That Crazy Treadmill Video
Ever see that video with the guys dancing on treadmills? It is one of the videos that caused the general population to realize the power of YouTube. “Here It Goes Again” just keeps going, getting over 53 million views since 2006. If you haven’t seen it, just Google “treadmills” and it will come up very high in the results. Four guys are dancing on and between six treadmills while singing to the beat.
How did this happen? Why did this three minute video get so many views? It can only be because it is so amusing to watch that people sent the link to their friends. The video has often been used in Internet marketing circles as a prime example of a video “going viral” and being passed around with such amazing speed that it opens minds up to similar possibilities.
The Los Angeles band that made the video is called OK Go. The band was formed in 1999 and the song in the video is from their second album, Now 23. The video took twelve days of rehearsal, seventeen takes, and many falls and bruises to get it all down in the final takes. It features bassist Tim Nordwind lipsynching the words. The dance was choreographed by the sister of OK Go member Damion Kulash’s. It is the band’s only single to make to Billboard magazine’s Hot 100, where it entered the Top 40 at #38, mostly due to the video. The video won the 2007 Grammy for Best Short Form Music Video. The treadmill dance on the video has been parodied in a number of places, most notably in the TV show The Simpsons entitled “Husbands and Knives” where Marge has difficulty finding the right gym for her and one gym has four people doing the treadmill dance.
After all this, it wouldn’t be surprising that the band would want to move past the treadmill stage of their careers and explore new ground. “I used to use treadmills for exercise. I have moved from treadmills to ellipticals – not because of the million views online, but because my knees can’t take the impact anymore,” said OK Go bassist Tim Nordwind. “There probably was a period in time when if someone had asked me, I would’ve been like, ‘ I don’t care if I ever see another treadmill again.’ But I’m sort of past that point.”
When the band performed the dance routine from the video at the 2006 MTV Video Music Awards, it did so without the treadmills. There were also no treadmill onstage during a recent live performance of the There It Goes Again song. Will the video live on longer than the band that made it? In attempt to get past the prospect of being a one-hit wonder and typecast as treadmill artists, OK Go has released new music. They have produced a somewhat similarly-styled video, without a treadmill, that has been viewed about 20 million times, called “This Too Shall Pass.” It features a Rube Goldberg-like machine, an intentionally complex contraption that uses chain reactions to perform a simple task.
By: Robert Braun
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Filed under Arts And Entertainment by on Nov 12th, 2010. 