Tuesday, August 31, 2010: TWOfer Tuesday - The Glory of YouTube Edition

God Bless YouTube!

I love the internet, I can't imagine going back to a time before it.  And, for me, one of the crowning jewels of the 'net is YouTube.

I believe that YouTube is hugely important.  Sure, it's a cool place to upload videos of goofy wedding dances or hilarious forklift accidents, but there is a larger reason why YouTube isn't just cool, it's important.

It connects us with our cultural past, and as we move forward at such a breakneck pace, as we become more fractured and disconnected as a culture, places like YouTube become like Irish Monasteries during the dark ages, repositories for learning and preservation.

Take 1980s Music Videos for instance.  Sure, you can use YouTube to learn Greek or brush up on your Algebra, but if I know those who follow my humble blog, you really just want to reconnect with your childhood.  Or live a childhood you were way too young for.

Obviously, I had a hundreds of obscure videos to chose from to illustrate my point.  Send Me An Angel by Real Life, for instance, or remember Close To The Edit by Art Of Noise?   I especially wanted to blog Sign Of The Times by The Belle Stars, however the embedding feature was disabled for all the decent versions of this song.  I still might chose Iko Iko for a proper CSOTD Belle Stars blog at some point.

This, of course, led me to I Eat Cannibal by Toto Coelo, one of the truly great lost 80's videos (neon and outfits made of trash bags, it's so uncool, it's cool!).  Yes, I pondered this selection for a while, I truly did, however I ultimately chose Space Age Love Song by Flock Of Seagulls as my proper, official CSOTD choice.  You see, I Eat Cannibal is funny, whimsical, disturbed and slightly frightening, but at the end of the day, it's just not cool.   And this isn't the Whimsical Song of the Day blog, now is it.

No, Space Age Love Song is cool.   Still, to this day.  That haunting chorus, that sound of synthesizers which, somehow, becomes timeless rather than caught in a decade they can't get out of.  We can look (and laugh) at the haircuts, the funny glasses and made-on-a-dime production value, but at the heart of this is a song that soars, far above its genre, its expectations, and its decade.  And that's very cool.





Our second clip illustrated my point in a different way.

Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton (December 11, 1926 – July 25, 1984) will forever be known as the person Elvis Presley stole Hound Dog from*. Sure, Janis Joplin did a fair cover of Ball and Chain, but it will be Hound Dog that Thornton will always be remembered for. And, really, never given proper due credit for.

Which, I imagine, is why we have a video of her somewhere in some dive in Oregon, sometimes in the 1970's, with obviously the effects of times and thievery taking their toll. I have no information about this clip, other than what the person who posted it has provided.

What I do have is a sincere gratitude that someone 1) recorded it at the time and 2) someone felt the need to share it with the world. And it needs to be shared. Here is one of the great blues singers singing one of the great blues songs. Here is one performance that has more soul, more spirit, more drive than most people can muster in their lifetime. Here is someone who is not just singing but, cliché it may be, living the blues. And we are all the richer for it.

It does make you wonder over the years, over the history of music even, how many great performances nobody ever got to see. At least, now, we can save some. Like this one.

And that's why I love YouTube.






*(Never mind that he actually stole it from Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, and their reworking of the song, when Elvis saw their act at The Sands in Las Vegas in 1956)