The music video ‘Love Is A Battlefield’ tells the story of a teenage girl who gets in a fight with her father and runs away from home by catching a bus to the big city.

Once there she’s forced to make a living by prostit… er… ‘dancing’ with men in a ballroom overseen by a seedy looking pimp guy that leers over her and all the other girls.

Things come to a head when the reality of that kind of life settles in for her and the pimp starts mistreating one of the other ‘dancers’.

This video was made in the early eighties and is very unusual for that time period, mainly because the video actually makes sense. It’s also reportedly the first music video ever to ‘use the spoken word’.

You can tell that the makers of this video wanted to do more than just throw a bunch of random crap together and set it to music. They took the time to tell an interesting story and even told it from different points of view in a style that’s half musical half after school special…

Wouwouwouwouwoaaa. ;)

Here’s a really interesting music video for the song ‘Power’ by Kanye West. It’s quite good because it tells a somewhat tired old story, that Kanye is a super talented guy and is the center of the universe, in an innovative and artistic way.

I’m a huge fan of music videos but get frustrated watching them a lot of the time because of the lame formulas that many of them seem to follow. You’d think that since the average mainstream music video costs upwards of several hundred thousand dollars that there would be a decent effort put into making them more unique. That’s why I was happy to come across this video, it’s just different.

It’s got sort of a freaky tarot card feel to it and all the elements are steeped in symbolism. Like the sword hanging over his head alludes to the Sword Of Damocles, representing the major downside to having a lot of power.

Even though there doesn’t seem to be a lot of movement in the video (in fact Kanye West never moves at all through the whole thing) the setup is actually very dynamic and does a lot to move your attention around to all the different things going on. The layers create the movement and the story. Everything is in slow mo and barely moving which gives it a telepathic kind of vibe.

At just over a minute and a half long the video has another unusual feature of not using the whole song. It’s definitely worth a look if you’re into stories or storytelling (fair warning though, some of the visuals are nsfw).

Here’s one of the funniest videos I’ve seen in a long long time, it’s an old clip from The Frank Sinatra Show featuring an insanely funny guy named Larry Griswold.

As Sinatra introduces him he comes onstage and says ‘Larry is unable to make it over here tonight’. He says he’s ‘Larry’s father’ and insists on filling in for his son by doing the diving board routine himself.

He then proceeds to act out the story of a hapless guy trying to wow the audience by doing some stunts that are obviously way out of his league. I alternately laughed and gasped as he bounced like a rubber ball all over the diving board and scaffold. It’s amazing that he could do that routine without getting hurt:

‘Hey bub watch who you’re pushing around!’ Ha, awesome!!

I thought this was a neat bit of storytelling, very unusual and well done. Wish there was more physical comedy of this caliber these days.

Yeah wow right?? But could the game really have been that bad? Oh yes lol.

I found a video on YouTube of the game being played so that I could see for myself what the big deal was. I don’t know how to explain why I made it through the whole two minutes of the video other than…it’s one of those things that’s so bad you just can’t look away.

So the game is basically E.T. walking around falling in holes (wait that wasn’t in the movie) then walking around some more and falling in some more holes. How does he get out of the holes? Well he extends his neck and levitates upwards of course (hmmm).

Every so often some dude in a trench coat comes around and tries to hump E.T. and take him back to his alien molesting college. Seriously. No really…

Surely you’ve seen the epically amazing Trololo video by now, but did you ever wonder what the song was actually about?

Or maybe it didn’t even seem like the song could be about anything considering the lyrics are, well, there aren’t any really other than lololo and lalala type stuff.

But there is a story behind the song and here it is as explained by Edward Khil, the Trololo man himself:

“John on a mustang is riding across a prairie to his love Mary who is waiting for him and knitting him a woolen sock.”

There was one big problem though: the song was written in Soviet Russia and so a story about an American cowboy riding free on the range had no chance of making it past the censors back then.

It had to be changed. John and Mary were dropped and the officially sanctioned story of the song became “A man is merry he walks and sings for himself. He is glad and everyone around him is glad.” Talk about typical Soviet era censorship lol! We are all very happy and everyone is glad…lololo.

But the spirit of the song lived on in between the lines and the sound of the song was kept in the American style as much as was possible. You can hear a bit of this specifically in the ‘Aiieeee’ part that sounds a lot like it came from a cowboy song.

Another interesting Trololo related story is that Edward Khil had no clue that he was super famous on the internet until his grandson came home one day humming the Trololo song:

“I asked him what that was about. He answered that I am not keeping up to date and that in the internet all America is singing it while I am sleeping at home…”

I watched a video of an interview with him, turns out he’s a pretty awesome guy overall and even took all the Trololo parodies in stride. I can only hope to be that layed back about things when I’m seventy-five years old.

source: spb.kp.ru

Most of the time advertising isn’t about selling the actual item as much as the story it will create in a person’s life.

A perfect example of this is the following somewhat hillarious yet sad 1950′s car ad. It makes a big point of saying to housewives ‘Buy a new Ford and get your independence, finally!’

I posted this video on YouTube and it got an interesting range of responses…including quite a few people coming up with endings to this woman’s story. What did you think of this ad??

Not the kind of story you’d expect from a choir full of seniors that’s for sure. Somehow their very enthusiastic (diabolical?) choir leader has convinced them to rap and sing hip hop songs by Eminem, Outkast, and a bunch of others.

Many of the choir members look like they’re doing it all begrudgingly, some seem confused as to wtf they got involved with, and a few look amused.

The ladies really get into the ‘Dontcha wish your girlfriend was hot like me?’ part and the whole choir ends up disrobing at the end while singing ‘It’s getting hot in there…’.

This is a fun video to watch, you will lol for sure and come out with an appreciation for this awesome choir:

They’re basically creating awesome stories in what normally are pretty mundane landscapes:

But wait, there’s more! An otter also told me the misheard lyrics version is even funnier:

Even the few elements of nature around him were conspiring to be distracting, like the tree branches creeping over his forehead and birds having a squawking contest…