When the music video history of the 2000s is written, I think that it will prove to be the most transformative decade for music videos yet. And, I think that OK Go will fit into that history in a big way. From 2005 to the early part of the 2010s, OK Go played an integral part in defining the music video genre we'll call "internet spectacle" for lack of a better term that is also not "viral video". In the middle of the decade when videos were just starting to be really feasible online on a big scale, OK Go helped throw music videos into the mix.
The most famous example is "Here We Go Again" from 2006, but today we're taking a look at a music video that is sort of a prequel to their famous treadmill dance, "A Million Ways", directed/choreographed by bandmember Damien Kulash's sister, Trish Sie.
"A Million Ways" is even simpler than "Here We Go Again", if you can believe that. It features OK Go in Damian Kulash's backyard (it's a very nice backyard) and they do an entertaining, choreographed dance to a song. That's pretty much it - there are no other props or anything, just the band dancing to the song.
It's important to remember where the internet was in 2005 with regards to video. In an NPR Fresh Air story about the video's popularity, they decribe the popularity of the video as having 500,000 "downloads" instead of "views". YouTube was only a few months old at this point, and internet video was scattered across many individual sites. In fact, Robert Siegel doesn't even really have a metric to point to, something that in our world of detailed view counts is pretty alien.
The story is that OK Go created this dance with Trish Sie for the end of their live show, and they recorded it without the intention of releasing it as a music video. However, fans who were given DVD copies put the video online and it spread from there. OK Go already had another single lined up, but this one's popularity was too great to ignore.
This video started a concept that OK Go would ride until you could turn on the Superbowl and see OK Go driving a car that hits things and plays a song in a commerical. They pioneered a kind of internet visual spectacle genre (sorry, not going to call it viral, not going to do it) that I believe is currently dying due to an oversaturated market and the general internet audience looking for something different. However, for half a decade, the place of music videos in internet culture had a lot to do with what bands like OK Go were doing, and "A Million Ways" is one of the videos that started it all.
