Assuming everyone has seen the new All Time Low video by now, right? Although I do have this condition where I'm really bad at guessing the median age of readers of blogs, so it's possible I could be off by 20 years on this.
Go watch it here. No, not because it's good, which it really, really is not, but rather because it's important to check in from time to time on what 'the kids' are listening to, if for no other reason than so you can understand just how irrelevant you've become. Sit through the advertisement and watch it, trust me. You'll come out the other side a better person. An angrier person too, but that's the price you pay for wisdom.
I actually kind of have a soft sport in my heart, and in my panties, for ATL, as we call them in the young community. Rehashed pop punk cliches leftover from the Blink 182 cutting floor? Sure, but what's so bad about that on its face if we're being honest? Pop punk is supposed to be dumb and fun. Those are the rules, no matter how 'gay' we want to say it is. They've got some fun songs like this one below, "Dear Maria", and I sort of started relating to them when I did this story a while back in Alternative Press
How One Overzealous All Time Low Fan Exposed The Dangers of Social Networking, about what it's like for bands like them to deal with stalking fans in the age of the internet where kids can use your Twitter and Facebook to pinpoint your movements out in the real world and come find you in your fucking house, because as a super famous blogger I deal with that shit all the time.
“Sooo we found his address againn, and drove to his house. All his twitters and shit said that he was coming homee today but didn’t say whenn. Soooo we went to his housee, the lights were on but nobody would answer the door. Buttt, i got plentyy of pictures of Peyton and Sebastion. (their dogggsss.) Soo, like the stalkers we are, we waited outside his house for an hour withh nobody comingg homeee.”
More like All Time Blow, right? Actually, that's one of the many good zingers from this earlier video for the song "Weightless" which you should watch next, because it's a good example of how to be arch and winking in a music video while not taking yourself too seriously. It's also a pretty good example of a band trolling its own fans, which I am always in favor of, because fans are really weird.
This new video for "I Feel Like Dancin'" is the exact opposite of that. Not only is the song weirdly slow and talky, with tons of pop culture references that seem forced, and awkward hip hop lingo like some awful fifth rate Weezer song (which is no surprise because Rivers Cuomo co-wrote it), the entire premise of the video, that the band is 'selling out'
but at least they know it you guys, is handled so ham-fistedly it makes me long for the good old days of music, like five-ten years ago when I saw this exact same concept done dozens of times already. As I wrote here, also in Alt Press,
Everything Corporate: How “Selling Out” Has Turned Into Survivalism, 'selling out' isn't even something bands are ashamed of anymore.
Notice all the advertisements at the last show you went to? Maybe you didn’t; they've become so ubiquitous in recent years that it's possible you don’t even realize they’re there. Yet there they are: on the brand-sponsored stages, on the ticket itself, tucked in amid the concession stands and dangling over the stage on imposing banners. To say that this type of corporate sponsorship of punk and indie concerts is a departure from the old way of doing things is an understatement, but perhaps the most interesting part is how little anyone cares about it. In fact, partnering with brand sponsors isn't just a new wrinkle in the music business model—it’s now the entire business model itself. Corporate backing can often make different aspects of a successful career possible for bands. Touring bands wrap their buses and vans in brand logos; clothing and beverage companies bring artists into their own studios to record viral content for their marketing outlets; smaller labels team up with brands to beef up promotional push for an album; and chain restaurants and hotels adopt bands into the fold, offering free meals and places to stay while they are on the road.
Knowing that makes what ATL are trying to do in this video -- get their product placement money but act like it's a joke, have dancing girls in bikinis, but, you know 'dancing girls in bikinis' -- even more offensive. No one even registers it when you have product placement all over your video anymore, except for old grumps like me, so you don't need to place ironic distance between yourself and what you're doing, because, first of all, your fans don't know what irony is, and secondly they didn't even grow up in a world where selling out was something you could actually do.
We're all born sold out now. (Seriously though, how long do you think it will really be before babies start falling out of corporate tattooed uterii wearing sick Rockstar Energy newborn v-neck onesies? Ten years tops?) It's like the corporate version of the Christian idea of original sin, and videos like this only further hammer that point home by pretending that it's not true.
Punk rock died a long time ago, and with videos like this, although it sounds kind of weird to say, selling out is dead now too. With the two poles at either end cut off, what does that leave us with besides a big, boring middle?
Ultimately this video is the equivalent of that little "I'm so clumsy dance" you do after you trip walking down the street and you feel like people are watching and laughing. It doesn't turn an embarrassing situation into a comical one by acknowledging it, it just makes you look even more embarrassed.
