Category: Music Video Page 1 of 3

I have survived a second week of a band-spotlight and this roughly wraps up the first month of this [I skipped a couple of days and weekends] so let’s get to the Durry Week finisher, “Dead Media“:

“Dead Media” started out a bit differently. It was originally a hidden track on their physical copies of This Movie Sucks: a celebration of “owning” songs and not just streaming them.

Now, of course, it has succumbed to the pressure of Spotify and the like, but for a brief-ish moment it was a testament to its own lyrics before it became a testament to its own lyrics:

I’m an addict
I admit it
But it’s how I
make a living
Selling cheap tricks
But I got it
A few more seconds
Of your life
I’m like a vampire
For your time

It is an odd moment for the more socially aware artists to realize that they are part of the noise that they often write against. In another Durry song, “Bully,” we hear the lyrics:

Greetings people of the internet
It’s your friend from the real world
I’ve been reaching out
trying to make contact
But all I’m getting back
Are really mean comments

Only Durry is not your friend from the real world. At least, not for the majority of us. For most of us, Durry is very much so a band we found through streaming sites and Youtube. Being addicted to the “cellphone light” is how we learned the joy of listening to Durry.

From a whole other artist, you could see Grandson’s “Brainrot,” a video that might feature in the next round so I won’t deep dive too hard. We get a lyric talking about people with their new smartphones having batteries “mined by a kid in a warzone.” Only, smartphone users are Grandson’s target audience.

It is a dissonance rampant in this current era. I can rant about The Algorithm™ all I want but without it, no one will find this blog. Without it, I would never have had Durry’s “Who’s Laughing Now?” or Grandson’s “Blood/Water” recommended to me.

I imagine I am a good bit below the average phone usage of many modern people — it’s not like being on a desktop all day really makes a huge difference, mind — but that phone which represents capitalism at its spikiest and the potential death of a future is also a gateway to a potential better future.

One where we own our own dead media before the AI chatbots buy it all up to consume it and destroy it. The bastards.

Also, Spotify sucks. I use Youtube Music (technically, more like I use Youtube [obvs] and some of the stuff is a byproduct of YTM) so I’m being a hypocrite but they mostly all suck. Pandora at least tried paying people. I…think…Qobuz is ok. Nice FLACs is the only way I use it.

For real, Space Pilgrims, go and buy your shit and then curate and show it off and share it and stuff. Stop letting AI-generated playlists replace your control over your own media. You’ll be dead soon enough.

We are being trained to listen to artists who are being trained to beg us for likes just to keep making art while AI-bros who own the platforms are shilling the heat death of the artistic universe.

My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube. No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little) though it started as “daily”. It might not even all be music or dance videos. Absolutely picked by me, though. Usually I have to like both the song and the video, but we’ll see.

You can see at least the most recent songs here: [Doug’s] Music Video Picks [Youtube Playlist]. Size of that list will change as the mood strikes. Playlist might contain spoilers for unpublished posts. Just enjoy.

To counter yesterdays’ [somewhat ironic] song about coming of age, let’s continue Durry week with a song about being stuck in between:

This song is in between their two albums and shows some degrees of transition between those two moments. Surburban Legend grew out of a few years of singles and shifts. By contrast, This Movie Sucks was a year of a much more concentrated effort.

And, again, in the middle, is a song about feeling like you are supposed to still be a kid when you are also expected to be an adult:

I love dungeons and dragons
In the basement with my friends
Everybody’s got commitments
It’s getting hard to plan

And everyday I’m playing dress up
Go to work and play pretend
That I grew out of it
But I can’t

We’ll be
Teenagers forever
But not forever young
Always on the cusp of growing up
But it’s never quite enough

Absolutely wonderful stuff.

By the way, don’t think I mentioned this yet, but Durry has a Bandcamp page.

My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube. No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little) though it started as “daily”. It might not even all be music or dance videos. Absolutely picked by me, though. Usually I have to like both the song and the video, but we’ll see.

You can see at least the most recent songs here: [Doug’s] Music Video Picks [Youtube Playlist]. Size of that list will change as the mood strikes. Playlist might contain spoilers for unpublished posts. Just enjoy.

Whoo, 2o+1 of these things.

If you have heard of Durry, you have probably heard of “Who’s Laughing Now?“, their most viral hit, so I am not going to share that one. Instead, I am going to share…

“Who’s Laughing Now?” was a hit in our household, no doubt. I’m almost positive it was the first Durry video I saw and it was a case of instant love. The argument about whether or not to get a face tattoo lives, as the kids say, rent free in my head…at least some days:

However, it was “Loser’s Club” [yesterday’s pick] and “Coming of Age” that were my Durry-songs-of-choice. I played them both a whole lot. I still play them both a whole lot. I have designed entire music videos about “Coming of Age” in my head.

I also like the idea of having two different songs about coming of age stories on this blog.

A lot of what I enjoyed about this one was the subversion of the traditional “coming of age” from a teen to third-life crisis. A resonance, if you will, with the feelings a lot of us were going through post-COVID-19’s initial blast when we were returning to normal and realizing that the normal didn’t have to be precisely the normal and maybe “normal” was a code-word for “abusive relationship with society”…

Back to the rat race run in place. I just spin my wheel till my my next lunch break. And hope it gets better with a five cent raise.

But I can’t stop until I get paid.

I don’t know which is worse, the commute or the hearse. I don’t think that it’s worth it anymore. Sick of living for the paycheck. Blow it on the weekend. I’m giving up and loading up the briefcase.

I should have known better than to think that this could change.

I should have seen the pattern, how disconnected I became.

Climbing that corporate ladder.

If you need somebody to take the blame: you can call me a quitter.

But I’m calling it a coming of age.

Even as a person who was happy with his job — and I would be shocked and awed if most people wouldn’t essentially agree, disdain requires something of a minority condition to sustain¹ — the fun of a certain type of punk attitude is fist-in-the-air, beer in hand, and shouting “FUCK IT” to everything for a full four-minute song.

That kind of joyful rebellion is rampant in Durry and I love them for it.

1. In the same way that if the shortcut was easy it would just be the way, true disdain requires it to be much more trouble to fix than to let it roll. ↩︎