OK GO!.....Uhmmm...a while ago!

I was watching video hits on Saturday morning, like I usually do if ever I wake up in time, and to my surprise, OK-GO!'s song was on it! I was, as per usual, chatting to friends as my wake up ritual on msn when this happened. Funnily enougf I was in the midst of talkin to a friend, whom I told her how great they were, when she was telling me the other day her sister had sent her a link from Youtube of their video too, about a week after I did.

This group as a huge following on the Net, esp. Youtube and it made me think about the issue of passive vs. active viewer, with TV and radio being passive, and Web 2.0 being active.

As I continued chatting online, still present in the twilight of time between sleep and awake, when I heard the host, Axel Whitehead, talk about Kelis' song ‘Bossy‘, discussing her past work, and furthermore introducing the song as her new one. My first gut reaction was a bit of ’No!!! U-DID-NT!‘as it seemed a far cry to be able to call it ‘new’ as I have already known and seen the single on Youtube at least 2 weeks ago, and OK GO! I think even longer.

And today, as I drove home from a friend’s BBQ @ Centenial Park in Homebush, I was listening to triple J wen once again the hype about OK GO! was turned up, as they were saying how they hav broke so many online music records, which must have been a topic in the air, with Lily Allen, whom I also watchd on Video hits on Sat, as she discuss her own online fame, thru her online myspace shows.

And then it dawnd on me how slow, tv and radio pick up new things that rise out of our cultural surface. To me, Youtube is a medium for active viewing and is a better receptor for new and emerging things, in this musicians and artists, which exist at our cultural fringe.

The only downside I see in the advent of the successful rise of the underground bands such as OK GO! is that it is a little annoying to get ‘re-xcited’about them again once you were one of the early passengers to board that ship….becos once their one the radio or being interviewd on tv, in most cases that it has happened to me, that ship has already came and saild, that as the 2nd round of adopters get all xcitd about the music I cant help to feel a slight blunting about the whole thing, as the music that I once saw as so cutting slip further and further into the mainstream, slowly and gradually getting old and tired.

This weekend’s instances has stressed to me the point of how much I hav left the influences on my own musical taste to the in many ways out-dated radio and tv. I feel that I shouldn’t have to work my weekend morning schedule to catch/tape these shows, becos in many cases, the contents is at least a week old, and in the circles that I run in, that’s ancient bro!

It is a lot more convenient to watch them on formats like Youtube, becos you can decide to watch them at any time that suits u, u just need to search for them, or look up tags that relate to them. I only find the radio a useful format to use, because it allows me to put it in the background, and zone in and out of it as I tackle more important things, like drive, or do work, or household things. I feel like as it would be much more wiser to allow me, an avid listener to music, to give myself greater control on the expanse of my music listening repertoire.

To sum up, being an active user, has alot more to offer than being a spoon-fed passive user. You are connected directly to the source, hav an ear to the ground of new and emerging aspects of our culture, and if u have any motivation in ur spare time to just go and rummage in the cultural waste bin of Youtube, U might find something that u really like, or act least, feel a littl bit proud of urself, that u can put a stamp of discoverying it, a day, a week, or a month, b4 anyone else u kno.

Cheers big ears!
Chase.