OK Go, the late 00’s/early 10s rock band, gets a lot of shit. Dealing in poppy alt-rock, think Jet, or Stereogram, they released their most well-known stuff between 2005 and 2012. Unlike other bands however, OK Go’s songs didn’t catapult them to the top of the charts, their music videos did. Starting with their choreographed dance video for “A Million Ways” and really taking off with “the treadmill video” for “Here It Goes Again,” they rode the wave of those videos to national recognition. The treadmill video, as most people refer to it, came at the perfect time. It hit YouTube before YouTube turned into a wasteland of Jordan Peterson videos about lobster cosplay or whatever, and took advantage of early Facebook to go viral. For all of 2006 this video ruled the internet. Pre-gif culture, people shared the whole video over and over again. The video made the talk show rounds, and won a bunch of music video awards, when those existed. I think they even got on Sesame Street. OK Go then released a few more albums after that, always accompanied by increasingly complex videos. None of them went as viral as the treadmill one did however, their record sales slowed, and they haven’t released an album since 2014, or a music video since 2017. A declension narrative if I’ve ever heard one.
But I don’t want to shit on OK Go. What I want to do is celebrate their music. Cause honestly, it bangs. The monkey’s paw deal that closed when OK Go became viral meant that despite being a band with a tremendous amount of name recognition, no one knows the names of any of their songs. And that’s too bad. They have some legit hits. Before taking on an electronic edge in 2010 they sounded like a bit like the Strokes, if the Strokes knew how to have fun. Despite being a band most associated with feel-good music videos, a lot of their songs have a heavier edge, veering at times on punk. I’ve made a playlist of some of their best stuff, for your listening pleasure. Just follow the link. I promise it’ll be an aural treat. Similar to how saying “aural” is an oral treat.
I don’t have a real reason for wanting to rehabilitate OK Go’s image other than that I like their stuff and I don’t like it when critics write them off as a music second, video first group. They clearly put a lot of work into their songs, and while no one should mistake them for the next Rolling Stones or anything, they have clearly got the chops. Maybe it’s because they added a 30-minute-long recording of the lead singer’s girlfriend sleeping to the end of their second album so that the label couldn’t add DRM software to it. Maybe it’s because the guy mouthing the words in the music videos isn’t actually the lead singer. Maybe the dreaded sentimentality has infected me and I’ll start reminiscing about how I only ate peanut butter sandwiches at lunch for three straight years of high school like that’s a good thing. Yes, peanut butter, not peanut butter and jelly, just peanut butter. But that’s not the point.
So what is the point? After drinking two La Croix and watching an episode of the 2nd season of Altered Carbon I’ve realized that OK Go got lucky. If they had released the treadmill video 2-3 years after they did no one would have cared. While “creators” like Jake Paul hadn’t taken over YouTube by that point, 3+ minute long videos had long been dethroned as the gold standard for virality. Facebook and the beginnings of Twitter had started their take-over, and content aggregator sites like 4chan, eBaum’s World and others had started to feel the pinch. The internet had changed and just would not have seen the astronomical amount of success that it previously had. While describing counterfactuals can only go so far, the type of music OK Go made essentially disappeared in 2010 with only legacy acts being able to make any type of money off of it. The four lads would have been out of luck.
The internet has changed how we consume media, and what kinds of media we consume over and over again. To 8-year-old me, Netflix could only have existed in the realm of sci-fiction. Those top-down cooking videos took the world by storm and then promptly disappeared. Bands like OK Go act as conduits into the ever-shifting online media landscape. Survival in the digital media age requires understanding its past, lest we drown in its terabytes of information. Unless you want to do that. In which case, I wish you well.
So ok, go listen to some of their songs. Hell, watch some of their newer music videos, they still got in my opinion. And don’t feel bad for the boys. They’ve got money.