This Too Shall Pass

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This Too Shall Pass
OK go
publication January 17, 2010
length 3:08
Genre (s) Alternative rock
power pop
Author (s) Damian Kulash, Timothy North Wind
album Of the blue color of the sky

This Too Shall Pass is a song by the American rock band OK Go . The song was released as the second single on their third studio album Of the Blue Color of the Sky on January 17, 2010.

Two music videos were (unusually) produced for the piece, both of which received awards on YouTube . The first music video was created in collaboration with the Marching Band of the University of Notre Dame , the second is about a gigantic Rube Goldberg machine that runs synchronously with the song. The popularity of the second video, comparable to that of the video for Here It Goes Again , increased awareness of the band and sales of the singles, but had little effect on Color in the Sky album sales . Due to differences with the major label EMI in the marketing and distribution of the two videos, OK Go founded an independent label .

composition

This Too Shall Pass was written, composed and produced by Damian Kulash and Timothy Nordwind. The rock song is written in the key of C major and held in four-four time. It has an average speed of 80 beats per minute with a playing time of 3:08 minutes. Damian Kulash's singing has a range from A3 to C6.

The song picks up on many themes from the album Of the Blue Color of the Sky , which Damian Kulash says is about the "search for hope in hopeless times". The song title This Too Shall Pass is an English phrase that means something like "This will be over". This Too Shall Pass and some other songs on the album were created under the impression of the "dwindling service time of George W. Bush's presidency and the beginning global economic crisis from 2007 ".

The Billboard magazine described the song as a "psycho-pop anthem" comparable to kids from the Indietronic band MGMT , which is due to the fact that the music producer Dave Fridman previously with MGMT and the progressive rock band The Flaming Lips had worked together and brought some musical influences from it.

First music video: Marching Band

The first music video was released on YouTube on January 12, 2010, at the same time as the album and the single was released. Director Brian L. Perkins made the music video in October 2009 in South Bend, Indiana . The music video does not use the original album version of the song, but a live recording that was recorded during filming. OK Go's Tim Nordwind noted that the song would be good for a large orchestration.

At the beginning of the music video, the four band members of OK Go stand in a field, dressed in the purple uniforms of a marching band originally from Rochelle Township High School in Rochelle, Illinois . They begin to march across the meadow, and as the song progresses, OK Go is complemented by members of the University of Notre Dame's marching band , 15 of whom are disguised in ghillie suits . In the last chorus, 20 children join in, made up of two children's choirs from the local South Bend preschools. Like many of OK Go's other music videos, the marching band video was shot in a single one- shot.

The marching band video ultimately bridged the period between the album's release (January 17th) and the Rube Goldberg video (March 2nd). Although the Rube Goldberg video was planned first, the band found time in October 2009 to work out the recordings with the Notre band. During this time the band realized that the Rube Goldberg video would not be ready until long after the album was released, so the label pushed for the marching band video to be implemented immediately.

Second music video: Rube Goldberg machine

The second music video for This Too Shall Pass was directed by James Frost. Like the video for Here It Goes Again , the video for This Too Shall Pass was designed as a four-minute one-cut video with a very large Rube Goldberg machine running in sync with the song . This complex series of chain reactions of simple mechanical activities consisted of over 700 objects and was housed in a two-story warehouse.

While the song and the machine are running, the band members move singing next to the kinematic nonsense machine and, as its last function, are shot down by paintball markers . Parts of the machine run in sync with the music: in one scene, spoons hit water glasses and play the melody of the song as if on a glass harp . In another scene, the music video of Here It Goes Again is played on a CRT TV until a sledgehammer destroys its cathode ray tube . A 1993 Ford Escort LX racing car with the Make: logo , which was used in the "24-hour race of LeMons", is shown in the video next to a miniaturized Lego version. Behind the Lego car are small Lego figures as a reminiscence of the music video with the marching band.

Emergence

The inspiration for the music video came from the band, whose long-cherished wish for “a gigantic machine we can dance to” should finally be realized. The band had seen several videos of Rube Goldberg machines on YouTube , including some from the Japanese children's program PythagoraSwitch.

Although the machine was initially considered for all the songs on the album Of the Color , This Too Shall Pass was ultimately chosen to make the end result “majestic and epic,” even if it ended up being two music videos with the previously released marching band version would be.

OK Go sought support through inquiries on online science - related forums , and then got in touch with Syyn Labs , an arts and technology collective based in Los Angeles . Between 55 and 60 employees of Syyn Labs, the California Institute of Technology (including some that at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA worked and the Mars Exploration Rover participated program, so a Rover model can be seen briefly in the video) and the MIT Media Lab helped to develop and design the machine. Damian Kulash Senior, the father of band member Damian Kulash, was also involved in the construction of the machine.

The team was on a budget and used recycled junk for a number of props in the machine. The total cost after filming was approximately $ 90,000. OK Go initially defined five requirements for the Rube Goldberg machine:

  • No use of “magic” such as automated devices, computers and electric motors - and restriction to purely mechanical devices.
  • The machine starts the music, should run in harmony with the song and end with the song at the same time.
  • The belt should be integrated into the machine.
  • The machine should play parts of the song, sync with the rhythm , and play some beats.
  • The video should be designed as a one-shot.

The machine consisted of a total of 89 sections. It took six months from conception to completion of the music video, two months for planning and four for implementation and filming. The warehouse where the shooting took place is on Glendale Boulevard in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles and was rented by Syyn Labs in November 2009, after which it was cleaned, painted and electrified. The final construction work in the warehouse took a month and a half during January and February 2010. The band members, who had previously been on tour for four months, have been involved in the construction work over the past two weeks and have made a number of changes.

After the completion of the machine, the shooting took place on February 11th and 12th, 2010. The film was shot with a single Steadicam Glidecam X-45 and a Sony PMW-EX3 HD camcorder . The machine was activated by bassist Tim Nordwind outside the warehouse and started with falling dominoes , which activate an iPod via several mechanisms , which plays the song and whose loudspeakers in turn make metal balls roll. Most of the elements of the machine used gravity as well as centripetal force , leverage , spring force, moments of inertia, or interaction forces . A total of 85 settings were required, around 60 of them before the machine worked properly for the first time. On the first day, 47 takes were shot, and the machine never worked completely, so that another day of shooting was necessary. Many settings ended just 30 seconds after the machine was activated, at the beginning of the chorus, where a car tire did not roll properly into the next section of the machine. Overall, the machine worked three times without errors, but once the tube television remained intact.

Syyn Labs employed an additional 30 people for the shooting, in order to reset the machine after a failure, which could take up to an hour depending on the progress. There were no notable injuries during the shooting: Tim Nordwind was hit hard by paint at the end, while cinematographer Mic Waugh with the steadicam at the end of the machine mechanism was almost hit by a wooden beam and a blue oil drum in the shot that was ultimately used for the Video was used.

Many elements of the machine had to be precisely synchronized with the timing of the song. The band divided the song into sections, which were triggered by the machine in defined sections in order to compensate for small time deviations of up to half a second and to remain lip-synchronized, as chief designer Brett Doar explained. Small objects like dominoes turned out to be particularly tricky as their behavior was far less predictable than that of large, heavy, and bulky objects like those that predominate at the end of the video. After the machine moved from the upper to the ground floor, it almost always ran through to the end without any errors. Furthermore, the time of day and the temperature played a decisive influencing factor on the kinetic behavior of smaller devices in particular, so that their timing had to be adjusted accordingly. Ball tracks and other features had to be cleaned of dust and dirt so that rolling objects are not delayed. The wooden marble track at the beginning of the video was created to have movements in sync with the music, but required a particularly shallow angle, which caused steel balls to jump out of the tracks. According to Kulash, the biggest "nightmare" was a series of mousetraps that set colorful flags. These were extremely sensitive to vibrations, such as those generated by the falling piano, so that the mousetraps had to be reworked and insulated so as not to trigger prematurely.

The timing of the movements of both the four band members and the cameraman had to be carefully considered. Damien Kulash admitted that although the machine worked three times without errors, no shot was perfect because either the cameraman or one of the band members fell short of the machine's actions.

While the video could be shot three times in a single continuous one-shot, the plan was to synchronize the speed of the film track with the piece of music in post-production . At least two film cuts can be seen in the music video: One when the camera is passed through two curtains in the transition from the upper to the ground floor; According to Hector Alvarez, a developer of the machine, this cut was made by the band to keep the sound track in sync with the machine. Both bassist Tim Nordwind and Adam Sadowsky, President of Syyn Labs, admitted that although the entire machine ran three times without errors and no cut was actually required, it was still done in order to achieve a better result in the basement in the final video to get. A second cut can be seen on the upstairs piano, which falls and hangs over on ropes while the camera drives past some metal supports; the piano changes its position within a frame .

Reactions

The music video with the Rube Goldberg machine won an award on March 2, 2010 on YouTube . It was viewed 900,000 times in one day. The video reached 6 million views within six days, comparable to the popularity of the music video for Here It Goes Again , and was given the adjective "instantly viral" by the US news broadcaster CNN . The video reached 10 million views in the first month after it was released.

Due to the success of the two videos, the band auctioned their props, including the four uniforms from the Marching Band video and the ping pong balls from the second video. The Rube Goldberg video was included in a selection list of 125 out of 23,000 videos in the poll for " YouTube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video ", in which the Guggenheim Museum was also involved, but did not make it into the 25 winning videos.

The great success of the music video on the internet had no significant impact on sales of the accompanying album Of the Blue Color of the Sky , of which only 40,000 copies were sold after its January release. One reason may be the “inconspicuous” music on the album and the music video; the English musician Max Tundra therefore suggested the band may be better "absorb innovative, exciting piece of music - and then make a sedate, unobtrusive video to" a ( English "record of innovative, exciting piece of music - and make a plodding, nondescript video to go with it " ).

However, the sales figures for concert tickets from OK Go rose suddenly after the music video was released, as did the download figures on commercial multimedia portals such as iTunes . According to Nordwind, the band was not concerned about the moderate album sales, as their career was based on "unusual paths". Kulash stated that the continued viral success of their music videos (like that of This Too Shall Pass) has given the band more touring opportunities and audiences than would have been possible with conventional music videos under the control of a major label.

This led OK Go to Nordwind to “look at making videos like [they] look at making records - it's part of the art that [they] make” it's part of the art of what [they] do "). In recognition of the success of This Too Shall Pass and previous videos, OK Go won the 14th Annual Webby Special Achievement Award for Film and Video Artist of the Year. At the third annual UK Music Video Awards , the video won the two categories "Video of the Year" and "Best Rock Video".

In May 2010, after the band split from EMI, the single rose to number 39 on the Billboard Alternative Songs Chart, the first appearance on the charts after the single Here It Goes Again in 2006. The song ultimately peaked at number 36.

Syyn Labs was founded shortly before the collaboration with OK Go; Due to the viral success of This Too Shall Pass , the young company was able to implement several other similar projects through the innovative combination of technology. When OK Go appeared on the US comedy show The Colbert Report on April 29, 2010 and played This Too Shall Pass , the presenter Stephen Colbert opened the show with a Rube Goldberg machine. This was created by Brett Doar, one of the chief developers of Syyn Labs, from various props from the show. After working with OK Go, Syyn Labs produced commercials for Disney , Sears and Ford, among others . At the beginning of 2012 the beverage manufacturer Red Bull commissioned the Syyn Lab to build an oversized chain reaction in which the athletes under contract with Red Bull should be involved.

In February 2011, the music video blog Yes, We've Got a Video! Both the marching band and the Rube Goldberg video came in third in their list of the 30 best videos of 2010. The latter was particularly praised for its “cleverness and the fact that you always see something new with every view can discover “(English“ the cleverness of it and the fact that you could always pick up something new upon each and every view ”). The song was also used as the theme song for the US remake of the British sitcom The Inbetweeners .

Differences with EMI

The marching band video sparked some controversy immediately after it was posted on the Internet. Due to an agreement between the major label EMI (via Capitol Records ) and YouTube , the video could not be accessed worldwide or linked to other websites, which frustrated many fans and professional music critics who could not integrate the video into their blogs as usual. The band, led by singer Damian Kulash, explained the reasons for their label on the band's blog and a comprehensive guest commentary on February 19, 2010 in the national newspaper The New York Times . According to Kulash, EMI refused to allow the video to be "embedded" played outside of the YouTube portal, as no license fees were paid to EMI for such views. He explicitly asked for permission to "integrate" the following music video, which had collapsed Internet access by 90% due to EMI's restrictive handling, as a result of which the band's viewer-dependent royalties on the Internet had also collapsed.

The band was able to secure the distribution rights to the Rube Goldberg music video of This Too Shall Pass before it was released, in part thanks to the support of the US financial services company State Farm Insurance , who were able to clarify a number of contentious issues with EMI; In return, State Farm influenced the creative process, and their logo appeared in the video, including on the door of the toy car that triggered the machine at the beginning.

The music video was completed a week later than planned; According to some sources close to the band, Capitol Records kept the time window for promotional activities of the single on the radio closed for at least June 2010 due to the delay. OK Go then decided to separate from EMI amicably because of the problems with the internet distribution of the music video and the marketing on the radio and to found their own label with the name Paracadute Recordings .

Web links

Individual evidence

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  4. ↑ Chris Mincher: Of The Blue Color Of The Sky . The AV Club. January 12, 2010. Retrieved April 30, 2010.
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