Ok Talk! An Interview With Youtube Band Sensation Ok Go

The SMP is proud to present an awesome interview with a really cool band. Ok Go has been giving the world music since 1998, and are known for their funny/weird music videos, like "Here It Goes Again" (which won a Grammy), "A Million Ways", "This Too Shall Pass", and "White Knuckles". The have released three albums, their latest being Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky. Thanks to Jennifer Lloyd for interviewing the band's lead singer (and cutie), Damian Kulash. Peace, love, and treadmills.

Ok Go performed on October 10th at the House of Blues in Chicago. Jenn talked with the lead singer, Damian Kulash about their live shows, choreographed dances and why the older Star Wars movies are better than the newer ones.

Jenn Lloyd: What do you enjoy most about performing live?

Damian Kulash: It’s kind of hard to put into words. It’s the emotional connection with the audience that when a show is going really well everyone is sort of feeling things when we go for as much energy as possible and get everyone as fired up and as excited as possible. Standing there in a crowd of 200 or 2000 people and everybody is concentrating on the same feeling, it’s an amazing experience.

JL: Does Ok Go have any preshow routines?

DK: Tours are so repetitive that the whole thing is a little like a routine. About a half hour before we go on we make sure everyone has their monitors ready and everything is ready for the performance. There’s a moment of focusing before anything happens, but it’s not like we all speak a Latin prayer or something. It’s a very functional thing, but because we do it every day it has a routine quality to it.

JL: Describe an Ok Go show in 2-3 words.

DK: Fun, surprising, colorful

JL: What do you hope to achieve as a musician? When will consider being a musician a success?

DK: I don’t think there’s ever a particular moment of a single plateau that is a success. Success is being proud of what you make and being excited about the places you are going. I think if you ever decide you have achieved all you want to you are finished. I think you are always working towards the next new project.

JL: So, you graduated from Brown University. Did you go in knowing you would pursue music?

DK: I was both art and music. I was going to pursue visual art afterwards but I guess I felt like the things happening in the art department and the art world in general didn’t resonate well for me. Music was really fun for me; I had been doing a lot of music and I had bands and played a lot in my bedroom in high school so I was doing a lot of music. I don’t think I figured it would become a career or anything. At school I started working in the music studio at college and become completely fascinated with that process.

JL: Do you feel that musical ability can be made better through learning in school versus picking it up on your own?

DK: They’re totally different processes, I don’t think better or worse. You become more efficient if you are trained, but I think music encompasses a great many types of communication. What’s so wonderful about music is that you can make it with a beat and a chord. You communicate incredibly complicated, fulfilling, emotional statements that words could never get to. That doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with someone’s skill. Different things: like asking about being a good writer. If you want to become a good writer you certainly make it a lot easier by being a good writer, but becoming a good writer is also helped by spending a lot of your time writing, but that doesn’t mean you will be good.

JL: Did you know how successful the videos for A Million Ways and Here it Goes Again would be on YouTube? Do you think it was because of YouTube that they became so popular?

DK: I don’t think we predicted exactly what would happen and no I don’t think it was all because of YouTube. The logic of the question is like asking, do you think you are alive because of air, you certainly need air to survive. Those videos traveled the world via YouTube but the success is not just because of YouTube.

JL: How did the idea of dancing on treadmills come about?

DK: We had danced on the stage for years for sort of shocking the audience. One of the big challenges of mine at shows is that a lot of people have set expectations of what should happen all the time and it gets really boring; what they expect to happen happens. There’s no surprise or excitement. Having choreographed dances on stage people just thought songs would have crazy routines. Having done that for a few years we came up with a new dance routine with my sister for the song A Million Ways and when the video of that exploded online, I thought to myself if we can have a video that by accident travels the world at that speed then we can make an intentional video. So we altered the parameters of the dance so there would be something where we weren’t repeating ourselves but going somewhere new. That’s when we came up with the idea of the treadmill.

JL: It seems that Ok Go is into making complicated music videos that require a lot going precisely right. How would you describe your music videos?

DK: I think that says it pretty well. I think that music itself is a version of choreography. You get a bunch of people together and what everybody does when they hit the right outcome creates something that is bigger than the parts. When you hear a song you don’t think, ‘I hear a bass and also a guitar and also drums’, what you hear is the emotion and feeling that is behind the music. Choreographing is doing the same thing visually: coming up with system by which every part has to be just right to achieve the outcome.

JL: Your song, "A Good Idea at the Time", from the CD Oh No is a response to "Sympathy for the Devil". Why did you decide to take on such a well known song?

DK: I really love that song. I was listening to it and there is a line in it about the troubadours were killed before they reached Bombay. I tried to figure out what that was about and went online to find out what that was referring to. This was all during Bush’s second term and I was not a fan of what was going on politically. I was thinking about how the evil that is perpetrated in our world does not have to be by mysterious forces like the devil, but just by us so I wrote a song about it.

Two selected student questions from Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois:

Sara Koehnke, junior: You get a lot of press for the treadmill video, but what was your favorite video to make?

DK: The "White Knuckles" video that just came out.

Connor Schmidt, freshman: What is your opinion on the newer Stars Wars movies?

DK: Not a big fan. I feel like they didn’t have the magic that the original three had. You can tell from our music videos that we are big fans of no constraints. The original Star Wars were amazing because you felt the technology, incredible people created a futuristic universe. When you move into our decade and you have computers that can do everything you lose some of the magic of the futuristic world. I just felt like I was being yelled at by a computer.

Interview performed by Jennifer Lloyd in October 2010.