Please allow me a quick story time tangent. Let’s start by turning the previous music oligarchy that is made of up companies like Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group into a bunch of humongous, lazy dinosaurs. These massive creatures are enjoying their reign at the top of the food chain until one day when a super-sized asteroid smashes into the earth and creates environmental havoc. In our continuing metaphor, the cratered chaos represents the changes that the internet has created in our culture. The chaos spreads darkness and confusion over the landscape and our dinosaurs, who were previously complacently sitting fat, dumb, and happy, are now scrambling for any scrap of food or antiquated copyright law they can find.
(Skip ahead to 7:25 to watch a visual SNES version and video related gamer play-by-play and commentary of what I just described above)
Out of this darkness emerges the future. While the fossil record tells us that no angry gorillas[1] emerged from these prehistoric dark ages (that would almost be too perfect for this story, right?) a new creature does raise up out of the volcanic ash that was a part of our environmental chaos and gladly starts its climb toward the top of that peril less food chain. What creature am I referring to, you are asking as you lean over the edge of your seat? It’s the mammal of course, or if we’re decloaking the metaphor; it’s “Auto-tune the News #2: pirates. drugs. gay marriage.” (Story time fin.)
Sequentially ATTN #2 shouldn’t mark the beginning. The first official Auto-tune the News video does the same basic things in that news people of various degrees become unintentional singers. But this video is different for two key reasons.
This video (as mentioned in the introduction to the live version of this song) marks the first appearance of the angry gorilla. This character is just as silly as anything that was in ATTN 1, except he has a little more satirical focus. Exaggerated political punditry has become a pillar in modern media. If you form a musical group with your brothers (and brother’s wife) with an idea that you want to highlight some of the absurdities that abound in our 24-hour news cycle, then an angry gorilla (Andrew Gregory plays the character in this clip) who constantly talks about his belligerent feelings is a natural fit.
The second feature that distinguishes ATTN 1 from ATTN 2 is melodic singing of CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric, specifically at the 1:46 minute mark in the video. At that moment Couric puns about global warming, letting us know that if we don’t change our ways we’ll be on very thin ice. The way she sings these words, with a super-serious overly sincere tone that could compete with any Shakespearean soothsayer bewaring us of the Ides of March, gives the Gregory Brothers their first hook.
Very thin ice is a hook that will get repeated in ATTN 3 and ATTN 8, which features T-Pain, the unofficial king of auto-tune, singing their hook and giving their music a blessing from the pop gods.
ATTN 2 is still primitive in many ways. The Gregory brothers mixed simplified beats and with the exception of the Couric excerpt, relies more on silliness than musicality. But out of this primordial ooze you can clearly see the beginnings of what they will grow into. It became wildly popular because of the ways it highlights the absurdities in our culture. But as their videos progress, the Gregory Brothers have given us new ways to define pop music.
[1] This particular angry gorilla clip shows are furry friend in a moment of poetic catharsis.
[...] this old blog I started during Gateway at the University of Oregon. I’d like to write some more music reviews, may put up some poems I write for class (I promise it’s usually not pretentious poetry) or [...]