My on-and-off tenure at Idolator began in February 2007 (whoa), and it’s resulted in me being addicted to sharing my opinions with people. So I’ve been trying to find another blogging outlet since the bad news rolled down the hill here. Unfortunately, the odds of finding a music blog that would actually pay me are somewhat slim, so here’s my open application to any site that will let me comment on my second love: the ABC soap All My Children. MORE »
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“All My Children” Tribute Videos Make Me Dream Of A Lucrative Soap-Blogging Career
an objects of affection special report
YouTube’s Take On Columbine Is Predictable Yet Disturbing
Today is the 10th anniversary of the Columbine shootings. I was curious to see if there were any tribute-style YouTube clips about the event, since it did take place before the advent of widespread online video. Surprisingly, there are quite a few; more surprisingly, most are not altogether different from the graduation montages I looked at a little while back. Both are sort of sad, wistful, and nostalgic, and accompanied by very similar tunes–but instead of fun in the sun, you get pictures of horror and loss and death. But then they take an odd turn. Let’s take a look. MORE »
an objects of affection special report
Mickey Mouse And Minnie Mouse Engage In Some (Creepy) “Digital Love”
Those copyright cops at YouTube deleted the account of Trunks6, a genius at combining peculiar pop songs with clips from Disney films, late last year. (They must hate love.) But the man is back—and he’s brought back his greatest hits for us to enjoy again. If you love romance and the somewhat icky feelings that watching animated dogs and cats frolicking to a particularly erotic Marvin Gaye song arouse in your soul, you’re in for a treat today. MORE »
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Animoto Edits Your Crappy “Lost” Tribute Videos So You Don’t Have To
“Welcome to the end of slideshows,” declares the subtitle on Animoto’s press kit. The site, which launched last August and just got some funding from Amazon, allows users to upload photos, choose audio from Animoto’s library or their own computer, throw these elements into a slick virtual crock pot, and come up with an automatically produced “music video” that’s more like a fancy slide show. The concept is very similar to what we know all too well as tribute videos–except there’s even less skill and artistry required, as there is no actual editing involved at all. As the resident expert in both tribute videos and stupid Internet shit, I took it upon myself to test out the service and see what it could do with some of the odds and ends in my Photobucket account and an English New Wave classic. MORE »
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YouTube Lets Sigur Ròs Be Weird All Over Its Front Page For 24 Hours
If you’ve been on YouTube today, you may have noticed that the front page is curiously devoid of videos like “Todd’s Oscars rant” and “Monkey eats cheese.” Instead, Iceland’s second-most-famous weirdo musicians, Sigur Ròs, have taken over the site for the day, and anyone can watch their tour documentary Heima in its entirety (for free!). They’ve also selected ten fan-made videos submitted to the Minn Heima contest to be featured on the front page. Most of the videos use leftover footage from Heima, but at least one out of ten Sigur Ròs fans is going to be artsy enough to dabble in stop-motion animation. Let’s review a few of the more notable entires. MORE »
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Kelly Clarkson Fans Fight Clive Davis With Rudimentary Understanding Of Editing Software
In light of what they see as Clive Davis’s neglect toward the promotion of Kelly Clarkson’s My December, the Kelly Clarkson Express–a group that sounds like it should serve as a dual-purpose fan club for the first American Idol and trains–has put together a video for the song “How I Feel,” which its members think should be the next single. This is but one facet of the How I Feel Project, a campaign to get the song played on the radio, or maybe very quietly in the background of an MTV show. While strong fan support is essential when you’re a pop star being ignored by one of the world’s most powerful music bigwigs, that devotion can come with a price–and in this case, that price is a well-intentioned but sadly incompetent tribute video. MORE »
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Tribute-Video Community Insists that Jane Austen Can Be Sexy
Period dramas: pretty costumes, stringent etiquette, and smoldering sexual repression. Men with cartoonish sideburns stare longingly from across the room at women in corsets. Indiscretions are hinted at, though rarely seen. And if there’s one artist who can capture the essence of this subtle, implicit sexuality, it’s Marvin Gaye, right? MORE »
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In Case You Missed The Patrick Stump “Law & Order” Episode Last Night
For those of us with no particular affection for Fall Out Boy frontman Patrick Stump and even less of an affinity for Law & Order, last night’s season premiere of the NBC stalwart, in which Stump had a role, was not at the top of the to-do list. But I was just curious enough this morning to search for clips of it on YouTube, and luckily for me, there were already ten good old-fashioned bootleg videos–made by people who pointed their video cameras at their TVs, and hoped for the best–posted on the site. But which was the most watchable? In today’s fast-paced world we can’t be expected to pay for music or watch TV shows on a television set, so here’s a handy guide to the best and worst Stump/Law & Order bootlegs on YouTube. MORE »
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“No One” Reimagines Sondheim Like The Tribute Video Community
We’re just now wrapping up two concurrent seasons: movie-going season, and end-of-year music criticism season. Luckily YouTube has a video to offer that combines both of these variously unbearable occurrences into one moderately amusing tribute. MORE »
objects of affection
Amy Winehouse: Not Even Trying Anymore
In her continuing effort to disappoint as many people as possible, Amy Winehouse has put down the bottle and picked up Windows Media Maker. The video for her dull-as-dirt single “Love Is a Losing Game” is basically a glorified slide show that looks as if it’s really a fan-made tribute video. And it’s a mediocre one at that. MORE »
