New video series! Joining the likes of Best Live Tracks and Best New Music, this series will present what I think are some of the Best Covers Ever.
Credit where credit is due, my friend Brent linked to these guys and it’s only through him that I found them. Nonetheless, this husband and wife YouTube sensation do incredible covers of songs you wouldn’t expect to sound so good. And they just seem so gosh darn happy!
Karmin — Price Tag
Karmin — Lighters
In this video, our Penelope Lou performs a trick after her own particular fashion.
The dedication is to her dear Aunt Karin who knows a thing or two about dogs.
For his 30th birthday, Lucas Jatoba, a Brazilian living in Australia, had the brilliant idea to give back to the country he’d grown to love so much. The film below documents Lucas and friends creating and distributing “30 gifts to 30 strangers”. The result is absolutely heart-warming.
30 gifts to 30 strangers in Sydney from Lucas Jatoba on Vimeo.
Make sure to check out the Making Of… video as well for some fun behind-the-scenes footage.
I certainly know what I’m doing when I hit the big 3-0.
Back in 1988 a man named Jack Rebney and a crew of amateur filmmakers were under contract with Winnebago Industries to make an industrial promo film for Winnebago salesman to use across the country. The infomercial was filmed over the course of a dozen days, in the heat of the summer, in the middle of Iowa. Rebney, being a seasoned broadcaster whose career included two stints with CBS, quickly lost patience battling the scorching heat, the vexatious fly population, and his bumbling production crew. The result of Jack’s lost patience? The famous Winnebago Man outtakes reel. Outtakes peppered with so much swearing and so many breakdowns and brilliant catch phrases that it earned Rebney the title “The World’s Angriest Man” and became, arguably, the first viral video (originally passes around on VHS tapes).
Winnebago Man, the 2009 documentary, is the quest of one filmmaker, Ben Steinbauer, to track Rebney down and find out exactly what made him so angry. The resulting film is brilliant.
Steinbauer, while annoying and vexatious himself at times, hires a private detective to find Rebney and from there we begin an emotional, mysterious, and humorous adventure into the foothills of Northern California. Without spoiling too much I can tell you that this film packs a wonderful story, has a very good pace, and if you like human interest dramas about truly interesting people than you’ll enjoy this film. In fact, after watching it I thought how interesting it would be to see more of these “Where Are They Now” videos about former YouTube stars—those, of course, who didn’t intend to achieve stardom.
All in all, if you like documentaries, or even if you can mildly tolerate them, this is a great summer film to spend an afternoon or evening with. Oh, and it has a lot of swears.
It was my wonderful wife, Maria, who first tipped me off to The Civil Wars. It was Taylor Swift on Twitter—not that Maria follows Taylor Swift, I should hope not!—that apparently tweeted about the folksy duo and, via the power of having a million followers, launched them into atmospheric orbit.
The Civil Wars are just about a stripped down as you can guy. Joy Williams (yes, that Joy Williams) and John Paul White, a guitar, and the occasional percussion and piano. The focus though, in my opinion, isn’t so much on the instruments. What sets this band a bar above others is how well they use their voices, together. It just works, so well. White’s trembling tenor and Williams’s crisp vocal range play so well together, you have to hear it to understand.
When we saw them live in a tiny club in Toronto back in the Spring. Well, let me just say that this is one of those groups you need to see live. I’ll say that their recorded stuff, even the live recorded stuff, captures only about 40% of the power and perfection of a live performance. 40% folks.
Here are a couple of my favourite live tracks, and their single:
“Between the Bars” (Elliott Smith Cover)
“Disarm” (Smashing Pumpkins Cover)
“Barton Hollow”
If you’ve had your head in the sand this week then maybe you’ve missed the Internet’s newest sensation: Rebecca Black.
Earlier this week her music video, “Friday,” went viral. Big time.
The YouTube video quickly garnered 12 million views in the course of just a few days and now she’s doing the talk show circuit. But what differentiates Black from other YouTube sensations like Canada’s own heart throb Justin Bieber (I prefer Dwight from The Office’s “Justice Beaver”) is the reason why she’s become so popular.
Unlike The Bieb, Black’s video isn’t growing in popularity because she’s a great singer—an undiscovered musical gem from a tiny little town in Ontario—it’s her completely over-the-top cheeseball of a music video, and lack of any semblance of musical talent. When I first saw the video which features, at several points, Black trying to decide which car seat to sit in—the front seat or the back seat?!—I wondered if this wasn’t an SNL Digital Short. It was ridiculous, playing up all kinds of stereotypes, complete with Rebecca’s constantly auto-tuned voice and some of the worst lyrics imaginable.
But apparently it’s for reals.
Doing some digging I found out that Rebecca Black was recruited by Ark Music Factory, a record label that puts out casting calls looking for the next Justin Bieber. Ark Music Factory finds young people, gives them the songs to sing, and then produces high quality videos to stick up on YouTube hoping to make it viral. Whether the song Black was given to sing was an honest effort by some pretty minimally-talented songwriters or whether the joke was on her all along, it’s hard to say but the result is priceless.
The fallout, however, has been anything but kind. The success of the video is based on its terribleness. Black has been criticized and made fun of and given the kind of treatment that only the Internet is capable of. Her fame hasn’t come from her talent but out of what’s now become an embarrassment for her—her fame is at her expense.
And for me, this whole episode begs a pretty interesting question for me: Are we bullying Rebecca Black?
TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin recently aired a great piece of the whole usage-based billing fiasco that’s sweeping across this great nation.
If you aren’t familiar with the concept of the big Internet providers forcing the smaller ones to adopt their pricing structures and to charge users based on how much Internet they consume, I wrote a piece about it here that you might like to read.
Below, though, is a great clip from The Agenda contributor Tony Keller, who compares usage-based billing (UBB) to fast food restaurants. It’s a great explanation of what UBB means for the Internet industry and for ordinary Canadians:
For those looking for more techno-political drama, The Agenda also assembled a panel debate on the issue. As a way of cliffnotes, it’s 37 minutes long, altogether pretty interesting (if you’re into this kind of stuff), and in the end the Bell representative winds up coming across as an greasy snake oil salesman.
