YouTube videos (Happy Rhodes-related, but not totally)

Cafe Society
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I’ve become addicted to YouTube recently. I don’t know if it’s ok to talk about YouTube. I’m sure I will find out.

I’ve got a bit of a rep for being a besotted Happy Rhodes fan, and a bunch of videos appeared on YouTube (with a little help from…). Happy’s been making music for over 20 years and has 10 albums, and has NEVER made a video to any of her songs before, and no footage from live shows has ever been on the Internet before. Since I’m not sure if direct links are forbidden, if anyone’s interested, search for “Happy Rhodes” and look at “k8fan’s” videos. There are a bunch there, of varying quality, but all worth watching because of her phenomenal voice.

Anyway, I’ve been spending a lot of time at YouTube (watching other things besides Happy), and I can’t imagine how much longer it will stick around. I don’t know how they stay in business. I can’t even begin to imagine what kind of hard drive space they must have. Has anyone ever heard a figure?

I can see YouTube becoming another Napster, something that becomes wildly popular by hosting illegal files that then gets shut down (though Napster never hosted files, so it’s not an exact comparison) and is reborn with a corporate stamp and usage fee.

Is anyone else a YouTube addict?

2

Slight hijack:

I once picked Happy up from the airport and sat around in my office talking to her while she waited for the boss to be available. I’ve also talked to her on the phone several times.

3

I use Youtube to watch some of the American shows we don’t get here. The entire first season of the Colbert Report is up there, as well as a lot of the Daily Show. Whose Line is it Anyway is pretty well represented.

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I watch it when I’m bored and can’t really think of anything else to do and generally watch fan-made music videos, either montages of shows I’m a fan of set to music or songs I really like set to whatever. I’ve never seen a single episode of *House *before but there’s a really nice video of his codeine habit set to K’s Choice’s Not an Addict that I watched two or three times when I stumbled across it.

5

My favorite videos up there are the Star Trek Monty Python video (to the tune of “Camelot” from Monty Python and the Holy Grail) and the AMV Hell videos (Oh goodness NOT AT ALL WORK SAFE)

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I just stumbled across this video for a song by OK Go (whom I’d never heard of). Really clever and cool; goes to show that you don’t need CGI or a big budget to make a terrific video.

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Why would it be forbidden to talk about YouTube here? Because you might find some copyright violations there? If so, we’d better stop talking about 90% of the internet.

I love YouTube. There’s great stuff on there. Lately I discovered some concert footage of a couple of the “Rock Star Supernova” contestants, which impressed the daylights out of me. In particular, “Storm Large”, who I thought was pretty good on the show, but not much else. It turns out she’s a pretty popular indie star in her own right, and she is one hell of a performer.

Check out these Storm Large videos:

Great Day
Beautiful
Penetration
I Want You To Die

And here she is performing Bowie’s ‘Changes’ on Rockstar. I really, really like this performance: Changes

Then there’s Ryan Star - a guy I didn’t think much of at all until he did this version of REM’s “Losing my Religion”. So I went to Youtube to see if he had done anything else, and it turns out he’s quite a popular indie act in the New York:

Ryan Star - Head like a hole
Ryan Star - Losing Your Memory

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It seems like the TV networks are being a lot more cooperative with YouTube than the evil RIAA/Metallica cabal was with Napster. Just recently, NBC signed a promotional deal with YouTube, and other networks have followed suit.

As for the expense, I’ve heard that YouTube’s been losing almost a billion dollars a month in bandwidth fees (couldn’t find a cite, so that figure may be off) – which means, obviously, this free lunch won’t last forever. So enjoy it while you can!

And let me just say, when it comes to the homemade videos…people are into some weeeeird shit. Not necessarily foul or disgusting, just WEIRD. (Ever see The Jaegerr Report? That kid needs serious therapy!)

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My current favorite. Chez from The Lonely Island + the new Superman actor + the guy from Harold and Kumar go to White Castle. Hilarious.

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Good Lord…
I don’t like the song a whole lot, but that’s pretty amazing, especially since it looks like they did it all in one take. That must have taken tons of rehearsing. I have to respect a band that will do that.

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I agree, but it’s corporatizing slowly and steadily instead of the way it was quickly forced on Napster. They are being smarter about it. NBC doesn’t want anything NBC-related on YouTube, though they have a long way to go before they get it all.

She’s a real sweetheart isn’t she? I see you’re in Nebraska, which must mean you worked for Samson Records during the brief time she was signed there. Still work there? I have some nasty things to say about them. They REALLY blew it when it came to Happy. I have to wonder how many more albums we’d have, how much more music we’d be listening to, if Samson had never come into Happy’s life and screwed her over.

On the plus side, thank to Samson I got a Many Worlds Are Born Tonight poster and mousepad, though I don’t think the pain Samson caused Happy was worth it. Does anyone ever think of Happy and say “Damn, we blew it”?
Ever read this?

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Not anymore, cuz we sold all the labels! :eek:

And you’re right, she is a very very nice person. Very down to earth. Unlike David Crosby, who’s not below yelling at helpless receptionists. Jerk.

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I was worried/wondered about putting actual links in. That’s what I wasn’t sure about.

Since you put in a bunch, I’ll put in one. Here’s Happy Rhodes. All of hers were put up by “k8fan” (that’s not me).

I’d never heard of Rock Star Supernova or Storm Large until this post. Thanks for the links. I’ve watched Great Day and Beautiful and a couple of the RSS appearances so far and she’s amazing. It’s not really my type of music, but I can appreciate talent when I see it, and she’s got it. Great Day in particular is awesome. I like the concert songs much more than the RSS performances. I can see her becoming very very famous, but I hope it’s for her own music and not the stuff she has to sing on the competition. I’m going to take it for granted that she’ll win so I don’t have to watch any of it anymore.
That OK Go is a lot of fun, and I agree, it must have taken some major rehearsal time.

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What’s Samson doing now? I know they don’t even own the website anymore. The way you talked it sounded as if you still worked there. Did you read what Happy wrote about her Samson experience? After Samson dropped Happy, did anyone express a regret that they just let go someone who could have been the next Kate Bush/Sarah McLachlan/Tori Amos? The entire company should have revolved around her. (says, I know, a besotted fan).

You wouldn’t happen to know any background details on why they booked Happy into the, I hate to even type it, Flamingo Club in New York City? I traveled from Chicago to that and other shows and it’s still surreal to me. The place seemed like something right out of Goodfellas, an owned-by-the-mob kind of place. It was so wrong for her in every way possible (size, acoustics, ambience, patronage) I still shake my head thinking about it.

Man, no kidding. He sounds like an ass.

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I worked for the parent. There have been changes since then in the company.

I’m not even sure if Samson exists anymore.

Beyond that, I don’t know the answers to your questions, and I wouldn’t answer them on a message board even if I did (that’s NOT intended to sound snarky, it’s just me being overly cautious and discrete. No offense intended.).

I will say that I’m glad to see people out there in the world know who she is.

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One of the other sites I visit regularly is for a specific flare of this type of work, and, well, lets just say YouTube isn’t well liked*. Part of the problem has to do with videos getting posted but people other than the actual editors, and sometimes even having the credit stolen. Part of it is just that people would rather have their video avaliable in better quality and downloadable (this site also hosts videos, so with a few exceptions there isn’t much reason to look for alternate hosting). That isn’t to say that I don’t like YouTube, and I do have a couple very short videos up there (I may add some full-length stuff later, I’m not sure), and if you just want to share stuff it has its uses. So far I haven’t seen anything I’ve made put up there by others–I’m not sure if I’m happy it’s not stolen or annoyed no one likes it enough to do so.

*It’s amusing to see newbies get bitten by the word filter. They’ll ask a question about YouTube, and then look back to see their post edited. “What’s a hostachel?”

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Ah GC. The fella who signed Happy (I still don’t know his name) was very nice to her but he left to work at GC and that’s when her problems began. She credits him for stepping in and helping her after she was dropped, but doesn’t give details. I always assumed it related to getting her masters back, because as far as I know she owns her own music.

No offense taken at all. I completely understand. After all these years, you’re the first person I’ve met on the net who worked for Samson/Gold Circle, and I sort of went over the top, so the fault was mine. Your responses have been good enough to tell me that there were people at the company who liked Happy and her music. That’s good for me to know and remember.

Cool of you to say. Even though her name doesn’t ever come up in the outside world, she does have a small, but worldwide, fandom. Her internet mailing list has been going strong since 1991, with hundreds of members. She’s obscure but does have a fanbase.

I’ve been a fan for 18 years so I’m pretty much the go-to person. I had a lot of advice for Samson when they first signed Happy since I was at the apex of her fandom, but they never listened to anything I said. Not that I have an ego about it, but I could have helped. For instance, she was signed in 1997, at the very beginning of the mp3 revolution. I urged them to get in on it, by putting a couple of songs on mp3 and releasing them into the wild of the Internet. They could have been right there at the forefront, with Happy, McKinley and others on the label, who would have been noticed simply because there weren’t that many high-quality artists on mp3, and certainly no Samson-sized or bigger labels who supported the technology, which would have gotten Samson and their artists written up all over the place, but instead, Samson acted like one of the big, paranoid record labels, and would only release songs in that lame “mp4” (which was a bogus name, since it had nothing to do with mp3s) propriatary format. A format which died very quickly. Happy trusted Samson to know what they were doing. Too bad for her.

Anyway, I know you can’t respond to any of that, even if you knew anything about it, but I had to get it off my chest. I still shake my head at the memory.