great songs #1,456,021

She's In Fashion, Suede, 1999

David Bowie with Ava Cherry, "Footstompin", 1974

You don't see this anymore; a popular musician openly presenting one of his influences on a cable television appearance. 'Footstompin' is a 60s single by the Flares, but you can hear the guitar riff that would soon become the backbone of 'Fame'. I just think this is a killer performance.

Debbie Harry in H.R. Giger's studio, 1981

internet nostalgia: unmanaged comedy

The Threebrain videos were some of the first 'viral' videos I ever saw. Before Youtube become a household tool it was the smaller, DIY websites that hosted the best videos, and friends would crowd around each other's clunky desktop PCs and share URLs. Threebrain had some of the funniest stuff I'd ever seen.



Before the age of omnipresent internet, television was the primary source for comedy, though it was all 'managed' comedy. The guys you saw on comedy central and HBO had already been forced to jump through a lot of hoops and omit a LOT of material to create a show that would be palatable to a wide audience, because in television there was no other audience; you must appeal to everyone, or you appeal to no one. In the TV age, something like this would have never received a second of airplay:



The internet brought in the Age of the Unmanaged, a time for comedians (or musicians, or filmmakers) to make their raw output accessible to a wide audience, or a small audience, or ANY audience. No joke was forcibly cut, or deemed too strange or random or offensive or left-field. If someone had vision, at last that vision could see full realization without being butchered by a team of marketers. And thus, magic happened.



The idea of appropriating and abusing the old G.I.Joe PSAs was surely not a novel one; everyone who had seen the show had poked fun at the dopey lessons laid out by the Joes at the end of every episode. Eric Fensler's clips, however, are classic because they're anything but obvious. These parodies are born from a sense of humor that we would never have been exposed to on cable television, because it's too bizarre to present to a wide audience. The glory of the internet, though, is that your show has a 24-hour timeslot; you can plant a joke in the world wide web, and with time and sunlight it will grow its own audience. Realistically, probably 1 in 5 members of the wide audience would laugh at "I'm a computer." But over time, from one desktop PC to the next, that ends up being a lot of 1's.



Eventually the G.I. Joe clips did get a bit of unwanted management, when Hasbro issued a cease-and-desist letter to Fensler, demanding that he remove the videos from his website. It didn't matter, though - the small audience that appreciated the videos turned out to be large enough to keep them alive, hosting them on a slew of other sites including Youtube. Fensler then found himself writing promos for Adult Swim, a programming block that found success by appealing to the very audience that finds dancing hamsters and psychotic G.I. Joes funny. (I hear these days he writes for Tim & Eric Awesome Show, a televised, managed program that achieves a very unmanaged feel.)

Guy Laramee carves these mountainous landscapes out of books. Don't ask me how.
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