| Pop Eye |
| Down Home Success: ‘A Million Ways’ to be Cool! |
| by David Belenky |
| While twenty dollars won’t accommodate you, your date, and a box of Goobers at the movies anymore, it apparently can budget a full-length music video. Just ask Chicago based band mates OKGO. |
With some fancy footwork, OKGO's homemade dance video for the new single, “A Million Ways”, has become the hottest downloaded clip on the Internet (www.okgo.net).
“The intention was to perform the dance, --live at shows.” explains OKGO bassist Tim Nordwind. They set up a camera in lead singer Damian Kulash’s backyard and taped the dance during rehearsals. “We then passed it on to a few friends to show them what we put together. Pretty soon our friends put it up on their blogs and passed it around to their friends, etc.” says Nordwind. With three million hits and counting, fands and enthusiasts are now pushing to have the video played in heavy rotation on MTV.
Entertainment Weekly, Time Magazine, The New York Times, Good Morning America, and VH1’s Best Week Ever are all calling the dance an Internet phenomenon.
Without question, the clips charm is it’s homespun likeability. Recalling that childhood obsession with documenting yourself as Aerosmith or Madonna, the band mates break out in a flamboyant routine paying homage to Jerome Robbins and Hollywood special effects. Choreographed by Kulash’s sister, Patricia Sie, a former professional ballroom dancer, it’s uncanny how skilled and fluid their dancing unfolds. Based on MTV’s current crop of hipster bands, where irony and metrosexuality rule the scene, one would expect to see OKGO lampoon themselves with two left feet. On the contrary, in one single take, the glam-boys go from ‘Guys and Dolls’, a full-on fight sequence a ‘la ‘West Side Story’, to a hilarious parody of the ‘Matrix’ in which the boys, through their dance, imitate slowing the camera down. As if you and friends never did that before in your backyard!
A throwback to the day when Thriller and music videos were shameless mini-pop culture events, as opposed to self absorbed statements for cross marketing, this clip will remind you how much fun a music video can be. And all the goods for just under twenty bucks. Take note Gwen. |
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