OK Go is the next big thing. Armed with a single all over MTV2 (\Get Over It""), they are about to become inescapable, due in no small part to an immense marketing push from Capitol Records. Unfortunately, like their labelmates the Vines, they don't really follow through on all the hype. Similar to the Vines, OK Go's self-titled debut has one or two catchy songs but falls short as a cogent album, a victim of it's own bombast and self-consciousness. They appear at the Annex, 1406 Regent St., in an early show Friday night, though, and perhaps their live show will succeed where their album fails. Cardinal Arts sat down with lead singer and songwriter Damian Kulash and provided a chance for him to defend himself.
What market are you aiming your new album at, the mainstream pop audience or the fringes?
It wasn't written with a market in mind, to tell the truth. We're sort of being marketed both ways, I think, and that's just the doings of a major label.
Speaking of market, you guys are getting a huge push from Capitol. Do you think you've paid your dues, have you earned the big push?
I don't think anyone earns that, you know. It's not a matter of earning, I guess.
Are you guys gearing up for a certain level of fame? This is a pretty big media campaign, I think you'll be pretty well known.
Having that sort of promotional effort put into you makes you think about it a lot. First of all, I think it's a little premature for us to think that we'll be wildly successful. Also, in terms of fame, I think that fame doesn't affect people's lives until they're wildly, wildly famous. If you're like Bill Murray, I imagine it's hard to go out and have dinner. Who's the guy from Jimmy Eat World?
Jim Adkins.
Sure. I don't even know his name, but the lead singer for Jimmy Eat World can go have dinner. Most places he goes, he's not recognized. I think that fame itself won't be a problem for us. Things are changing quickly for us when it comes to shows, though. We used to play to 15 at a bar in Philadelphia but now it's a bigger deal when we come to town. I don't know if there's anything you can or say to prepare for that, though.
This is a sort of a broad question, but what do you think of the music promotional system as a whole, where musicians can become famous without much merit at all?
I'm not going to read too much into that, but it's true, a lot of money goes into a lot of dreck, which often buys a lot of airtime. But the final arbiter is the people. Contrary to what most kids think, the judge, jury and executioner of rock bands is radio callout research, which is what happens when people like Clear Channel buy research time from companies who call up people in their homes and see if they like a 30 second chunk of a song over the telephone. That research is the final say for what gets sold to America, because radio time is more or less the heaviest promotion that you can get. It's kind of a vicious cycle, promoting mindless stuff to mindless consumers. For all of the hype and press time we give to the White Stripes and the Hives, P.O.D. still sells more records in a week than most bands will sell in their whole careers. The fact of the matter is that kids have the final say, because they're the ones with the dollars. So in terms of how mass marketing works, yeah, it's sort of disgusting, but it's kind of human nature.
What do you think of your music being used in shows on MTV like the ""Real World?"" I think ""Get Over It"" is a perfect ""Real World"" song. What feelings do you have on that style of exposure?
Actually, we've had a lot of our music on the ""Real World"" already. It's funny, because the guy who chooses the music for that show is a fan of ours, and every time they played it, I'd get a rash of e-mails. Everybody, it seemed, had dropped some sort of food when they heard it. One day I got three different e-mails about people who had dropped something; one of them had dropped mustard, one a sandwich and one a beverage or something. It's also funny how much people notice that stuff. I don't have cable, so I don't watch ""Real World,"" but tons of kids have come to our Web site having watched the show, heard the song and gone out and found the album. It's funny, because you were talking about the mass marketing approach to music, I usually think of people being dull receptors that if you beat them over the head enough times, that eventually they will start buying it. That may statistically be true, but it's still sort of exciting to know that even people who watch the ""Real World,"" which I think of as a pretty hard show to watch in terms of self-respect level, that those people hear something once and are so excited by it that they must look it up on the Internet. So there's hope.
There's a quote in ""Spinal Tap"" that goes something like, ""There's a fine line between clever and stupid."" Do you think you tread that line in your music?
Sure. Sometimes. I'm proud of the music we make, but we all have our misgivings at times. We recorded and wrote a whole record by ourselves prior to getting signed, and it was a thing that we started shopping around to get a record deal. A month or two after recording it, I started listening to it and digesting it for exactly that reason. It was too self-conscious and too overwrought and too overthought. I'm not sure it was too clever, exactly, but it was too self-conscious. So a lot of the new stuff on the Capitol record is a reaction to that, a desire to write more honest songs, ones that are less removed, less wink-wink nudge-nudge.
The tickets for the show on Friday are a little under two bucks. Is that common practice on the tour?
Yeah.
What's the strategy behind that?
Well, we just want people to listen to our music. I mean, our record sells for under ten bucks in most stores. I saw it in L.A. for $4.99. It's cheaper than a used CD.
Is that an idea that Capitol came to you with?
Cheap pricing of CDs is now pretty common practice for new bands. Right or wrong, people are under the impression that labels are ripping them off when they charge 15 bucks for a CD. If you can make it look like it's a great deal, comparatively, then they might give you a shot. At this point, too, we lose tons and tons of money for each show. Most clubs haven't heard of us and don't want to pay us much to play. So we take a loss for each show, if the tickets are cheap it doesn't matter, because we're losing money anyway.
