Brazil pop-up shows November 19th through November 25th

beckysioux

So, Forbes has now written about the boys.

José Cuervo Enlists OK Go To Serve Ice-Cold Shots In Brazil

laeticia

One of the interviews I promised... original article can be found here.

highlights by me :) NOTHING NEW, but worth the reading, I'd say. Must warn, I did not have much time to go over it, so, as usual, forgive me for grammar errors, spelling and such. 

 

OK Go, way beyond treadmills.

 

North-American band known for a successful video in
2006 is in Brazil for a different tour, with pop-up concerts for free in São
Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Rather than a record label, a brand of tequila is
paying for everything.

Rafael Pereira




It was Saturday night and a huge truck stopped at a
parking lot at Augusta Street, one of the busiest streets at night in São
Paulo. A crowd gathered to see the content of the truck. Around 10pm, the side
of the truck fell down and the four members of the north-American indie rock
band OK Go began a quick concert with three songs *wrong info here, they played
six songs* - their biggest hits - and excited the newly formed crowd. They said
goodbye, the truck closed and the crowd went their way for the night in the
city. That was one of the quick presentations of an odd tour, that started in
São Paulo and that's about to be concluded in Rio de Janeiro this week.

OK Go is a band shaped by innovation, which was born
with the internet and got bigger with the popularization of digital media.
Besides the music, they invest time and money to create videos that become
instant classics on YouTube, and go beyond the old fashioned model of visual
representation of their songs. The first huge success was the video for
"Here It Goes Again", known online as "the video with the
treadmills". The musicians put together the treadmills, like those you see
in a gym, and they choreographed a dance routine on them. They opened the
concert at Augusta Street with that song *wrong information again, it was Do
What You Want* - it became the indelible mark of the band and the power of the
internet for new artists.

Getting into people's homes through creativity came to
be a shortcut for musical and financial independence. On March 2010, OK Go
announced they were parting ways with their label EMI/Capitol and the
foundation of their own label, Paracadute Recordings. They took with them the
newly released album Of The Blue Colour of the Sky and the freedom to create
and promote their work. The videos for the songs "This Too Shall
Pass" - with a gigantic machine that starts to work with an avalanche of
dominoes - and "White Knuckles" - with the members of the band and a
bunch of dogs making a fun choreography - had an even bigger success on YouTube
than the "one with the treadmills" *again, don't actual*s is correct
information, but okay*. But how to transform all of that into money without a
big label behind? Moreover... how to make money with music these days?

That and other questions were answered by the childhood
friends Damian Kulash (guitars and vocals) and Tim Nordwind (bass and vocals),
leaders *wtf* and main composers of OK Go. The drummer Dan Konopka and the lead
guitarist Andy Ross complete the band. The talk with EPOCA was at a night club
in São Paulo, stage to a private concert for guests of the sponsors of the
tour, a tequila brand. It is that way that the band supports their presence on
the stages of the world. That is how OK Go is getting physically close to the
fans they conquered over the internet with their creative videos. The success
of the concerts in São Paulo will be repeated in Rio between the 23rd and the
25th of November (access the band's website to know the exact spots). It may
not be the model that'll save the industry from crisis, but it is undoubtedly a
viable and - affirmed by the members of the band - fun way of making art.

EPOCA - Do you really like tequila?

Damian Kulash - I do like it.

EPOCA - But do you enjoy it or just for getting drunk
and having fun?

Damian - No, I really like tequila. About ten years
ago - and I agree with the police on this one - in the US, tequila was only
seen as a fuel to get drunk. But now we can find good tequilas there, and we
have some good drinks made with them. I like tequila with cucumber, for
example. 

Tim Nordwind - That said, tequila, for me, still is a
good way to get drunk (laughs).

EPOCA - And how did you come up with the partnership
with a tequila brand?

Damian - We've always wanted to do different concerts.
I think rock concerts follow some strict rules, a little boring. You go, you
try to look awesome on stage, and the crowd thinks it's awesome, staring...
We've always tried to change that, making less structured shows. Then, Cuervo
(the tequila brand) asked us if we were interested in making these crazy
concerts in Brazil. Then came the idea of pop-up concerts (the band shows up
without warning on the street). We wanted something spontaneous, and that was
the idea.

Tim - Spontaneity in this format is very exciting. You
show up out of nowhere and see what you can take out from the audience.

Damian - We were in New Orleans for a tour a few years
ago, at the end of a tour that lasted two years, and we realized the music was
getting too commercial... We travelled around the world making the same
concerts, playing the same songs, again and again, to see if someone would buy
our records. We went to New Orleans and we saw a musical parade on the streets,
with people simply getting out of their houses with instruments and joining in.
I realized music can be this purifying experience, much more than just
listening to songs in an mp3 player. We look for ways of capturing this
spontaneity and this celebration of music.

EPOCA - These pop-up shows, whose idea was it, you
guys' or the brand?

Damian -  We've
talked amongst ourselves about doing something similar to this format for a
while. I don't know who came up with the idea first. It was natural, and a long
time ago. But to get the logistics of it took us months.

EPOCA - And this tour is only for Rio and São Paulo?

Damian - Yes. Only in Brazil.

EPOCA - Until this day, when someone tries to explain
OK Go to their friends, they still mention the "video with the
treadmills". Does it annoy you in any way?

Damian - Not at all. That's what we do! I understand
that journalists need to understand the band in some way, and it may seem wrong
that our videos are so popular. But we wake up trying to make cool stuff, we're
not limited to only doing rock concerts and making records - we make videos and
artistic works. If someone knows us for that, it's awesome! It´s like saying
... "Isn't Nirvana that band who sings 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'?".
Yes, that's their biggest hit, but it doesn't mean the rest is bad. What could
make someone believe that it is bad for us is that, usually, the videos of a
band are made by other people. In our case, we make everything on our own. If
someone likes it, great, because it's our work.

EPOCA - With the passing of the years, you made other
classic videos such as "the one with the dogs" and "the one with
the huge machine". How do you come up with these ideas?

Damian - We drink a lot of tequila (laughs). We drink
six or seven bottles of tequila, and the one who can still stand says the first
thing that comes to mind and, whatever that is, we have to try to do it
(laughs). It takes more or less six months for us to be sober again, but when
we get out of the hospital, we look at what we wrote. "Dance with
dogs?". And we have to do it. There was this time Tim was the only one
left standing and he said something about a space station...that one we didn't
do yet (laughs).

EPOCA - A lot of work ahead, then...

Damian - Yeah... ideas come from...well, who knows
where ideas come from? If you think about videos as music videos in the
traditional sense, as a way of promoting your song and being on MTV, you won't
get anywhere. We think about three minute movies that don't need to be
narrative. The only demand is that they are interesting by itself. The motto is
to find something that people will like to see, and then we think of the
craziest things possible. Usually it's like this: Is this line of thought
possible? We'll go through it and see what we can get.

EPOCA - Is there a moment in the band where only the
music is important?

Damian - We're just going through this right now,
writing for our new album. These shows in Brazil were an opportunity we
couldn't miss, but we haven't performed many concerts lately. Tim has a new
band, and he's working a lot with that right now, and for a while now.

Tim - I'm releasing a band called Pyyramids, and the
EP came out on our record label, Paracadute. It was out at the end of October
and we released a video for the song "That Ain't Right". So, that was
a period only focused on music. OK Go dedicates, sometimes, two whole years to
music for making a record. Our last record was like that.

EPOCA - And how is the process of writing in the band?

Damian - Writing music is the most mysterious part of
the process. The video starts when the song is made, but the song comes from
out of nowhere, from a blank page. Someone can say they can write a song that's
similar to this particular song, or that will make the listener feel a
particular way, but I never worked like that. I work by gathering musical elements.
I gather up things, without a result, until one day it comes to life. Like one
plus one is always two and, suddenly, the sum of it results two millions. For
example, taking a chord progression with a beat, and another, and changing the
chord progression... It's a very mysterious process, but really fun, though also
very lonely. Everything else that we do has a lot of people involved, like the
videos and the concerts, but the writing process is usually very lonely,
sitting at home with a guitar, a piano, a computer.

EPOCA - And sometimes you need a loyal friend to do
that with you, like Tim.

Damian - Yeah, I'm still looking for a friend like
that (laughs).

EPOCA - How did your partnership start?

Damian - We were 11 years old. We met at a summer
camp.

EPOCA - Love at first sight?

Tim - (laughs) Yeah, you can say that.

Damian - First there was ping-pong, then we started
talking. And, talking about that, we really talked about love, and girls. Tim
has an older brother, and I have an older sister. Our first talks were about
how to get girls. We ended up making up some simple strategies, like
"Always have gum", or something to offer them. "Never hold your
books in front of you, always by your side", because you don't want to
seem like you're at the defensive, but rather confident.

EPOCA - Those are great tips!

Damian - "Never have a bad breath", that's a
good one. Oh! And "never be up against a wall", even though they do
that in jeans commercials. Don't do that in real life, you'll look like an
idiot (laughs). That was basically what we learned when we were 11.

EPOCA - And music?

Damian -  We
played together for, at least, 10 years after that. We lived in different
cities, and we met again at camp, so what we did was send cassette tapes by
mail to one another, on that LONGINQUO time where people still listened to
cassettes (laughs). After college, he moved to Chicago and we started a band.
That was November 1998, exactly 13 years ago. Almost 15... Do you know what to
give as a present for 15 years of marriage?

EPOCA - Don't remember it, really...

Damian - (asks people around). What do you give for 15
years of marriage? Leather, maybe? Yeah...I'm going to give him leather, and
he'll give me Legos.

EPOCA - What are your main musical influences?

Damian - We like very different things. Sometimes we
DJ together at parties and people will say things like "Why did you think
these songs match?". When I was young, I had phases. I remember a time
that I just listened to Led Zeppelin, and another time that I listened to a lot
of punk music from Washington, DC, and a lot of rap. I remember when I was 10
and I found out about Run DMC (takes a deep breath)... It changed my life.
Prince has always been a huge influence too.

Tim - I've always been into bands of the Britpop
movement, and growing up I got more into indie and punk rock bands. At college,
I started liking old bands and composers.

Damian - Today, I've only been listening to old
musicians like, Percy Sledge and Otis Redding. 


EPOCA - The videos end up as a way of making fans all
over the world, via YouTube. Is it surprising to see that you have fans on
places you've never even been to?

Damian - It's always a surprise. When we get up on a
stage and we have an audience of 50 people, 5 thousand, 50 thousand...it
doesn't matter, we always get a visceral response. The version of that on the
internet is to upload a new video and staying at home seeing the numbers go up.
You, at home, in your pajamas, saying "Wow! That's a lot of numbers".
It is a lot more work making videos, but it's less personal. It's always a
surprise to go to a country that our records haven't even been released and
seeing that a large group of people know all the songs by heart... It's crazy
and wonderful.

EPOCA - And it's not planned, like a marketing
campaign...

Damian - We treat our videos as we treat our songs, we
make both as artistic work. It's not like one is a visual support to the other.
We spent a lot of time in the beginning of our career just touring, and we
found out how dangerous it is to get tired of your passion. If you play 31
months worth of concerts non-stop you'll end up not liking it anymore. I do
think that there are artists that are happy only playing their guitar on stage
every night. But we are different, we always want to do something different.
The video isn't a part of a promotional campaign, it's a chance of doing art in
another format. At the beginning we had a record label (EMI) who guaranteed the
distribution and the promotion of our records. 
When we found out, almost by accident, that we could do something to get
straight into people's homes, with a work of art, it was almost like a
revelation.

Tim - To find that space was one of our biggest
surprises.

Damian - We made things that had to fit into a record,
a CD... That (the video) didn't need to fit anywhere! We had the luck to make
such a success with our videos. Because, in the past, if we started a band
wanting to be a group that makes music but also makes their videos, and wanting
to be really successful with that, we'd be seen as completely crazy people.
(laughs).

EPOCA - You got out of your record label EMI to open
your own, Paracadute. Was it an easy decision, natural, or
scary?

Damian - It was scary! (laughs). We were lucky to have
had that option. To be honest and kind with our old label, they were really
nice letting us go. Usually, until you build a career, you need a record label.
After you built it, they are the ones who need you to make profit. So, usually
big labels won't let bands just walk away with their records under their arms.
We had a lot of luck. They worked hard, but success in their world and in our
world are completely different things. Their world is set by the position of a
band in the charts of radios and most sold. In our world, success is being able
to create interesting things. The agendas are very different. If we wanted to
work with a brand like this, of tequila, we would have a lot of work with our
label. We want to do cool things and we want to show it to the people. Cuervo
wanted to do cool things and show it to the people. I'd much rather work with
commercial partners that will clearly say what they want: people, attention,
the same that we want.

EPOCA - Do you believe in music as a viable business
today?

Damian - I believe in music as an emotional
experience, and I believe that there is a way of making art, provoke emotions
and having a career at the same time. It's fucking hard, since it's impossible
to live from music like you did 15, 20 years ago. The question is: What's going
to change? For us, music will never lose its essence, which is talking with
emotion from human to human, and not with logic. I think that music will go
back to being more an experience and less a product, a record. The market to negotiate
records will persist, but the market of selling cool stuff will also exist.

EPOCA - And how do you sell "cool stuff"?

Damian - I don't know... We just work a lot. There
isn't a "silver bullet". You have an answer to that, Tim?

Tim - We're still stuck on the traditional ways, but
we try to find new ways of doing it. Nobody knows... that's the million dollar
question.

Damian - I don't know if you want this interview to go
nerdy, but (laughs) I'll try explaining it in a quick way. Corporation
concentrates more money than they did 20 years ago. 20 years ago, if you wanted
to make money with your art, you had to look for one of these corporations and
submit yourself. "Hello, big record label.. Invest in me, please, so,
maybe, I can be one of your bets...". If you got it, the promotion
investment was to put your song on the radio, and your video on MTV. The radio
and MTV would make a lot of money from publicity. Right? So... today, the money
still comes from publicity, it's basically the same thing, only now there isn't
just the radio and MTV to promote a song. Today, you have to find new ways of
exciting the audience online. If you manage to do "cool stuff" on
your own and you attract 100 thousand people, suddenly you get the big corporations
to come to you, and not you going after them, begging. So, artists have more
power today than they had in the old days. It all depends on how artists will
use that power, if they'll choose ways of doing it without sacrificing their
art.

laeticia

Oh, I'll translate the other one for next week. Also, I can't seem to get it right – if I just post inside the post the letters get very little, if I post it in a quote the letters are normal but then it gets all spaced out xD

NinjaCat

Thanks so much for doing all of that, Laeticia!!!  That was a fun interview to read.

sherib

Congratulations to D.

glamour_and_sedition

"I believe in music as an emotional experience."  Amen, Damian.  Somebody please take note - I want that carved on my tombstone. (And I mean that not in a morbid way but in a "I love it so much I want it with me forever" kind of way. )

Thank you, Leticia!!!

BeckiWitte

Thank you so much for translating this for us.  It was a great read and we wouldn't have been able to read and enjoy it without you.

magnoliamaggiemag

Lots of fun to read. I found the tequila jokes especially entertaining. Thanks Leticia for your excellent translating!

sherib

Yes, thank you, Laeticia, for all of the translating!  That was a lot of work.

sherib

laeticia said:

One of the interviews I promised... original article can be found here.

 

Wow, I hadn't checked out the link until now - definitely worth checking out for the photos!
Or maybe I can actually manage to embed them ... doubt it ...

Well, whaddya know?
And

laeticia

I WAS going to do that when I posted the interview but it was so late in the night I completely forgot. Thank goodness we're all a bunch of clickety-clicks on OK Go links and nothing ever passes us by.

Thanks, sherib!

laeticia

On a related note about 'being so late in the night' 

LONGINQUO means far distant, as in far distant time.

I was going to see if there was a single word for it, so I wrote it in caps and kept going to see it later and as you can see, I forgot. I'm sorry.

laeticia

Another interview from the Cuervo Concerts. Sorry it took me so long to post the translation here.

Original article here: http://virgula.uol.com.br/ver/noticia/musica/2011/11/21/288662-ok-go-toca-de-graca-pelas-ruas-de-sao-paulo

Album of pictures: 
http://virgula.uol.com.br/ver/album/musica/2011/11/21/17768-ok-go-toca-de-graca-pelas-ruas-de-sao-paulo 

I gotta say, I particularly enjoyed the bit he talks about 'kids I've seen in all three concerts'. Yes, I'm an annoying kid, YES I AM! hahahaha

OK Go plays for free in the streets of Sao Paulo

Nov, 21st, 2011.

Alexandre Lopes

OK Go is a North-American band  expert in creating videos that are a huge success online, with low budgets and simple ideas. Proof of that is the video for Here It Goes Again, which showed Damian Kulash (vocals, guitar), Tim Nordwind (bass, vocals), Dan Konopka (drums) and Andy Ross (guitar, keyboard and vocals) doing a choreography on treadmills, which was seen by around a million people on YouTube on the course of six days.

Having an eye in the viral potencial of the group, the brand of tequila Jose Cuervo hired the guys for a special action, with the purpose of promoting their new drink, Cuervo Cold. With that, the brand is promoting a series of free concerts with the band on the streets of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro between the 19th and 25th of November.

The idea is to distribute OK Go in little doses, with  itinerant presentations inside of a truck. The action also involves the recording of an interactive video, here in Brazil, to one of the band's songs.

Virgula Musica went down to check one of those presentations in Sao Paulo this sunday (November 20th) and we got Damian and Tim to have a talk with us about the shows in Brazil, the relationship of the band with labels and the next steps of OK Go. 

Virgula Musica - You're performing more than one concert, inside of a truck, in one day. Have you ever done anything like this?

Damian - We've never done anything exactly like this, but we did already play more than one concert in a day...

Tim - Once we had a few shows in Canada, one day we played in one side of a city, got in a van that had no snow tires and we went to play in Halifax on the same day... it wasn't a really safe thing to do.

Damian - None of these concerts were in 'land', they were all on snow. That was amazing and terrifying at the same time. After that I swore to myself we'd never do anything like that again. And now we're here (laughs).

Tim - Yeah, but it's more fun playing in Brazil!

Damian - Yes, for sure! But we tried some weird presentations before. We tried playing underwater and it worked. It wasn't that confortable though, I was using this suit where my whole body was more loose than the rest of the guys, it was almost like a tank. The others had snorkels. I thought it was pretty cool, Andy hated it. I think we couldn't do that again, he would kill us (laughs)

Tim - We played on a very high stair in the Guggenheim Museum, in New York.

Damian - Yes, we tried playing 30 feet high, mas we only managed 26. Besides that, we had an 8 hour parade in Los Angeles with around 100 people. That day we played every single song we knew!

Virgula Musica - Then it was easy for you to get up that truck and do this series of concerts...

Damian - Of course! The most difficult part of this job is actually for the people who get everything together, they're in and out of that truck very quickly. All the energy for the instruments has to come from generators, it must be exhausting to prepare all of that. It is logistically very difficult for them, but for us is pretty easy, because it's a much shorter concert than usual. We don't have much space, mas it's fun because we capture different energies from the audience in each spot. There are people who are caught by surprise, walking down the street, and also we have those dedicated fans that came to all concerts. It's like a 'treasure hunt' combined with a concert. There are some kids I've seen in the last three shows and you kinda feel like you're friends with them... it's a great feeling.

Virgula Musica - How were you invited to do this? Did you have a pre-established script or could you make suggestions in the actions?

Damian - Jose Cuervo's staff got in contact with us and basically said 'we want to do this kind of campaign and in a way that's fun and different'. And from that, we shared some ideas and we got to this experimental format. For us it's great to keep a good relationship with these companies that work in a more transparent way than to get to a big record label, where we'd have commitments we wouldn't be able to control. If we were in a big label, I don't think we'd do something like this. I think it's cool that we can make these partnerships this way and still make a rock concert with cultural and artistic experiences, not just plain boring advertisement. And Cuervo was nice about that, they wanted people to show up and have fun, just like we did. It seems like this kind of action gets this better than the music industry itself. We don't base our work or our lives on radio charts: we want to go on with our projects according to our own ideas. 

Virgula Musica - You almost killed my next question: you managed to make success with videos on YouTube, without big productions and with simple ideas. How does the band sees these patterns of labels and from the music industry?

Damian - I feel bad for labels, because it's not like they only have bad people working there - most of them aren't bad at all - but let's put it this way: we have to find solutions to only one band, and they have to find solutions to lots of bands. So, they need systems that work, it doesn't matter for which band, but it has to work and become a success. Our system wouldn't work with just any band, but it works because of the specific things we do: videos, records, and different stuff to challenge ourselves. And this kind of system they use is dying, everything is getting more and more experimental. For many years, it was like a product. If I say "Thriller", Michael Jackson, you'll remember the record, and booklet, things like that. Now, if I say "Fuck You", Cee-Lo Green, what will you remember? I remember the video and the song. I think today certain things are more connected to the experience of people with it than to the pre conceived image of the artist, a piece of plastic. And things shouldn't be returning to that model. It's like labels are selling fax machines in the wrong decade.

Tim - Like they do with Bieber (laughs)

Damian - Yes! We have our own label and we'll also try to release bands through it, our friends, and maybe we'll have the exact same problem normal labels have. But I doubt we'll use the same systems, seeing as we're only working with friends and projects we feel passionate about, things that are really interesting to us.

Virgula Musica - Talking about music that interests you, which popstars do you think are worth it nowadays?

Tim - There'll always be good pop music out there...

Damian - I don't really listen to much pop music around. But I think it's interesting to know that indie rock is a success, with small bands growing in popularity. Like Foster the People, who became a bigger band for a big audience. It's nice to see these things are pop because of the internet. I don't think Arcade Fire could be a huge success before the internet.

Tim - There are some pop artists that work with interesting people. I like Justin Timberlake, for example. He's great.

Damian - I love Justin Timberlake.

Tim - He's done good records, his production is great. There's people like Pharrel and other hip hop artists like Jay-Z. Their production is also interesting and excelent.

Damian - Jay-Z's records are really good.

Virgula Musica - Andy Ross is in the band since 2005. What has changed since Andy Duncan left?

Tim - Well, everything. The music industry changed! (laughs).

Damian - Yes, the music industry fell apart. All of the videos we made happened after he left, and that obviously was a huge difference. We are creative people who like doing many things, that's why we found it pretty cool to go on in an independent label. And when the videos started to get attention and get us the realization of being able to do what we really liked... that changed a lot. But I'm not saying it all happened because Andy Duncan left, that may have been a coincidence. We didn't manage to do this only because of Andy Ross. But there are some differences: our sound changed a lot and if Andy Duncan was still with us, probably our sound would've gone a different direction. Andy Ross' way of playing is really unique, and if he wasn't in the band, we wouldn't have done the record this way.

Tim - He's got some pretty special solos, he likes that kind of thing.

Virgula Musica - And after this crazy madness of pop up gigs, what are your plans? Do you have any new songs up your sleeves for a next record?

Damian - We are in the middle of a production of a new video in the US. We started last week, but we paused everything and we'll finish it as soon as we're back there. We hope to record the new songs in the next semester, but we don't have a lot of songs written yet. The way we write is like playing a chord progression along with a beat. Next, we improvise on it and chose whatever we can get from it. So we have a few elements ready, but not complete songs yet. 

BeckiWitte

Wonderful interview!  Thanks once again for translating these for us.  It is really generous of you to spent your time doing translations for the rest of the boardies.

DJRose

What Becki Said.

laydeejol

What ^ Rach said ;)

I really miss them now :'(

sherib

BeckiWitte said:

Wonderful interview!  Thanks once again for translating these for us.  It is really generous of you to spent your time doing translations for the rest of the boardies.

---

Agree wholeheartedly!

laeticia

Thanks guys! I do this with much pleasure! :)

sherib

Because I'm totally on the ball, I only just watched the IWYSBICB video now (link for future reference, since it's actually hard to find if you search with the song name: ).  I dig it.  It looks like a Lite Brite came to life.

* Wow, didn't expect or mean that to embed.