On a spring afternoon in 2005, the members of OK Go dressed up in cheesy fits, gathered in entrance of a video digicam and awkwardly danced their approach into historical past.
The band’s DIY single-shot clip for its tune “A Million Ways” — wherein the brainy rock quartet strikes by way of three and a half minutes of intricate choreography on the patio behind singer Damian Kulash’s Los Angeles residence — grew to become one among music’s first viral movies, racking up thousands and thousands of downloads (keep in mind these?) and serving to to determine a brand new approach for acts to attach with followers because the web started to supplant MTV and High 40 radio.
OK Go doubled down on the strategy in 2006 with its video for “Here It Goes Again,” one other bare-bones manufacturing that had the musicians dancing on eight synchronized treadmills, then went on to make more and more elaborate clips that includes a Rube Goldberg machine, a zero-gravity airplane flight and a pack of lovely canine.
“As soon as the treadmill thing happened, it was like: Holy s—, we’re pop culture now,” Kulash mentioned the opposite day of “Here It Goes Again,” which gained a Grammy Award for finest music video and has been seen greater than 67 million occasions on YouTube.
Twenty years after “A Million Ways,” the mechanics of cultural connection have reworked once more because of social media and TikTok, the place what you encounter as you scroll is guided by the invisible hand of information evaluation.
Mentioned OK Go bassist Tim Nordwind with grinning understatement: “The algorithm has become a bit more powerful.”
“Not a big fan of the algorithm as an arbiter of art,” Kulash added. “It’s sad to see optimization in a space that was once the Wild West.”
But OK Go continues to be at it: Final month the group launched its newest one-shot video for the tune “Love,” for which Kulash and his co-directors put in dozens of mirrors on highly effective robotic arms inside an outdated Budapest practice station to create a sort of kaleidoscopic impediment course.
The band’s strategies have grown extra subtle since “A Million Ways,” and nowadays it seeks out company sponsors to assist convey Kulash’s visions to life. However an adventuresome — and touchingly private — spirit stays key to its work.
“What I love about the ‘Love’ video is the humans in the room,” Kulash mentioned as he and Nordwind sat outdoors a Burbank rehearsal studio the place OK Go was making ready for a tour scheduled to cease Friday and Saturday at L.A.’s Bellwether. (The group’s different members are guitarist Andy Ross and drummer Dan Konopka.) “The robots are only there,” the singer added, “to move the mirrors so that we can experience that magical thing — so simple and beautiful — of two mirrors making infinity.”
A wistful psych-pop jam impressed by Kulash’s changing into a father to twins — his spouse, writer and filmmaker Kristin Gore, is a daughter of former Vice President Al Gore — “Love” comes from OK Go’s new album, “And the Adjacent Possible,” its first LP since 2014. It’s a characteristically eclectic set that additionally features a strutting funk-rock tune that includes Ben Harper, a glammy rave-up co-written by Shudder to Suppose’s Craig Wedren and a woozy existentialist’s ballad about discovering there’s no “no deus ex machina working away in the wings.” (That final one’s known as “This Is How It Ends.”)
“We’re old people who listen to sad ballads,” mentioned Kulash, who’ll flip 50 in October. “That’s what happens when you become an old person, right?”
Wedren, who’s identified Kulash because the latter was a teenage Shudder to Suppose fan of their shared hometown of Washington, D.C., mentioned that “part of the beauty of OK Go is that they’re so musically omnivorous — that all these things that wouldn’t seem to go together always end up sounding like OK Go.” In Wedren’s view, the band “doesn’t get enough credit for how exploratory they are as musicians — maybe because of the genius of the videos.”
If that’s the case, Kulash doesn’t appear particularly to thoughts. He knew practically 20 years in the past that the viral success of the treadmill video — which the band recreated onstage on the 2006 MTV Video Music Awards between performances by Justin Timberlake and Beyoncé — threatened to make OK Go “a one-hit wonder whose one hit was an exercise equipment stunt,” because the singer put it. “Or it could be the opening to an opportunity to do more and weirder things.”
Among the many bizarre issues the group ended up doing: the 2014 clip for “I Won’t Let You Down,” wherein the members trip round a parking zone in Japan on private mobility units underneath the attention of a digicam on a drone.
“I remember hearing that Radiohead didn’t play ‘Creep’ for 10 or 15 years because they were too cool for that,” he mentioned. “Had we taken the path of being too cool for treadmills and homemade videos, I can look back and say —”
“We’d have had a much quieter career,” Nordwind chimed in.
There’s a approach of OK Go’s emphasis on visuals that depicts the band as a harbinger of an period when “musician” is simply one other phrase for “content creator.”
“It’s weird to think about a life in the vertical as opposed to the horizontal,” Nordwind mentioned with amusing, referring to the respective orientations of movies on TikTok and YouTube.
“What’s difficult about social media is the question of volume — the volume and quality balance is off to me,” Kulash mentioned.
Creators, he means, are anticipated to churn out content material like little one-person factories.
“Day after day,” Nordwind mentioned. “We like to take our time.”
“Also: When I fall in love with a song, I want to hear that song over and over again,” Kulash mentioned. “I will listen to ‘Purple Rain’ until I die. Do people go back and search someone’s feed to replay the TikTok they first fell in love with?
“The relationship that I think people have to their favorite YouTube star or TikToker,” he added, “feels much more like a relationship to celebrity than it does a relationship to art.”
OK Go at its rehearsal studio in Burbank.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Occasions)
For Kulash, who made his characteristic debut as a director (alongside his spouse) with 2023’s “The Beanie Bubble,” the pursuit of artwork is sure up in concepts of effort and limitation, which is why AI doesn’t curiosity him as a filmmaking software.
“When everything is possible, nothing is special,” he mentioned. “The reason we shoot our videos in a single shot is not purely for the filmmaking heroics. It’s because that’s the only way to prove to people: This is real — we did the thing.”
OK Go’s dedication to pricey and time-consuming sensible results has led to partnerships with numerous deep-pocketed manufacturers, starting with State Farm, which spent a reported $150,000 to finance the band’s 2010 “This Too Shall Pass” video with the Rube Goldberg machine. (Meta sponsored the “Love” video and in return obtained a distinguished spot within the clip for its Ray-Ban sensible glasses.)
Kulash mentioned that sort of product placement was “scary as s—” again within the late 2000s, when the worry of being perceived as sellouts haunted each rock band.
“Now, of course, it’s like a badge of honor,” he added, amongst influencers desperate to flaunt their company ties.
To elucidate his place on the matter, the singer — whose band walked away from its cope with Capitol Data in 2010 to start out its personal label, Paracadute — tried out an prolonged metaphor: “On the other side of the planet, tectonic plates are moving and the hot magma of corporate money is coming out of the ground. That’s why the MTV Awards exist, that’s why the Grammys exist, that’s why everything you think of as a celebration of high art exists. It’s all advertising dollars, every last bit of it. You’re protected by these continents of middle-people, which let you feel like you’re marking art. But if you can manage to be one of those microbes at the bottom of the sea that gets its energy directly from the thermal vents of the hot magma money, then you get to make something other people don’t.” He laughed.
“There’s no record label in the world that would ever be like, ‘Hey, why don’t you go to Budapest for three weeks and spend a ridiculous amount of money to make this music video at a time when there’s not even a music video channel anymore?’
“But brands know that’s worthwhile, and we know that’s worthwhile,” he mentioned. “You just have to make sure you don’t get burned by the magma.”
