Archive for July, 2008
an entirely too deep look into the monkees
08 Jul, 2008 • posts i've written • 1 comment
Last Train to Clarksville — The Monkees’ first number one hit in August 1966. It actually preceded the airing of the hit television series by a few weeks.
You might remember that yesterday I was mulling over what seems like a cultural shift from the copycat to the remix, and I asked Mike Arauz his thoughts on the subject. He asked a good question, ‘What made the Monkees so successful? Was it just the tv show?’
My immediate answer, was that while there were a glut of bands trying to ride the wave of the british invasion and the beatles’ sound, ‘The Monkees’ was an incredibly self-aware and self-deprecating clone. And that’s true, the tv show itself employed a variety of self-aware techniques like breaking the fourth wall and talking to the camera well before it was an established technique in episodic television (not to mention music videos before music videos existed). I also think it shouldn’t be taken for granted that The Monkees was a ground breaking show in premise alone: it was a tv sitcom about a fake band, composed of real musicians (as their later albums demonstrated), using their real identities (mostly), that launched the real band. American Idol, America’s Got Talent, et al, eat your heart out.
But I’ve been thinking it over some more, and that immediate answer isn’t enough to account for the popularity of the group. And I think the real answer lies somewhere still in the discussion between copycats and remixes.
In the 60′s, TV was hitting the height of its power as a persuasion medium. And it definitely functioned as the tastemaker for popular music during that time. Following the ‘pre-fab four’ around on their totally random adventures sold records. Furthermore, the powers that be were running the show. Bob Rafelson (director and co-writer of Five Easy Pieces*) and Bert Schneider (son of a Columbia Pictures President) were the producers — and at their disposal was the entire writing team at Columbia Records’ Brill Building. Hence the ability to drop a single BEFORE the show ever ran and see it hit number one. The Monkees are an example of supreme copycatting, launched at a time when the copycat was also an incredibly powerful model. (has this model worked for P. Diddy in the last decade with his groups? And he has a powerful brand to launch these groups, which are more like brand extensions than The Monkees ever were)
So, why were The Monkees so successful? So far we’ve got 1) the rise of tv’s power to persuade and 2) it was an excellent copycat, produced by heavy weights in both tv and music. But there’s a third ingredient missing-scarcity.
These days, copycats abound. Any hit has copycat products following close behind like the tail of a comet, especially in music. Its just gotten easier to produce almost anything these days, and with social networks, copycat bands have a hell of lot easier time reaching fans of the hits. Not so in the 1960′s, however. Copycats had a hard time getting noticed at all, siphoning off much less of the hit’s fanbase. The Monkees were different though, they had an incredibly visible platform to launch from and again, an amazingly powerful vehicle of persuasion. This put them leaps and bounds ahead of their copycat competitors.
Ok, I’m satisfied for now. Off to non-Monkees thoughts…
*Weirdest trivia I uncovered during this research: Jack Nicholson co-write The Monkees film, Head.
the remix versus the copycat
07 Jul, 2008 • posts i've written • 1 comment
I’ve been thinking a lot about copycats, cover songs, and club mixes. What’s the key difference and which is more culturally authentic? On one hand, people have been covering songs as long as someone has been writing them, but remixes seem like a different beast altogether. Copyright law itself establishes the possibility that a remix could be so entirely removed from the original to be considered a unique property. (covers not so much)
The copycat is a massively successful business model (wait for a hit, then rush to market with clones — one recent example in book publishing comes to mind), but is the remix emerging as a model too? Are the two differentiated enough to make such a case? I can think of plenty of copycat products, but what about remixes? Copycats seem to be more top-down driven, while remixing is very bottom-up (it requires less actual manufacturing and more hacking). With that said, is the remix just the 2.0 version of the copycat?
What’cha think? I’ll provide a little entertainment while you mull it over…
The Monkees’ Porpoise Song, arguably their most derivative and yet their best.
Travis Barker puts a little elbow grease into Soulja Boy, where does his version begin and the original end?
happy fourth of july!
04 Jul, 2008 • posts i've written • No comments
credit
Happy 4th of July, kids. Go celebrate our independence from those tea-sipping, taxing without reprezentin’, wig sporting, limp wristed, lily livered, trollops*.
Just don’t blow your hand off, cuz’ you’ve only got the two, and that pig powder turned out to be bullshit.
Did you know?
- 60% of injuries from fireworks in the United States occur in the month surrounding the July 4th holiday (Greene & Joholske 2006)
- Between June 18 and July 18, 2005, firecrackers (26%), sparklers (17%), and rockets (17%) accounted for most of the injuries seen in emergency departments. Sparklers were associated with over half of the estimated injuries among children under 5 years, during the same time period (Greene & Joholske 2006)
- In 2006, eleven people died and an estimated 9,200 were treated in emergency departments for fireworks-related injuries in the United States.
- According to the U.S. Census Bureau, last year we (America) imported $201.9 million dollars in fireworks from China, and exported $14.9 million of our own.
- Those age 75 and up are 209 percent more likely than average to spend on backyard pyrotechnics. No surprise then that they claim 29 percent of the firework market share.
Anyone else thinking there might be a correlation between the age of those firework enthusiasts and the rate of injury?
*any other day of the year they’re our cooler, saner little cousin.
puff paint + dinosaur = badass t-shirt
03 Jul, 2008 • posts i've written • No comments
Aside from my rant, my sister (a jazz pianist and fifth grade math teacher) noticed my propensity for drawing dinosaurs and thought to capture it. I went insane when this arrived in the mail…
what consumes him: Michael DiTullo
03 Jul, 2008 • posts i've written • No comments
Michael DiTullo, Design Director at Converse, and general shoe God draws a new design on camera in under five minutes. We should be able to pre-order that shoe right now.
it oughta exist: suicide-o-meter
02 Jul, 2008 • posts i've written • No comments
What’s missing is the suicide-o-meter to keep track of all the myspace and tumblr blogs (yeah, I’m pointing you Tumblr kids out) out there being written by those lost souls and how close they are to ending it all.
For example, the world recently lost one of its most super of models, Ruslana Korshunova, to suicide. She actually leaped/plunged from her ninth floor apartment in the Financial District.
“Her tragic death seems to have come as an absolute surprise to friends
and family, who claimed she seemed to be “on top of the world,” though
some reports suggest that she had shown her distress in posts on a
social networking site.”
It oughta exist.
F1RST!
02 Jul, 2008 • posts i've written • No comments
Welcome to my new … place.
I’m your host, Bud Caddell, and this is what consumes me.
what consumes me is all about two things:
1) topics and thoughts that I can’t keep from taking over my entire brain, ya know, the really pervasive thoughts that wake me up at night..
and
2) the products and consumption decisions I routinely make and have, up to this point, never put much thought into.. my goal isn’t to become a green consumer, a slow eater, a vegan or someone else at a Burning Man festival, it’s simply to start becoming a conscious consumer, and to trust over time that knowledge is transformative.
Who am I? I’m your typical mid-twenties migrant to Manhattan working at a digital thinktank. People ask me what I do, and the best description I’ve been able to come up with so far is that I help my clients speak to an entirely new generation that was born digital through authentic and engaging storytelling. I previously wrote at Passion2Publish.com about the journey from a print world to a transmedia world while I worked for Imagination Publishing.
I grew up in Houston, went to school in Austin, worked for a while in Chicago and found my way to Soho. In comparison to some, that’s not too much bouncing around, but it sure feels like a pinball game at times.
If you want to learn more about me, try BudCaddell.com and keep reading here.
What consumes you? Leave it in the comments.
