Happy Halloween!

I'm actually not a big Halloween person (no costumes here), but I do love candy and seeing other people's outfits. I blame my unfun parents. And the fact that most of my friends don't really do anything for it either, other than drink. Also I am getting old. On the other hand, I really dig Neil Gaiman's idea of All Hallow's Read. That's more my style. Anything with books is a good idea for me.

I would do a themed post, but honestly, I am still fighting a lingering cold and basically tonight I plan on hunkering down with chocolate and beer and watching something nice and tacky like The Vampire Diaries (it's super fun, people, don't judge). Currently I am watching Dexter and hoping that it starts raining to keep kids away. No luck yet!

So I have no energy to look for very many videos. (And yes, I know there is a much wider selection of Halloween music out there than my rather narrow scope, whole genres of more 'scary' stuff. This is just a few things off the top of my head, and none of my posts are meant to be exhaustive descriptive studies. Merely a taste.)


First song that came to my mind - "I'm a Vampire" - Future Bible Heroes - but of course there's no video for it.  Here is a link to the track (YouTube). Digression: The Magnetic Fields and all related acts really need to make music videos, in my opinion. They have the best music, and based on their lyrics, they're clearly very imaginative and well read and theatrical... And I'd just love to be able to post a constant stream of what I imagine would be very weird and delightful videos for my friends.

The 2nd song that came to my mind was "Zombie Me" - No More Kings, but again, I can't find a real video for it, so here's just a link to a performance.

And the third was "Vampire Blues" - Mercury Rev. This is actually a cover of a Neil Young song. I just love his whiney voice (both artists, LOL). Again, no real video - here is a link to the Mercury Rev song version with a nice vampire picture. And here's a link to the Neil Young track.



So after striking out three times, here is one actual Halloween song.

"Do They Know it's Hallowe'en?" - North American Hallowe'en Prevention Initiative" (NAHPI) - this is is a satire and also a charity song, in case you were wondering. See the Wikipedia article here. A wide variety of talented people are involved. So many! Arcade Fire, Beck, the list goes on and on and on. The video is good too, nice and weird.











And I almost forgot, but here's a (Halloween suitable) hilarious random song which my sister played for me once back in the day, which has an equally hilarious and random video - "Move Your Dead Bones" - Dr. Reanimator







I hope everyone who has a life has a safe and happy Halloween! Enjoy yourselves, and stay away from my house (or my black cat will put the evil eye on you). 


Feel free to share your favorite Halloween-y music suggestions in the comments, all 2 people who read this =)

Puppets!

Somewhere between creepy and adorable, there are music videos that feature puppets.

If you are not a puppet fan, this is not the post for you.

I'm going to mention a few of my favorites, ones that I had seen/thought of prior to digging deeper - unfortunately I discovered my list is not extremely original (a disappointing blow, indeed), as I found out this morning after a little googling, which led me to find there are several other lists previously compiled. And they do include a lot of the ones I will talk about, and some I had not seen before like "Flat Beat". But I hadn't read those before, so LOL. I will cite them for reference: in a 2007 post, Culture Bully listed their Top 5 music videos w/puppets, the comments on the post list several more, which make for a very entertaining click-through). A 2009 Yahoo Music blog had a considerably longer list, which I thought included some great newer ones.

There's probably some kind of deeper analysis to be done of puppet videos, here's a short list of possible topics for rants on the subject:
* Do they do things we can't do/show people doing?
* Do they represent our trapped meaningless lives?
* Is this just a ploy to make a video that people will talk about / is it just an easy way to make your video more 'whimisical' or 'quirky'?
* Are most of these videos made by white rock/pop bands? And therefore, are puppets racist?
* Why do I like puppet videos so much? Am I sucker for adorable things?
Provide your detailed answers in the comments, folks, I'm sure you have opinions.

Let's get to it by starting with creepier ones!

First up, a classic - is this the first puppet video ever? Do we know? "Land of Confusion" - Genesis: Not sure how or where I first saw this, but it is super weird and I think definitely falls on the Creepy side of the spectrum.



"Evil" - Interpol: A little creepy because of the extremely flat affect of the singer and the puppet and the disaster setting. I think it actually matches the song/singer's voice perfectly, and was one of the first videos I thought of blogging about.



"Keep Fishin'" - Weezer: This was on both of the aforementioned lists, and for good reason. It has the actual Muppets. And it's cute, especially because Rivers is cute and muppety himself. Weezer has lots of videos with gimmicks - animals, internet memes, herpes-riddled Southern Californians, etc. Some might say that they often have too much gimmick, not enough song, but I generally enjoy Weezer videos, because they really go for it. No self-important "this video is just us standing and playing our song"... they tend to have a lot going on. Is this selling out, or calculated-selling-in-an-ironic-fashion, or is there a difference? Either way, I think this is a cute video.(I know this also opens the ongoing, "does Weezer suck now" can of worms.)



Slightly less famous - another video that actually used to be on my profile - which features not just puppets, but cute animal ones: "In a Funny Way" - Mercury Rev:




"Sugarbaby" - Morningwood: Puppet boobs, vomit, coke and other things... I laughed so hard when I first saw this. I'm glad to see it was noted in the Yahoo music list. This was another of the ones I saw for the first time and hoped/knew someone would write about.

Morningwood - "Sugarbaby" from Matthew Achterberg on Vimeo.

A more recent one, "Elephant Elephant" - Evelyn Evelyn: just plain super cute, love the toys. Leave it to conjoined twins to make an endearing video!



Finally, "Dog Problems" - The Format: this one doesn't even actually have puppets, just the stripped down, slightly-accessorized hands. This is a nice swingy song, and I loved this video immediately because the hand in the hat is just so sweetly sad throughout - the hand posture/movement is actually strikingly evocative, I think (the backgrounds/lighting contribute a lot). The Format also have another video done in paper/origami.



I feel there are probably at least a few other great ones out there, that I just don't know about. Educate me! Comment with which ones you like, which you think sucked, or ones you think I overlooked. Suggestions for upcoming themes are also always welcome.