Print Story Trolling Radiohead
As most of us likely already know, because news on teh_intarweb travels fast, to promote their upcoming single Radiohead has a remix contest going.  The setup and terms of this contest are so ludicrous in the "this is a parody, right? It's gotta be" sense that it initially hit Digg as an April Fool's Day joke.

All this is just background to help explain why someone would troll Radiohead, and why it is your responsibility--no, your duty--to vote for the troll remix.

Additionally, the guy doing this is absolutely hilarious.



First off, I really have to express how funny the guy behind this is.  Of course I mainly know him from his column at the NINhotline.net, so most of the examples I can think of off the top of my head are rather insider jokes, but here's one example of his sense of humour:

"If you're a loser with no life (unlike me), it can be fun to pretend you're a rock star, as long as you don't let it blur the line between fantasy and reality like I did back in the day with SimCity. I ended up re-zoning my entire neighborhood to Industrial and bulldozing a mini-mall before someone finally smacked some sense into me."

Anyways, he has a very troll-style sensibility in the playful, what-you-believe-is-stupid kind of way.

Here is his remix.

It is terrible.

But it's also hilarious.

Also, the entire contest is absurd.  As you might assume, much of the base of voters for his remix is coming from theninhotline.net folks, and the thing is that for three albums now NIN fans have been able to fawn over freely downloadable multitracks released in one's choice of formats.  The most recent album has in fact been entirely released under a Creative Commons license.  Meanwhile, to get the tracks for this Radiohead song (which are just split up into five groups, while the NIN ones have sometimes even been literally the ProTools tracks they used) one has to individually purchase AAC files on iTunes.  And all the uploaded remixes are owned in full by the label (yeah, you thought Radiohead had left the label system? ya thought wrong). 

I could go on endlessly about how Radiohead is running a pale imitation of what bands like the aforementioned NIN (or IAMX, or The Kills, or etc) are doing already, but you know what, that doesn't really matter. 

What matters is that this is a funny troll.

And it has cowbell.

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Trolling Radiohead | 4 comments (4 topical, 0 hidden)
You had me at "cowbell" by Rogerborg (4.00 / 1) #1 Fri Apr 04, 2008 at 09:47:19 PM EST
So must wasted time, so many wasted words.

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Metus amatores matrum compescit, non clementia.
Pointless by BadDoggie (2.00 / 0) #2 Fri Apr 04, 2008 at 11:34:39 PM EST
See the T&Cs. It's "not a contest" in that they're not obliged to use the most-voted version. They own all rights, no one else gets credit, and rule #8 means that you can't even play your version for friends much less put it up on your MySpaz page. Sorry for the buzz kill but this a waste of effort.

woof.

OMG WE'RE FUCKED! -- duxup ?

I listened by johnny (4.00 / 2) #3 Sat Apr 05, 2008 at 05:27:06 AM EST
I'm confused. You mean that wasn't Radiohead? How can you tell?
Buy my books, dammit!
[ Parent ]
well actually by Phil Urich (2.00 / 0) #4 Sat Apr 05, 2008 at 09:26:42 AM EST
they give you a "widget" as they call it so that you can put it up on your myspace or facebook or blah page.  Just that it's running from their page, you can't re-post it yourself...yes, the T&Cs are hugely restrictive, and hence Meathead posting what he did.

However, you are somewhat right in calling it pointless, because it has been removed (despite actually not violating any of the T&Cs, but of course T&Cs are always just to give more legitimacy to the people running such things removing entries they're against).

[ Parent ]
Trolling Radiohead | 4 comments (4 topical, 0 hidden)