***I would like to first point out that I personally do not enjoy country music very well and had to cringe while uploading these videos to my blog. With that in mind, this project helped me to realize how big of a “hick” any small town kid is, whether they embrace it or not.
Growing up in a small town, my friends and I had to be very creative when coming up with activities to keep ourselves occupied. The following videos display some of the interesting objects we used to create entertainment so we wouldn’t loose our minds in a small town.
The Spill Canvas: All Over You: This Spill Canvas video focuses on a boy spending a lot of his time in a small town park. The park seems to be fairly tiny, only showing a few swings and a little set up containing a slide, monkey bars, and a few benches. This park is very similar to the park in my hometown that my friends and I would spend countless hours sitting in, trying to scheme up our mischief for the day. The park seems to have a fairly green tone to it, suggesting that the season is somewhere around spring or summer. The lack of children on the playground equipment is almost comically similar to my hometown park because they seemed to be more teens who used the park than children. Later in the video, the main characters are found in the back parking lot of a grocery store playing with a shopping cart. The cart is pretty average metal wire with a red handle for pushing, probably rusty and unwanted in the front of the store. The parking lot is pretty deserted with a large number of extra boxes laying outside. In the shopping cart is a girl with a bunch of colored balls around her. As the boy swings the girl around, she throws the balls at her friends. Taking the extra shopping carts from behind the grocery store was a specialty of my friends. The unwanted carts created hours of fun as we rammed into each other and ultimately destroyed the carts
Red Hot Chili Peppers: Can’t Stop: Throughout this video, The Red Hot Chili Peppers are shown playing around with a bunch of random objects. The objects such as plastic one gallon buckets are very ordinary and seem like an everyday object but when the musicians pick them up, they find different uses for them. For example, the simple, yellow, plastic one gallon buckets that anyone else would see for only practical use, automatically become the head, arms, and legs of a character similar to a robot. This same idea represents how many times I would use an object around the house to create a new game. During the breakdown of the song, the guitar player is doused in small, pink, foam packing peanuts. The peanuts fall slowly to the ground almost as if they are lighter than air. This light quality made them ideal for protecting items that are being shipped far distances in boxes. Although these peanuts are very common objects that are usually viewed as more of a nuisance than anything, they create an cool effect as they fall onto the floor. The excess amounts of peanuts that would come in any package that was sent to my house instantly were thrown onto the floor in an intense peanut battle. The same effect seen in the video could be found in my living room as the war waged on.
White Stripes: Icky Thump: Although the whole theme of this video tends to be a little creepy, there was one part that hit close to home. As the singer is shown traveling through different parts of Mexico, he stumbles upon a small carnival where the girl had led him to. In the carnaval, you can see a variety of animals wandering around, sparkalers shining all around him, and different stations set up to play games. The creepiest part about this carnival are the people who are lurking around it. The “carnies” have a very vicious aura around them that seems to make a person shiver. These people, who choose to have a profession traveling around small towns working with carnival rides seem to always be very unhappy with their lives and want to makes others just as unhappy. The whole carnival itself doesn’t look very clean and definitely doesn’t look very safe. But even after all of these negative factors, it also seems to be the place to be! A large group of people are seen around this creepy carnival and they all seem to be enjoying themselves a great deal. This demented carnival reminds me of my town’s once a year county fair. No matter how creepy the carnies were working the rides, it was still the place for all of the little children to go. Farm animals would run around and people saw no problem with it. Although your chances of getting murdered was much smaller than in this video, the creepy factor was still just as high.
Brad Paisley: Mud on the Tires: One of the main focuses for this video is the cars driving around. Many different versions of trucks and Broncos can be seen ripping up fields in flashes of this video. This is called the art of “mudding.” Throughout clips of the video, trucks can be seen flinging up mud many feet in the air as the truck spins wildly out of control. The higher the mud flies, the more successful the run was. This idea of mudding comes about after a large rain when the fields and country roads are pretty much impassable. So the boys with their supped-up trucks and broncos head out to the minimum maintence roads and tear them up. Getting stuck in the mud is only a plus because then you have the adventure of being creative enough to get yourself free from the mud’s sticky grasp. Many times, your truck was seen as a trophy as you drove back into town completely caked in mud and grass. Sometimes you wouldn’t even wash it off, just to let others know that you had a good time last night. Just like clockwork, every day after a big storm, I could expect my friends knocking on my front door with their truck in my driveway. We’d do as much damage to the roads as we could before shipping off to find some other mud to terrorize.
Kasabian: Shoot the Runner: Standing in front of an all black background, the members of Kasabian are seen in different color scheme outlines jamming on their instruments. Each color scheme changes as the music continues until the splashes of new color enter. As the video goes on, the members are constantly being splashed with different colors of paint. The colors of paint are very bright and range from pink, to blue, to green, and so on. As the song continues, the splashes of paint become more and more frequent. Towards the beginning of the video, the colors seem to just trickle on the musicians or maybe like someone was painting the color on them. Later in the video the color becomes much more vicious and violent, almost like someone is throwing it at them or it was splattering out of them. This simulated paint fight is similar to the paint fight that occurred between a bunch of my friends. What started off as a simple painting turned into a full blown, dodge for the sake of your clothes, paint fight. In the video, as the paint fight continues, the splatters become larger and larger until it looks like they too are having a full on war. Each key beat is accented with different styles and sizes of splattering.
The Black Keys: Strange Times: At the beginning of the video, the audience is taken into a laser tag arcade where a girl who doesn’t seem to really enjoy her job is explaining all of the rules and the safety precautions within the arena. She points out all of the exit places in case of emergency and lets the children know how to be safe inside the arena. As the game starts, the children are running around laughing and playing but the quickly changes when the two members of the Black Keys break into the arena and start using real lasers against the children. The children start screaming and running in many different ways trying to escape the actual laser’s blow. As the lasers shoot past the children they blast the walls and create rummage throughout the course. This whole concept of bringing actual lasers into a child’s play-place reminds me of how my friends would take laser tag way too seriously. It seemed as if they believed they were in real war. We even created our own version of laser tag that includes tinfoil and pointer lasers. To save myself from further embarrassment, I’ll refrain from further explanation.
Sum 41: Fat Lip: A main theme of this video seems to be rebelling against the norms of society. One of the major things that these kids are shown doing that fits under that stereotype is skateboarding. The kids who are skating go back and forth on the half-pipe doing tricks. The half-pipe, made of plywood, creates the perfect shape for the skateboarders to roll back and forth and do different tricks and jumps as they reach the top. The name of the half-pipe came from the distinct look of the shape of this object. It seems as if someone took a giant pipe made out of wood and cut it in half in order to create enough angle for the boarders to keep up their speed and also be able to travel over the same area again and again. A large part of my high school career was spent sitting on the top of the half-pipes watching all of my friends skate back and forth on the half-pipe trying to attempt the best tricks they could. The tricks weren’t really that impressive but it was a great way to pass the time and most definitely a social activity.
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