It’s a weird time to be a musician — getting signed to a label, making an album and touring isn’t quite the way things go anymore.
A lot of times, an act has to take matters into its own hands and come up with a new way of getting noticed.
Which brings us to Atomic Tom. Taking the iPhone’s slogan, “There’s an app for that”, to a new extreme, the Brooklyn-based quartet decided to try something new: Make a live music video on the subway.
Without instruments.
On the same week that Willow Smith, Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith’s 9-year-old daughter, releases her ode to hair, “Whip My Hair”, Sesame Street has its own version.
This one is another empowering song about loving what you have, less hip-hop and more pop than Willow’s version, but no less effective, and definitely popular, as it’s picked up steam on YouTube:
(Information courtesy The Washington Post.)
For those who love tooling around the internet, it’s amazing how this works — you get to enjoy a site, and then they tell you about another, even crazier site, and suddenly your whole day is forfeit.
For example, I’m a fan of Warming Glow, an extremely irreverent TV site that loves to make fun of bad shows and extol the virtues of good ones. Today, Mike Ufford, who basically is Warming Glow, let us all know about Japan Probe, which is a great site because, in Mike’s words: “Japanese television is a bottomless well of insanity.”
In this clip from Japan Probe, we learn that a demaeki is a device that steadies food for delivery drivers. Here, we see if it can keep food steady on a fully-operational rollercoaster:
demaeki
Uploaded by japanmaster3. – More video blogs and vloggers.
Michael Grimm, the soulful singer who won the top prize this season on NBC’s America’s Got Talent, appeared on Ellen recently to introduce the audience to the woman for whom he sang “When A Man Loves A Woman”.
Then he showed her just how much he loves her:
The premise: The video below is apparently a parody of a pop songs from the 1960s or 1970s with lyrics made up of gibberish made to sound like American English.
The reality: This is the most bizarre video I’ve seen in a while.
Thanks for Videogum, specifically commenter “lilbobbytables”, for the link.
JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater has achieved folk hero status online for actually doing what many of us in this stressed-out overhyped, rude and uncivil world only daydream about. He completely and utterly lost it – in public, on the job and under the microscope of TSA security, no less.
Steven Slater, 2010's Man of the Year?
Slater has become one of the most popular topics on Twitter and has inspired a number of Facebook pages, with titles such as “Free Steven Slater” and “I Support Steven Slater.”
One group, dubbed the “Steven Slater Legal Defense Fund,” is seeking to raise money for the airline veteran. More than 650 people are members.
Slater, 38, is accused of cursing out a passenger on the PA system after their plane landed Monday at JFK airport in New York, grabbing two beers and making a quick exit down one of the plane’s inflatable emergency slides. He was later arrested and is now free on bail.
The meltdown has inspired songs and an animated reenactment of his now famous freakout. Read the full story
Update: Corrected to show none of the men have been cut from the cast.
It could’ve been potentially disastrous.
On So You Think You Can Dance, the final group started with six men and five women. After a few weeks of cutdowns, more women saw the door than men, leaving six men and three girls. Now, while it was still possible for each guy to pair off with a female counterpart, the powers that be decided the time had come for two guys to be paired up.
And so classically trained ballet dancer Alex Wong — of the Miami City Ballet — was paired with hip-hop master Stephen “Twitch” Boss.
But what could’ve been an out-and-out train wreck turned into one of the show’s top routines of this season and possibly any other.
Take a look at Alex — who also talks glowingly of his boss, Edward Villella — showing that because he’s pretty much up for any style, he has to be considered the clear favorite to take this season’s crown:
Has Britain’s Got Talent done it again? It’s possible — as E! Online looks at the show’s newest phenomenon, 81-year-old Janey Cutler. Cutler, like Susan Boyle before her, was found in Glasgow, Scotland, and, like Boyle, brought the audience of Britain’s Got Talent to its feet and YouTube to its knees. Here’s more:
Find out all about the new $100 bill — all those new countermeasures against counterfeiting. All those new touches — holograms, golden overlays, bells in the inkwell (?)!
Basically, seeing this video is about as close as I’m gonna get to one of these, I figure.
(Video courtesy newmoney.gov, via Videogum. Videogum link NSFW due to language.)
Check out this link to read the Associated Press story and see photos of the new bill.
Here’s an interesting, iconic duo, paired on TV in a video that’s just been unearthed by a writer for Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.
On the one hand, it’s Ronald Reagan. On the other, James Dean.
Reagan and Dean starred in an episode of General Electric Theater called “The Dark, Dark Hours”. In it, Reagan plays a doctor who’s forced to give medical care and keep his family safe from a thug, played by Dean, who brings an injured friend to Reagan’s house.
The episode was found by Wayne Federman, a writer for Fallon who’s working on a Reagan retrospective for his centennial. He passed it along to John Meroney, who introduces it to us on The Atlantic’s web site (via New York magazine’s Vulture blog).
Both actors show, in small glimpses, the kind of characteristics each was known for. Reagan came off as compassionate and tough in quick fashion, while Dean was both cool and ready to snap.
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