…for bringing to life for me so many performers and bands I would otherwise not be able to visualize.
I have a talent for unhipness. I seem to alight on performers and bands who are either woefully inaccessible from where I’m living or, to put it plainly, defunct, or past their reputed glory days (or rock star days, if they ever had them). Many of my favorite rock performers, for example, are strictly phonograph records to me. In some cases I can more readily conjure album artwork (have you read the wonderful For the Love of Vinyl, the Hipgnosis story?) than I can the faces or personae of singers and band members.
After many years’ hiatus, it’s odd to be able to put names and faces together in a way that I never could during my undergrad years, when I was steeped in art rock and other forms of musical esoterica. The source of this pleasant oddness is YouTube and other online video-sharing sources (but YouTube mainly). Here are some examples of what I mean:
Of uncertain provenance and uneven technical quality, and in many cases perhaps uploaded in violation of copyright, these are still gems to me. Welcome home, you total strangers.
