Youtube music videos made with World of Warcraft animation.
God, just stop, people. There is no possible way to improve the experience of any song by making a World of Warcraft video about it. None. Zero. Zilch. De nada. No, not even that one Jonathan Coulton song you really, really like – you know, the one that’s part funny, part unpleasantly creepy, and was obviously written to appeal to a sci-fi/fantasy dork. [1] Yeah, that one.
Honestly, if you really want to ruin a song, I can think of no better way to do it then to animate a hokey, stupid video using the hokey, stupid World of Warcraft characters and their hokey, stupid animations. Did you really listen to the song and think “hey, you know what this song really needs? A forest troll. And maybe a couple of naked halflings…”?
(There are always naked halflings.)
Seriously, log off of WoW right now. I mean it. Yes, I appreciate the many seconds’ worth of effort it took to message your entire guild and then synchronize a dance routine – and by “dance routine” I of course mean “everybody pressing Emote Menu -> Dance Option 4” in exact unison. Maybe it even took you two or three tries, but you’re apparently the cyber-Paula Abdul now, and no amount of (virtual) sweat will deter you from illustrating the seventh line of the song with a bad, unfunnily obvious visual pun.
Yes, I know you thought “The Internet Is For Porn” was funny, but guess what, Avenue Q has been around for quite a while now. So has “Peanut Butter Jelly Time.” And the theme from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. And all the other songs you just discovered last week that have been around forever, but you missed them, presumably because you were busy trying to level to 60 and get your epic mount and epic warhammer and epic codpiece and whatever other thing they have now that’s epic.
(How can a mount be “epic,” anyway? Epic is something you use to describe a work of art, and usually only refers to length – an epic composition, an epic poem, et cetera. When used to describe greatness, it’s meant to describe an experience – “Stalingrad was an epic battle,” “I took an epic shit,” and so forth. None of this is really that appropriate to describe your magical Pegasus turtle, unless they are suggesting that the amount of time you sat your ass in front of your fucking computer is supposed to be somehow monumental, which come to think is probably the idea. Fucking Blizzard.)
While we’re talking about your taste in music – most nerdcore rap is shit. Most filk is shit. It’s just shit that panders shamelessly to you rather than to the masses, which is why most of it is free rather than costing money, and why nobody wants to make an actual music video of it for real. I get that you worship MC Frontalot. I mean, look at his name! It is a funny name! I’m sure that if only it came along with a reasonable amount of musical skill, he would be famous now! But he is not very good and your dancing orcs will, amazingly enough, just make the entire experience worse: a horrible vortex of everything about the Internet that sucks all at once. (The shit comments your shit Youtube video will inevitably generate are, of course, the shit icing on the shit cake.)
And god forbid you’re doing this in a game other than WoW. I mean, WoW is bad enough, but at least they went overboard in that game with an immense number of pathetically unsubtle emotes, giving its players the ability to render nearly any stock phrase in visual terms. Most other MMORPGs have only a small fraction of the emotes that WoW does, sad but true, and halfway through your “music video” you’ll have used the three different “dance routines” five times apiece already, and all you will create is pity, and there is already enough pity in the world.
If you’re using Star Wars: Galaxies – look, I’m only saying this for your own good, but for god’s sake turn off the computer and go out into the sunlight. It may burn at first, but you need to get away from the computer now if you think, even for a second, that the hip-hop Jedi treatment is whatever any given song you like really needed. “But it’s a song about Star Wars -” NO. FUCKING NO. Just STOP. You’re JUST MAKING IT WORSE FOR YOURSELF. (People may argue that I am dropping into cliche here to support my argument. I would counter with “it is fucking Star Wars: Galaxies, and the only people playing it at this point are the ones who need intervention worse than anybody else – the origin of cliche, if you will.”)
You’re already wasting hours of every day and paying other people for the privilege of playing a game you already bought [2]; quit clogging Youtube with the evidence.
[1] Which would of course be every Jonathan Coulton song.
[2] If you’re using Second Life – which, if you’re making a video for the aforementioned creepy Jonathan Coulton song you like, is at least appropriately creepy in the same kind of way – you have my congratulations for choosing a free online RPG. And also my horrified fascination for actually spending time voluntarily in Second Life. Christ: just get a first one.
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17 users responded in this post
You forgot ‘get off my lawn’…
Remember your age, the times, they are a passin’ you by, my fren’.
Did you really listen to the song and think “hey, you know what this song really needs? A forest troll. And maybe a couple of naked halflings…”?
Pretty much anything by Led Zeppelin, to be honest.
While I don’t know if it’s the case in WoW, I know in City of Heroes, there’s a way to script demo files for playback so that you don’t need anyone else in your Guild or whatever to make the music videos and such. It’s just a scripting language so you have all the super villains or whatever dancing to Smooth Criminal by a series of statements instead of trying to get a bunch of your friends to do it in unison.
Someone needs a nap…
I recently got my hands on some of Coulton’s Thing-A-Week albums and I was surprised at how much of his work isn’t just “kinda weird combo of lonely guy and sci-fi/horror tropes.” There’s still a significant volume of dorky humor stuff (“The Presidents” and “Tom Cruise Crazy” come immediately to mind), but there’s also a few touching, low-key songs. I think “Famous Blue Raincoat” may actually be just a melancholic look at growing old and adultry, since it mentions no robots, genetic aberrations, or bodies kept in the backyard (which, if you go just by WOW-based videos on Youtube, would appear to cover his entire discography).
In general, I tend to agree, but the other day I was looking for songs by Renaud on YouTube (when I’ve just discovered a new artist — ha! new? the man’s the same age as my parents — I find YouTube is a good way of sampling their songs before I pay money for a CD), and some of the older ones were only available as crappy machinima videos — and in one case, the song was so crammed full of 1970s French slang that without the video I wouldn’t have had a clue what it was about.
NCallahan: “Famous Blue Raincoat” is a Leonard Cohen song.
Katherine F: Thanks. I’ll have to look into him, liking the cover as I do.
Leonard Cohen is an excellent musician.
You know what’s worse, though, MGK? Naruto. And Linkin Park. Seriously. When they’re not together, they’re crapping up everything else. It doesn’t matter whether it’s House, some jacktard from Lost, Naruto, or some dude from an obscure independent South American film . . . people seem to think that Linkin Park fits and totally captures the mood of the same stock footage every other dumbass with video editing software and the pretension to name themselves [adjective] [noun] studios/productions.
I submit that the WoW funeral ambush is still a classic.
lol… I’ve never seen Youtube music videos made with World of Warcraft animation. I am suddenly curious. And also afraid.
(As to your definition of “epic” though… epic isn’t primarily concerned with length. Epics are usually long, yes, but more importantly are deeply related to a cultural/national identity, origin, mythology etc. Therein lies the true test of whether something is or is not an epic. Aaaaaaaaaand please ignore the English student. lol.)
They’re not TERRIBLE. It’s just that a lot of subject matter does not lend itself to fantasy creatures doing repetitive dances and the same speaking animations over and over.
But… i spent 3 years on my level 70 halfling stripper… I need to show it somehow.
1) Epic, in World of Warcraft, refers to one of the upper ranks in the arbitrary hyperbole of item quality rankings.
Grey – Poor – Useless junk.
White – Common – Crafting ingredients and items of no particular note.
Green – Uncommon – A few rare crafting ingredients and useful world-drop equiptment.
Blue – Rare – Dungeon boss drop equiptment, as well as normal-speed mounts.
Purple – Epic – Equiptment dropped in raids and “swift” mounts.
Orange – Legendary – Extremely rare weapons that usually involve lengthy quest chains to obtain.
2) Most music of any genre is shit. I mean, hell, Kanye West managed to chart a #1 hit by singing over a Daft Punk song. Why single out MC Frontalot for ire because some people find him more entertaining than that?
“I mean, hell, Kanye West managed to chart a #1 hit by singing over a Daft Punk song.”
…So, which of the two songs have you not actually listened to?
“…So, which of the two songs have you not actually listened to?”
I’ve listened to both, though the Daft Punk song I tend to listen to all the way through while the Kanye West one I tend to get sick of listening to while I’m out in public and put on my iPod.
Having never directly compared the two before, I decided to do so now to intelligently defend my thoughts. And… it’s Kanye West singing over voice samples from Daft Punk’s Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger with a different bassline thrown in. Not as simplistic as I was implying before, but… not particularly unique, either, especially considering my brain tends to analyze songs by their treble first and the treble from Stronger is pretty much all Daft Punk clips.
What’re your thoughts about music videos made from other media, like, say, cartoons or movies?
Missed this when it was first posted, and I only found it now when I got curious and clicked on the “gaming” tag.
And I don’t care what anybody says: this ROCKS.