Here’s a question for the ages: If your music video is so compelling, so visually arresting, so completely mesmerizing and flat-out awesome to watch that the viewer may actually kind of forget to even listen to the song, is that a good or a bad thing?
Well, when you’re treadmill-hopping rockers OK Go and the song is Here It Goes Again, it’s not only good, it’s great. The band had already had some impressive viral success with the video for A Million Ways, in which they performed an intricate backyard dance choreographed by lead singer Damien Kulash’s sister Trish Sie. But when they hit those treadmills for a single-take, Sie-choreographed aerobic explosion of goodness, they became bona fide stars. The video, which took 12 days of rehearsal and features bassist Tim Nordwind lipsynching to Kulash’s vocals, won the 2007 Grammy for Best Short Form Music Video, and has gotten more than 33 million views on YouTube since its debut. Recreating the performance live at the 2006 MTV Video Music Awards cemented OK Go’s stardom, and today, the jaunty little ditty Kulash says is about “a terrible hangover after a one-night stand” has been used in commercials for everything from Nike+ iPod to Disney.com.
Since then, everyone’s jumped on the bandwagon (or, you know, the treadmill). Fellow viral darlings Derrick and Will risked injury to create Nobody’s Watching OK Go. The bands’ feats have been reenacted by Legos, Spider Pig and the Pulp Sport Mascots. They’ve been joined by Ozzy Osbourne, mashed up with Kenny Rogers, aped in countless high school talent shows, and caused everything vaguely treadmill-related, from French bloggers on escalators to this guy, to get tagged with “OK Go” whether it has anything to do with the band or not. There’s even an entire Here It Goes Again homage with animals on treadmills. And one of the stars of that video, the Treadmill Shrimp, actually has at least five Here It Goes Again mashups all his own.
And everybody knows, when you hook the shrimp contingent, well…that’s when you know you’ve really made it.
