking out to Green Day's Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Those guys, in case you don't know 'em, are a pretty big deal. The skinny one who looks like he should be fronting a garage band is Tumblr founder David Karp, and the Jimmy Kimmel lookalike is Silicon Alley Insider reporter Dan Frommer (whose bosses are loving the fact that he got caught singing on camera).
Want backstory? It's really quite a nice peek into the workings of New York's oft-bizarre tech community.
Serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, currently at the helm of human-powered search site Mahalo, was in town to keynote at the Search Engine Summit conference. Through Twitter and Facebook, he organized a dinner outing with a few dozen local tech personalities to a restaurant in Chinatown, and afterwards, I think everybody planned on going home and playing with their computers. We're geeks, after all.
But as the stragglers were getting ready to head out, a Dodgeball alert (believe it or not, a fair number of people in the New York tech scene never abandoned the where-you-at Dodgeball service for the more messaging-oriented Twitter) came in from Dealbreaker editor John Carney. He was headed to Mott, a karaoke bar a few blocks away, and wanted some backup singers. Nobody hesitated to join up. (Maybe it was because video blog hotties Julia Allison and Meghan Asha, who are working on a Web show together, were in attendance, and the dudes wanted to impress them.)
Those in the know may recall that Carney had reportedly gone all High Noon on Calacanis when the Santa Monica, Calif.-based tech personality was in town for a charity benefit a few months ago. But Carney and Calacanis appeared to have no hard feelings between them on Wednesday night, and hugged a lot. And then there was Karp and Frommer's stunning karaoke duet. Also seen in the video: Carney (the blond guy in the suit jacket) and Valleywag's Nicholas Carlson poking his face into the camera.
Carlson was unable to achieve his goal of getting Calacanis to belt out some Frank Sinatra. Oh, well. I'm sure there will be a next time.
Because it's Monday, I figure you could all use a little amusement. Here's a blurry camera-phone video shot at Friday night's launch party for New York dot-com Dropio at the West Village nightclub Le Royale, in which the dance floor got a little bit rowdy.
Watch British import Pete Cashmore, founder of social-networking blog Mashable, bounce around like Silly Putty. (He's the guy in the Mashable T-shirt.) With him is entrepreneur and dance-floor buddy Michael Gruen (guy in the argyle sweater).
Happy Monday!
