YouTube might be the greatest invention of the Internet.
It's become something where embarrassing videos just seem to show up whether you want them to or not. I'm sure it's only a matter of time until the video of me pretending to be He-Man when I was three is posted or my first band, Renaldo and the Smoothies, covering "Day Tripper", "Polly" and "Wild Thing" when I was 15 surfaces online. Me singing, nonetheless. And yes, it's just as bad as it sounds.
Videos like that have a tendency to surface whether you want them to or not.
My friend Colin posted on Twitter one morning that he was listening to my old band Cherem, which sparked a conversation. He told me that some friends of his made a video for the song "I Hate George Bush" that we did with our MC friend Foekus back in 2003 and I immediately knew I needed to see it.
That song was never supposed to become as popular as it did. But that's the way things always work.
Foekus was at a show one night and after our set was done, people were asking for another song. Bill said that we'd play one more if he came up and rapped over it. We were a vegan straight edge band and he was a vegan straight edge MC, so it seemed like a good idea and maybe we'd have some fun with it. He came up, did some freestyle over the top of a track called "Playing Victim" that Bill didn't really like singing, and the place went crazy. We started getting asked to do it at every show after that, and we did, because it was fun.
When we went in to the studio to record a few months later, we came up with the idea to have Foekus record his part and Bill record his part and put out a 7" with both versions of the song (which we did) and then add the Foekus track as the secret song on the actual CD (which we also did).
We had no idea that people were going to respond so heavily to that song. We thought it was fun to do and were kind of taken aback when it gained steam, never intending for anyone outside of Salt Lake to hear it. But then we had a 7" and it was on our self-pressed CD that we were actually selling to people in other states and it kind of went from there. We ended up taking Foekus on tour with us a couple of times and he showed up at a few shows in California we played and people loved it.
Honestly, we thought that if anyone outside of SLC heard that track and didn't know that it was written/recorded/performed all in good fun, we'd be the laughing stock of hardcore.
As I was watching this video, I was laughing so hard I nearly cried. It's so ridiculous (both the song and the video), but I'm still so happy that we did it. I'm even happier that these two dudes that I don't know liked this song enough to make their own music video for it, that they took time out of their day to have as much fun with it as we did.
And that's what it was all about.
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