Notable Screenshots from the video:

You can also play the game in the music video as well on Das Racist’s site.

Sources: [Pitchfork.com] [DasRacist.net]

Lady Gaga or just plain gaga as she likes to be called, has always been a provocative one and her latest video, Alejandro is no exception. The references in this video are off the wall. I will attempt to describe the video via screen captures and the various innuendo included.

Hmm where to begin….by the way this subject matter is not very kid friendly. If there are kids in the room, you may want to shut them eyes. Continue reading, if you dare.

Fish Nets and high heels on a man with a gun!

Boy Toys dressed as Nazi at the biker bar

Ah yes. Ethnic looking soldiers with bowl cuts practicing Tai Chi

Let’s not forget the Gothic look with the steam punk glasses

Lets play some Mafioso music and make it look like Evita/madonna/“take a bow”

Ahhh Spiky Hat and a Golden Gun…WTF!

Shiny Happy Bowl Cuts!

Alot going on here. Best way to describe it: Vogue Disco Fashion Show.

Don’t forget the blatant religious overtones. So provocative.

Wow! Fembot gun bra!

Finally Lady Gaga showing off her trademark S&M look.

As you can see there is no cohesive story line when it comes to a Lady Gaga video. She likes to go all over the place. This is part of her mystique and what draws people to her. This is has more a dance track theme to it and doesn’t shock as much as her last video, Telephone.  Gaga definitely went for a more militant vibe with this video and less of the sexy vibe then in previous videos. I take it back “Fembot” machine gun bras are pretty sexy. Overall a pretty entertaining video from a true pioneer in the music business.

I’ve included some notable screen grabs below. Enjoy.

And of course the official Alejandro music video.

Inspiration for this post: http://onemansblog.com/gaga

The keyword for both of these artists is Collaboration. I always love seeing great artists getting together and creating something unique that you would not see with one single artist on their own.

Broken Bells

This duo is made up of front man for The Shins, James Mercer and Brian Burton a.k.a. “Danger Mouse.” I’ve been a fan of both of these artists in some shape or form. With the The Shins, I fell in love with Mercer’s haunting vocals after hearing them for the first time on The Garden State Soundtrack. I know of Danger Mouse mostly through his collaborations including Gorillaz on their second album, Demon Days. He first jumped into the limelight in 2004 with his highly controversial mashup of Jay-Z’s Black Album and The Beatles White Album called “The Grey Album.”

You can hear Broken Bell’s full album in a couple of places for a limited time. NPR wrote an article about them and streamed their full album on their site. This may be there for a short time since their album is already out in stores. You can also listen to the full album for free on LaLa after signing up as a member. You can download one of their songs “The High Road” from the NPR SXSW Music sampler.

Below is a in-studio clip courtesy of Pitchfork.com

Gorillaz: Plastic Beach

If you haven’t heard of Gorillaz, you’ve probably been living under a rock. Their music is used heavily in commercials including ipod, motorola, and many more. You’ll never see the real people behind Gorillaz on any of their albums. That’s because the band is made up of four animated band members. The one permanent member of the band is Damon Albarn formerly of Blur. The rest of the band members are various musician from different bands.

Their latest album “Plastic Beach” has a bunch of well known artists helping them on the tracks from Snoop Dog to Mos Def to Da La Soul to Lou Reed. Take a listen to the tracks below.

Always been a fan of the Gorillaz animation as well. Check out their latest music video for Stylo.

You’re probably wondering who the hell is Swell Season and why should I care? Well if have seen the movie Once, then these are the two main characters in the movie who have started a real band together. If you haven’t seen Once, what’s wrong with you??? It’s a great little film I highly recommend it.

I watched this interview and performance on BoingBoing Video and had to share it. I love the two’s chemistry together and it makes for great music. Watch the video and take a listen. If you like what you hear, check out Swell Season’s album, Strict Joy.

You sample some of the album here:

Source: BoingBoing

Last night U2 broadcasted their concert at the Rose Bowl via YouTube. It was a huge event and pretty impressive show. The video quality was surprisingly good for a webcast. It seemed to be a space themed concert with an a little David Bowe “Ground control to Major Tom” to start off the show. They even had a moment where an interview played from one of the astronauts from the International Space Station played over their “Bubble Screen.”

This is yet another example of a musical group embracing technology and its many advantages to reach a huge audience. Millions of fans were able to access U2 from across the globe for FREE! You were able to experience one of your favorite bands from the comfort of your home and planted to seed for new fans in the process.

Besides just YouTube, they used the power of social media to get the word out with the help of twitter and facebook. Their page contained “crawlers” similar to other sites like ustream where people could tweet straight from the YouTube page about the show bringing in a global audience. I know this because I watched this twitter crawler go across the screen as I watched and noticed people from Israel, Japan, Mexico, Philippines etc posting in.

It was a great concert. Alot of the favorites were played along with songs from the new album. Don’t worry if you missed the live broadcast I’m sure it will be rebroadcast at least another day. I can’t wait to hear the stats on how many people were reached worldwide when YouTube stops the rebroadcast and we tally all of the status updates from Twitter and Facebook. I’m sure some records were broken last night.

U2 is already a huge worldwide band but they maintained or increased their elite status. I hope that more artists follow this path of broadcasting live for free like this. It won’t replace the act of really being at the concert but its a great complement and a good way to build followers and increase music sales.

Below are more pics and screen captures from the YouTube stream:

1). Matisyahu – Light

2). Imogen Heap -Ellipse

3). Collective Soul [Deluxe Edition]

If you saw in a previous post, I have moved away from big city lights of the Dallas Texas Area to the small town of Lumberton Texas. I have been here for a little over 2 months now and I needed something to connect me with this new area and the people in it. I looked around online for organizations like I frequented in Dallas, similar to the DFW WordPress Group and nothing really popped out at me. Well I happened to see someone post on twitter about a Tweetups in different areas of the country and thought that would be something interesting to bring to the SE Texas area.

What is a Tweetup?

Another blogger sums it up best on his blog:

The Tweetup is when the digital turns into face-to-face, 140 characters into a meaningful conversation, a recognizable position on a blog into an ability to listen.

Who came to the Tweetup?

We had a total of 6 people in attendance. We even had a reporter from the local newspaper; Humberto Martinez, who was there working on a story about how people in the area use twitter.

What did we talk about?

Yes we did talk Tech, but that is not all we talked about. The discussions varied in scope and size. We talked about our favorite TV Shows, local restaurants in the area, and what we do with our free time. I asked those in attendance if there was anything else like this and they all pretty much said no. I felt fortunate to be starting something new and fresh in the area.

What’s Next?

I hope to have another Tweetup in a month’s time. I don’t know if I will have it at the same location or not. I will bring it up to the twitter verse and see what they think. I would like to try different locations around South East Texas so we can get a variety of people involved and also so I learn more about the area I live in now.

Below are pictures of the news article Humberto Martinez wrote for the Beaumont Enterprise.

Online Version of the News Article

To join the South East Texas Tweetup just follow @Setxtweetup on Twitter. I’ll post updates via twitter as they come in.

Thanks to Justin Yarbourgh for the pics. He runs a blog of his own at http://www.jrtblog.com/

I received this email yesterday from the Radiohead mailing list:

After the insane response we got from the Nude remix stems and the site that was dedicated to your remixes…

Unique visitors: 6,193,776, Page Views: 29,090,134, Hits: 58,340,512, Bandwidth: 10.666 Terabytes, Number of mixes: 2,252, Number of votes: 461,090, Number of track listens: 1,745,304

…we thought it only fair to do the same with a tune that at least is in 4/4. You can get the stems (the different instruments/elements) from here

Radiohead is basically saying “here is all of our instruments from this song go and have fun!” God bless Radiohead! I could shed a tear right now. They have also launched a site for you to upload your remixes and have the public vote on the best ones. You even get a HTML widget you can put on your blog, myspace, facebook, etc. I think Radiohead is the only band out there that knows their audience and willing to go against the mold.

Most of the podcasts I listen to are tech-heavy. Just a warning. I will list each one and give a short description of each an whether its an audio or video podcasts. I have 3 categories: Tech, Gaming, and Misc. I personally use a 30GB Zune (Brown) to listen  or watch my podcasts only because it was such a good deal. I purchased it for $85 on woot.com! The podcast list is shown after the break.

TECH SHOWS

SYSTM [Video]

SYSTM is a hand-on tech show created for the hardcore DIY Hardware crowd. It’s also hosted by Patrick Norton but the show was originally started by Kevin Rose back when he worked for TechTV and G4. You will learn such things as Building your own NAS, DIY WiFi Antennas, and DIY Power Packs.

Diggnation [Video]

Diggnation is a weekly tech/web culture show based on the top digg.com social bookmarking news stories. The hosts are Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht who are both G4 Screensavers alumni. Kevin Rose started the Digg.com website as a news site where users “digg” or vote for the stories they like the most and the most popular hit the frontpage. Well Kevin and Alex review the top stories while drinking tasty beer beverages out of their houses which make for some colorful commentary. You can see why their show is so popular LoL. Recently they have been branching out of their California homes and starting going to areas around the country to meet their fans. Their show usually ranges from 30 minutes to 1 hour. They have a email answer segment at the end of the show and usually show fans in Digg shirts around the country.

GAMING

1UP Yours [Audio]

1UP Yours is the premier videogames podcast where hosts Garnett Lee, Shane Bettenhausen and John Davison report on the videogame industry and the community that surrounds it. This is a really long podcast and it can range from 1:30 hours to 2:30 hours. This is a casual gaming podcast and they stray sometimes from their own format to talking on a variety of subjects. The hosts are editors and game testers from some of the popular gaming publications like EGM, 1Up, GameVideos.com, etc. You will hear them talk about game current on the market as well as those still in production. One of the best segments is “What are you playing?” where the hosts and guests talk about what games they are into at the moment.

1UP Show [Video]

Each week, the editors of 1UP cover new titles and discuss the latest topics in gaming – all the while giving you a behind the scenes look at the on goings at the offices of 1UP, Electronic Gaming Monthly, and Games for Windows magazine. The show gives some great insight into the games they review by doing interviews with the staff of 1up while showing you game footage. They also have some great interviews with game developers as well. You can also see great field reporting from such places as E3, Quakecon, and Comicon.

MISC

The Totally Rad Show [Video or Audio]

The Totally Rad Show is the summer blockbuster of geek news shows. Every week, hosts Alex Albrecht, Dan Trachtenberg, and Jeff Cannata rip into the world of movies, video games, tv, comics, and more and pull out what’s rad. Most shows last 1 to 1:30 hours. They have either a audio or video feed. They have a quirky and fun approach to their reviews. Every show is started with the guys recreating a scene from one of their favorite movies of the past.

NPR Fresh Air [Audio]

Fresh Air with Terry Gross, the Peabody Award-winning weekday magazine of contemporary arts and issues, is one of public radio’s most popular programs. The show gives interviews as much time as needed, and complements them with comments from well-known critics and commentators.

This American Life [Audio]

The radio and TV shows follow the same format. There’s a theme to each episode, and a variety of stories on that theme. It’s mostly true stories of everyday people, though not always. There’s lots more to the show, but it’s sort of hard to describe. Ten Commandents was the last program I listened to and Ira Glass goes over the real ten commandents by personal interviews with each person’s account of one of the ten.

Here are additional links to Google Code Pages that show the a behind the scenes making of and even an interactive 3D viewer model of some of the effects.

Check out my other story on Radiohead about “Scotch Mist” a video which was released on New Year’s Eve this year and it features every song from In Rainbows to coincide with the “official” release of the album.