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From the album Hungry Ghosts, out now everywhere: http://smarturl.it/Hungry-Ghosts
The original members formed as OK Go in 1998, and their video for “Here It Goes Again” won a Grammy Award for Best Music Video in 2007.
OK Go has earned considerable fame for the band’s creative and often low-budget music videos, most of which have been promoted through Internet video sharing sites like YouTube. Many of these have become viral videos; the 2006 video for “Here It Goes Again”, in which the band performed a complex routine with the aid of motorized treadmills, has received over 50 million views on YouTube four years later. The band’s video for Needing/Getting, released February 5, 2012 in partnership with Chevrolet, debuted during Super Bowl XLVI and has over 32 million views on YouTube.
Samuel Bayer, who produced many music videos in the 1990s, asserted that OK Go’s promotion of music videos on the Internet was akin to Nirvana’s ushering in the grunge movement. Many of the videos also use long or single-shot takes, which Salon’s Matt Zoller Seitz claims “restore[s] a sense of wonder to the musical number by letting the performers’ humanity shine through and allowing them to do their thing with a minimum of filmmaking interference”. The success of OK Go’s music first won the band the 14th Annual Webby Special Achievement Award for Film and Video Artist of the Year.
The video for “This Too Shall Pass” was named both “Video of the Year” and “Best Rock Video” at the 3rd annual UK Music Video Awards. “This Too Shall Pass” won the LA Film Fest’s Audience Award for Best Music Video, UK MVA Awards – Music Video of the Year Winner 2010, among others.
The band has worked with directors including Francis Lawrence, Olivier Gondry (brother of Michel Gondry), Brian L. Perkins, Scott Keiner, and Todd Sullivan. The videos have been screened and displayed at museums, art galleries, and film festivals around the world including the Guggenheim Museum,[86] the Museum of the Moving Image, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Film Festival, and the Saatchi & Saatchi New Director’s Showcase.
In 2008, Damian Kulash said that the band had not produced the music videos as part of any overt “Machiavellian” marketing campaign. “In neither case did we think, ‘A-ha, this will get people to buy our records.’ It has always been our position that the reason you wind up in a rock band is you want to make stuff. You want to do creative things for a living.” On the release of the band’s video for “The Writing’s on the Wall” in 2014, Kulash explained to Rolling Stone that the band continues to make such quirky videos as following their success after “Here It Goes Again”, the band worried about being considered a one-hit wonder: “We could go in two directions: We could either try to out-cool it – try to out-run it like Radiohead did with ‘Creep’ – or just embrace it and go, OK, what really worked here.”
