‘A bizarro parallel universe where irony was never discovered’

When you read the headline, what did you think this post would be about? U.S. foreign policy, maybe? Former Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s delusional rants?

No, it’s about Microsoft. (I can see you now, hitting your forehead and beating up on yourself for not thinking of the most obvious possibility.)

But what about Microsoft? How about its inexplicable ad campaign trying to trick (I mean, persuade) customers using Vista into thinking they were really using a new program called Mojave? (As if that would fix Vista and all the problems it’s rife with.)

Or maybe Zune, which is Microsoft’s pathetic attempt to take on Apple’s iPod. (Impressively, Microsoft managed to have a Y2k-type problem at the close of 2008.)

Actually, in this case, what I’m referring to is Songsmith. Rather than set it up, I’m going to ask you to go straight to watching this video:

Read more about this Musak software freakshow here.

OK, before we enter that parallel universe, refresh your Van Halen memories with this:

And now, drum roll (just not one by Songsmith, OK?) please…

Check what happens when Songsmith meets Van Halen.

As these comments point out, it’s a bit horror-flick-meets-comedy-gold.  (“EVIL. This can’t be real. This can’t be real. This can’t be real. This can’t be real. EVIL, EVIL, EVIL.” “True fact: Rhythm deafness, or anapoetis, is a disease recognized in most developed nations, except New Jersey.” “My wife just burst out of the bedroom half asleep and concerned for what the hell was going on. Was I laughing, was I crying?”)

At least Microsoft is good at something.

The power of a well-chosen song (a.k.a. finding a dream you can speak to)

I missed Barack and Michelle Obama’s first dance at the Neighborhood Inaugural Ball last night. When a friend at work found this out, he made me Google it on the spot.

As all my friends know, I’m no romantic. And yet I found this completely mesmerizing — a fairy tale that Hollywood couldn’t have filmed any better, thanks to Beyoncé’s perfect serenade and the genuine romance the Obamas had on display. (By the way, props to the ABC photographer.)

“At Last”

At last, my love has come along.
My lonely days are over
and life is like a song.
Oh, yeah, at last.
The skies above are blue.
My heart was wrapped up in clovers
the night I looked at you.
I found a dream that I could speak to,
a dream that I can call my own.
I found a thrill to rest my cheek to,
a thrill that I have never known.
Oh, yeah, when you smile, you smile.
Oh, and then the spell was cast.
And here we are in heaven,
for you are mine…
at last.

Music to someone else’s ears. (Really? Who?)

I’ve got Kanye West’s “Love Lockdown” stuck in my head. This is not good thing because it reminds me of his performance on Saturday Night Live last night, which in turns reminds me about how much I dislike hip-hop’s Auto-Tune trend.

I think there are times when using technology to bend, break and boost your vocals absolutely works and might even be necessary (Thom Yorke’s disfigured voice on the experimental and defiant Kid A comes to mind). Rappers who can’t sing but figure they can fudge it with Auto-Tune? That’s just brings the industry’s self-indulgence to new levels of obnoxiousness — and not in an entertaining way. Auto-Tune makes for bad studio albums and even worse live shows — I mean, I cringed every time Kanye took a pass on the high notes last night. Why would he do that to himself? (Lots and lots of people disagree with me. Check out these comments, for instance. What I will give Kanye’s SNL performance is that visually, it rocked. He rethought that drab SNL stage, and that backdrop was sweet.)

That said, I’ve still got that damn song looping through my head. Time to get rid of this earworm.

Radiohead blurs the lines once again

Jonny Greenwood during a 2008 tour stop in Bristow, Va.

It’s been a visually stimulating week for Radiohead fans (I say this as one of the visually stimulated). The band this weekend premiered the last of its new batch of official videos for its In Rainbows album — videos that are actually fan-produced and selected from a worldwide competition.

Radiohead grabbed a lot of headlines last year by releasing In Rainbows as a pay-what-you-want (even if that meant you took it for free) download. By erasing the line between music production and music distribution, the band prompted everyone from industry executives to has-been rockers to wring their hands and wax poetic about an inevitable music-industry death spiral.

Whether it’s a groundbreaking album or a brash business decision, the members of Radiohead always seem to be bending, blurring and breaking. They’re not always the first band to push boundaries in a particular direction, but they are typically the most influential.

The production of these newly released videos are the latest example of how attune Radiohead is with the Web 2.0 spirit of taking down artificial barriers to make room for creative communities to thrive. Earlier this year, Radiohead broke down some In Rainbows tracks into “stems” – separated tracks of voice, guitar, bass, strings/FX and drums — for fans to remix and post for votes.

In this video competition — conducted in conjunction with the independent animation network aniBoom and TBD Records, and promoted on Adult Swim and MySpace — fans helped determine finalists by voting on one-minute video submissions. AniBoom says it received more than 1,000 entries that represented more than 150 cities in 40 countries. Radiohead originally sought just one winner, but in August announced four instead. Talking some syntactic cues from Yoda (for unknown reasons), lead singer Thom Yorke said at the time: “The aniBoom video competition, totally blown me away it has. We are proud that In Rainbows songs were the source of inspiration for so many amazing creations.”

Each creative team received $10,000 to produce the full-length video. MySpace Music previously premiered the final product for “Reckoner,” my favorite track off of the album, and over the past week, the full-length videos for “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi,” “15 Step” and “Videotape” were released. Envisioned and executed in France, the United States, Japan and Germany, these winning entries reflected Radiohead’s international fan base.

I really dig the Japanese-animation style of the “15 Step” video. And while I thought the other three were more innovative, I wasn’t immediately enamored of them — they’re probably acquired tastes, like natto maki or something. But whether I aesthetically like the videos doesn’t really matter, because it’s how they were seeded and grown that makes them so interesting to me.

YouTube helped music fans wanting to consume videos to bypass MTV. Perhaps by blurring the line between “official” and “fan-produced”— and the line between music consumer and music creator — Radiohead is helping to train fans see past the band itself when looking for creative inspiration.