ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
It's been 20 years since the band OK Go released "Here It Goes Again."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HERE IT GOES AGAIN")
OK GO: (Singing) Oh, here it goes, here it goes, here it goes again.
SHAPIRO: But the tune isn't what most people remember. They remember the treadmills. In a grainy music video, the four guys in the band jump on and off moving treadmills in a choreographed dance. It cost them $5 to make, and it became one of the first viral music videos blowing up on YouTube when the platform was still new and catapulting the band to fame. Two decades later, OK Go's music videos still regularly break the internet.
DAMIAN KULASH: The reflection of a reflection of a reflection is always such a spectacularly exciting trick.
SHAPIRO: That's Damian Kulash, lead singer of OK Go.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOVE")
OK GO: (Singing) Song there's ever been. Love.
SHAPIRO: The band's latest video for the song, "Love," is a frantic journey through a kaleidoscope of mirrors hinging on robotic arms.
KULASH: I remember standing between my parents' two closet doors that opened towards each other, and both had a full length mirror on it, and you could see the infinite hallway.
SHAPIRO: So why not take that childhood memory and spend months making an elaborate one-take music video out of it? I asked Kulash what it's been like to spend his career in the churn of internet virality.
KULASH: I think of it as being a strange goal to have.
SHAPIRO: (Laughter).
KULASH: You know? Like, we've never particularly chased the attention side of that. It's just the thing that has fueled our ability to keep making music, right? We get to make these really ridiculous and elaborate and wonderful art projects that there really isn't a cultural form for outside of this, right? Like, we couldn't walk into a gallery and be like, listen, we have some art to make. It's going to take a month and, you know, lots and lots of robots and a few hundred mirrors. And after that month, we will have gotten it to work for precisely three minutes.
SHAPIRO: (Laughter).
KULASH: You know? Like, that's not...
SHAPIRO: This is not a Marina Abramovic performance art piece.
KULASH: Exactly. And you can't take it to a movie studio and go, like, I got your four-quadrant, multi-tentpole summer hit. You know, like, this is not how films are normally made. This is not how art is normally made. And it's not even what musicians normally do. And we've stumbled into this place where we get to chase these crazy art projects, and we love it so, so much. And it's such a gift. And it's also - it's not that well suited to the modern version of virality. Like, what people do now with the internet - like, we were part of the move from cable to YouTube, right? Like, we had the biggest thing on MTV and VH1, which was the thing that shifted everybody to YouTube, right? Our treadmill video was the thing that sort of broke MTV.
SHAPIRO: I have to tell you, even today, I said to a friend, oh, I'm interviewing OK Go this week. And he said, oh, the treadmill guys.
KULASH: Oh, yeah. That's going to be on our tombstones. And, like, at the time when we put that out, we decided to put it on YouTube because we got an email from Chad at youtube.com - the guy who founded YouTube - saying, I've seen your stuff online. You should put it on my site. Like, that's how small all of this was at the time.
SHAPIRO: Wow.
KULASH: And now, virality is something like - I mean, first of all, it's kind of purchasable, right? And second, it's mostly done by people gaming algorithms. It doesn't mean the same thing that it did, and it also was never something we were looking for. What we wanted was to make the art project. And if this allows us to keep doing it, then awesome.
(SOUNDBITE OF OK GO SONG, "TAKE ME WITH YOU")
SHAPIRO: So I know that you have to present yourselves as a band, and bands make music videos. But when you're privately thinking about who you are, is it multimedia artists? Is it short filmmakers who also make music? Is it, like - obviously, this is more than just a band making a music video. How do you - this is such a pretentious phrase - describe your creative practice?
KULASH: Wonder-toucher - ew, no - but that's the thing is that, like, I don't really think of myself as a storyteller in the sense that I don't usually think that it's important, the narrative part of this. The arc is really important. The surprise is really important. The choreography is really important. But it's mostly that feeling that you get when Roberta Flack is singing, and suddenly you don't know if you're trying to smile or you're trying to cry, but both have to happen simultaneously. That thing that can't be done through my vocabulary or my rational thinking - that's the magic that we're always chasing, and I feel like it's there in music. And it's there in film, and it's there in everything.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG "TAKE ME WITH YOU")
OK GO: (Singing) Oh, take...
SHAPIRO: That's Damian Kulash of the band OK Go. In another part of the show, we'll talk more about their new album "And The Adjacent Possible."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TAKE ME WITH YOU")
OK GO: (Singing) I need to hear them, too. Oh, take... Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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