Zeroization What it is

Find every former member of the band The Fall. Not a trivial task for a band that has had 40-odd members over its 30 year existence.

The story of the making of The Police’s “Every Breath You Take.” Sting playing bass on a trampoline! How irritating!

MTV’s twenty-fifth birthday came and went with little fanfare. VH1 Classic celebrated by playing the first videos played on the day MTV debuted, and those videos are almost uniformly awful (Talking Heads, Once in A Lifetime is the sole exception in my book.) Everybody knows that MTV doesn’t play videos anymore and hasn’t for so long that it is hardly worth complaining about.

So, where is an aging video-addict to go get their video fix? YouTube.com has a massive repository that one could get lost in for hours, even days, but it is disorganized and its really only useful for finding material you already know exists. Along comes KingOfBeaver.com (main site NSFW, unless you are an editor at a porno magazine) to solve that problem for you. In their comprehensive list of 80’s videos (with links to YouTube.com,) you will find astounding material you never knew existed.

For example, have you ever seen an Angry Samoans video? I don’t even remember the band making any videos. How about the proto-Fatboy Slim project Beats International’s “Dub Be Good To Me.” Who’s quality of life wouldn’t be improved somewhat by on-demand access to Chaka Khan’s exuberant “I Feel For You,” which I should add features the guys from Breakin.’ Then, there’s Haircut 100, who squandered all the pop genius they had to spare on “Love Plus 1.” There’s even a video by The Go-Betweens for “Spring Rain,” which I’m pretty sure was never played on any US video station (too bad, they were a great band.) Of course there are some really low low points. For example, while I now better understand the appeal of the idiotic Sique Sique Sputnik’s “Love Missile F-111,” it’s still idiotic.

I recommend looking around for an hour or two, there are many more gems to be discovered.

Oddmusic, a site about experimental music, instruments, and musicians, has a wonderful gallery of musical instruments. The pictures and descriptions of the instruments are intriguing enough, but they also post sound samples of the instruments being played. At this site, I had the pleasure of hearing for the first time the hypnotic and soothing sounds of the Aoelian Wind Harp, an ancient greek instrument powered by the wind.  Also of interest was the Pikasso, a unique four-necked guitar inspired by Picasso’s analytic cubist works.