Music is the one thing that humans create

The other day, a friend was over and I had music from the iPod playing. A weird song, that I love, from a Believer compilation came on. "What is THIS?" my friend asked. It occurred to me that even though I love this song, I'd never looked up the band, CocoRosie. They're two sisters who make very unconventional but strangely beautiful music. Their first album was recorded in their apartment bathroom in Brooklyn. You only have to watch this video to see how bizarre and yet wonderful they are:



I got feedback from several people that they liked my posts on music and one reader offered, in response to my claim that humans don't actually make anything, that we create music not from nature but from our imaginations. I have to give him that. I think I would die without music. Here's what I'm digging at the moment.

Albums that I love every song on are:
Spoon, Gimme Fiction
The Raconteurs, Broken Boy Soldiers
Dandy Warhols, Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia, Welcome To The Monkey House (I still don't have their latest)

I listen to this Dandy Warhols song every time I go running and it makes me laugh my ass off. It's fantastic, especially if you're a "struggling artist."



I recently got the KT Tunstall album. She had two very mainstream songs playing all over the radio ("Suddenly I See", "Black Horse & The Cherry Tree") so I got this one for my mom as catchy and easy to get into usually becomes irritating to me. But this is a great album! KT is half Chinese, adopted, grew up in Scotland and is actually musically educated. You can hear in her voice that she's a spirited and passionate person. I prefer listening to her rich voice without seeing her face but to get a taste, here's the video for one of my favorite songs "Another Place to Fall."



If you were into the English Beat in the 80's, check out The Futureheads' News & Tributes. If you were also a fan of early Talking Heads and Devo, give a listen to Maxïmo Park ("Apply Some Pressure" is their radio hit.)



Oh and this is really fun! I've been a fan of Natacha Atlas, an Egyptian musician, for ten years. I have every album starting with Diaspora. A couple of years ago she put out an album, Something Dangerous, that expands on her traditional sound by incorporating rap, jazz, R&B, pop and dance. I was supposed to see her in concert at the Hollywood Bowl a couple of summers ago but they announced that her Visa was denied on suspicion of terrorism. Nice work America! Here's a song from it:



ENJOY!

“The Biggest Hat That Has Ever Been Made in the History of the World."

Last year I was the secretary for my local college alumni organization and put my experience to work organizing their first film festival. It featured several shorts (including my own) and one full-length film, Balloonhat in which balloon-twister Addi Somekh traveled around the world and demonstrated his unique ability to transcend cultural divides and make people smile with his creations. It was an inspiring and uplifting film. Afterwards the audience flocked around Addi to watch him make balloon art for us.


Addi just sent me an email that he has launched his own channel on YouTube. He writes:
It's been 16 years since I twisted my first balloon, and I decided to celebrate by starting a channel on YouTube called Addi’s Inflatable Minute. Every week will be completely different yet always anchored in the fascinating power of All Things Inflatable: Wild experiments with giant balloons clobbering little kids, the time I made 200 hats on the Martha Stewart Show, instructions on how to make the balloon ring (and impress the ladies) and “The Biggest Hat That Has Ever Been Made in the History of the World." Upcoming episodes include a guy in Berkeley that invented a balloon organ(?!), a balloon bikini photo shoot, a balloon hat/wheelchair parade in a nursing home and much more.

It's fantastic, watch them all!

Suing the pants off each other

I just met with a recruiter who wants to send me to one of the top ad agencies in LA to interview. I looked them up and the founder is the guy that came up with the Jack In the Box clown CEO while at another agency. "Did you hear?" she said, "They're getting sued right now by Burger King."

Their latest commercial insinuates that the Angus beef served by BK is actually anus beef. (This is, apparently, funny). Jack couldn't be happier that they're being sued as it's fantastic free publicity. I couldn't help but think this is how our "great nation" will end. Our world will be collapsing around us while we're busy suing the pants off of each other.

Pay the monkey back

A bevy of bands that I'm listening to now are imbued with the sixties: steeped in the varied sounds of The Rolling Stones from the late sixties mixed with a good measure of The Beatles, The Beach Boys and The Kinks from the mid-sixties and a dash of Herb Alpert and Nina Simone added for good measure.


The songs put out by The Bees, The Dandy Warhols, and The Raconteurs are unmistakably reminiscent and yet the product is wholly original. Amy Winehouse sounds like she's imported directly from the sixties as the new sound of Motown! These songs make me feel like I'm listening to memories from my childhood with the excitement of discovering something new. It's truly exhilarating.

One song, Chicken Payback by The Bees, is like a kids' tune from The Electric Company with utterly ridiculous and yet irresistibly singable lyrics set to a simple beat. Every comedian will tell you that words with hard consonants are naturally funny, as are the names of animals...and get a load of these lyrics! (Come to think of it, wonder if this is an animal rights song?)

Watch the video (lyrics below):


Chicken Payback by The Bees

(chicken)
pay the chicken back back
pay the chicken back
pay back the chicken back
do the chicken payback

(piggy)
pay the piggy back back
pay the piggy back
pay back the piggy back
do the piggy payback

(monkey)
pay the monkey back back
pay the monkey back
see the monkey
do the monkey
pay the monkey back
oh

(chicken)
pay the chicken back back
pay the chicken back
pay back the chicken back
back do the chicken payback

(camel)
pay the camel back
sittin' on the camel back
see the camel
do the camel
pay the camel back

(donkey)
pay the donkey back back
pay the donkey back
pay back the donkey
pay back
pay back the donkey

yeah
come on
all the animals together
break it down
let me hear ya

[repeat the above]

Do-it yourself is a bad idea

Ever have a boyfriend write you a poem in high school? Watch American Idol? Read an amateur script? I don't have to tell you that some people are more talented than others. There are people who can do things that literally no other person on earth can do. Where did we get the idea that the world would be a better place if instead of celebrating the talented, we elevated the common person to doing whatever they want?

President Bush has said, in defense of going to war in Iraq, that he doesn't believe that the general population is qualified to decide what government should do. Frankly, I have to agree with him on this point. I mean, despite our country being "the land of opportunity", the idea is not that anyone can be president.

A candidate should have to be extraordinarily intelligent, decisive, rational, educated, informed and compassionate because that person is making decisions on a daily basis that far eclipse the weight of any decision the average person will make in his/her lifetime.

Certainly radical transparency and information sharing are very, very good things. We are no longer living in a world that can afford proprietary rights on anything that can save or improve the lives of others. But I ask you, should we really be allowed to collectively create our world? Look what happened to the Romans!


Today, the idea of gladiators fighting to the death, and of an amphitheatre where this could take place watched by an enthusiastic audience, epitomises the depths to which the Roman Empire was capable of sinking. Yet, to the Romans themselves, the institution of the arena was one of the defining features of their civilisation.

Sound familiar? We're getting giddy over Web 2.0, writing our blogs and then Time magazine declares us all the "Person of the Year." Meanwhile every show on television (including the news) is about tragedy and humiliation, the top story clicked on in The Seattle Times was about horse sex and YouTube and MySpace, while legitimately doing what they were created to do, are also cesspools of the obscene and violent. I'm surprised this didn't make it online.

Don Imus, in his apology, acknowledged that as a society, we need to consider the direction we're going:
Here's what I've learned: that you can't make fun of everybody, because some people don't deserve it. And because the climate on this program has been what it's been for 30 years doesn't mean that it has to be that way for the next five years or whatever because that has to change, and I understand that.

Marketing now is all about interactivity, personalization and relevancy. Some of it is just common sense: in a world where thousands of companies are marketing to me at once, I only want to hear about things I might actually want to buy. But a lot of it is just time-consuming crap that taps into our limitless egos. "Put your face on something and send it to all your friends - they'll love it!"

Are we really living in a more personalized world or are we just being duped into doing more ourselves? Self check-out at the grocery store, do-it yourself plumbing, "customer service" that requires you to be on hold for a half hour and then an hour troubleshooting some piece of electronic equipment are things we don't even blink at anymore. Now marketers want us to make their commercials, write their ads and even design their products!

Lynne Truss wrote a fantastically hilarious book that touches on it - Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door. This is one of those those books that you shake your head, laugh out loud and say "so true" to yourself while reading it. Here's an excerpt.

The bottom line is, we're facing extremely tough and complex issues in the 21st century that the average person will not be able to solve, even if they desire to do so.

Here's an example from The New York Times:

- A Northwest power company owns four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River, a crucial source of so-called clean energy at a time when carbon emissions have become one of the world’s foremost environmental concerns. Without them, they'd have to rely more heavily on coal or natural gas. The Klamath dams only provide enough power to serve about 70,000 homes, a small fraction of PacifiCorp’s 1.6 million customers, which span six Western states.

- The American Indians, fishermen and environmentalists want the dams removed. They say for the last 90 years since the dams were built, endangered salmon have been blocked from migrating, Indian livelihoods have been threatened and the commercial fishing industry off the Oregon and California coasts has been devastated. In addition the water in the river is filthy.

- Residents in Portland and Seattle are the most sympathetic to taking down the dams but they're the ones getting the cheap power hydroelectric provides.

- Farmers in the area rely on the river and its dams which support an elaborate irrigation system started by the federal government more than a century ago. It provides water for about 240,000 acres of cattle pastures, alfalfa fields and other farming and also flows through a wildlife preserve.

So what do you think? Leave the dams? Take them down? What kind of clean-fuel alternatives do you think we should be promoting in Oregon to take their place?

What we should be doing is recognizing, supporting, promoting and celebrating those talented and rare individuals who can actually solve our problems (and for that matter, write TV shows, make movies and run the country)!

Let Cam do your breast exam

This Breast Cancer Society of Canada commercial, from 2000, was created to encourage young women to self-examine. It's freakin' hilarious. I love it.



Some good reasons from The National Breast Cancer Foundation to do regular self-examinations:
* Every two minutes a woman is diagnosed with breast cancer.
* Breast cancer is the leading cause of death in women between the ages of 40 and 55.
* Seventy percent of all breast cancers are found through breast self-exams.
* Eight out of ten breast lumps are not cancerous.

Do the math. Do the exam.

Product design: back on track

Just as cars were starting to look like cockroaches:



And apartment buildings:


Toyota has come up with some really fun and stylish vehicles - the Matrix, Yaris and FJ Cruiser.

The RAV4 has evolved from a cute car to a beautiful grown-up auto (with an awkward teen period):


Check out their promotional films, they're pretty cool.


The RAV4 tagline is: Too intelligent to be categorized. No wonder I love this car!

Sharing leads to purchasing

Last night in my networking group, we got into a discussion of content rights and how companies are trying to protect themselves from unauthorized sharing (ala YouTube). Several people, including myself, made the argument that with the staggering amount of content available these days (online, radio, TV, cable, theater, video, mobile, etc) it's impossible for people to find content the old-fashioned way. We're often told about it by a friend. Given the right push, we can become serious consumers of this content but it sometimes takes a little bit of free content.

Today, I had lunch with an old friend and we were chuckling about how, sometimes, a whiff of something at a restaurant will take us back to our food service days (sometimes grossing us out). He sent me this hilariously relevant video, "Waiters Who Are Nauseated By Food."

I was almost in tears it's so funny, and at the end, I read some of the comments and found my proof of how a bit of free content can spawn a purchase.

Problem is, people aren't necessarily purchasing the content companies might want them to. The content actually has to be good and desirable. Maybe that's why many companies don't mind getting a little "free" publicity on YouTube. They know their users will spread the word, get hooked, and purchase. It's the ones with crappy content that should be worried.

By the way, remember what people said about cable back in the day? That people would never pay for television when they could get it for free. But they did pay. Then they said people wouldn't pay if there weren't any commercials. But they kept paying. People pay because cable has the best content. Ultimately, quality is all that matters.

Milk Gone Wild!

OMG, this is fantastic! Only PETA could make a health statement, protest the mistreatment of animals, satire sexism, and be totally hip and kind of sexy at the same time. I agree with the user who posted that it's demented. It is, but in the best kind of way.

What makes a video campaign viral?

Just started the new job I'm not afraid anymore. But I am excited! The CEO came by my desk and we chatted about video campaigns. He showed a couple of successful (in terms of views) examples in the Monday Meeting. But what makes content virally successful? Is it just the entertainment value? Or does it matter where it's hosted? Are people more likely to watch a video on YouTube than on a corporate site? While people know that they're watching professionally produced content on You Tube much of the time, I think there's a thrill in the fact that they "found" it.

One of the funniest videos I've seen is an interactive video for Coke Zero (think Subservient Chicken). I only saw it because a friend of mine is the actor in it and forwarded to me. Otherwise, I've heard nothing about it and it's never been forwarded to me. Because it's interactive, it can't be hosted on YouTube but it's amazing to me how often I see a lot of production going into a concept but the whole "viral" component is completely missing. How did they intend for this video to circulate?

I think companies think these things just magically become viral. They don't. There's too much content on the Web for things to just be found. You have to get the ball rolling yourself. Then, if it's entertaining, relevant and accessible, it might become viral. Or not. Entertainment is not an exact science and more than ever, people want to be entertained.

An example of a site with crazy functionality but very bad exposure was to advertise The Simpsons. The contest was to create a trailer for their Halloween special using provided video clips, audio effects and music. The online editor was pretty good, not terribly accurate, but good enough to hook me. I spent several hours after work one day creating my trailer. Then what? I couldn't find it. I couldn't send it to a friend to rate it. I entered my email address but never received an email! I didn't even get a notice that the contest had ended. Nothing.

Too often, companies are sold on a cool idea but someone forgets to make it relevant (see my earlier post Faking It) or viral. To see an example of simple and really effective content, check out Church Sign Generator. I first got this on Friendster (before MySpace!) several years ago and it was just the first design shown. This obviously isn't selling anything, but can you see how this concept could?