Evidently YouTube celebrated its fifth year of operation last week. It's remarkable how, in such a relatively short span of time, it's become such a seemingly indispensable element of contemporary culture (as ridiculously lofty as that sounds). Like Google and eBay before it and Facebook and Twitter after it, it's hard to imagine a time before YouTube. We now take for granted that -- in a few simple keystrokes -- we can easily access long-forgotten video clips like the ones at the tail end of my previous post. Things that we could previously only hazily recall from the back pages of our fading memories can now be effortlessly plucked out of the ether, dusted off and re-experienced. We ran a news item over at the job this week which postulated that if you were to try to watch each and every video clip that is currently on YouTube, it would take you 600 years to do so. Amazing.
For a music fan or pop culture junkie like myself, YouTube is like a big, honkin' bag of hickory-smoked crack! I shudder at the thought of how many hours I've irreversibly wasted watching clip after clip of otherwise forgotten music videos or rarefied performances from justifiably obscure bands and/or dubious one-hit wonders. It's fiendishly simple to fall into a "YouTube K-hole" wherein you become a zombified voyeur of the antiquated and inane. Once you start, it's damn hard to stop.
Okay, enough haughty preamble. Given my own preoccupations, I'm routinely perusing YouTube for new and/or unseen clips from my favorite bands. Yesterday, I managed to unearth the below clip from my dearly beloved Cop Shoot Cop dating back to 1991. I didn't attend the show in question (it was shot in Holland in a surprisingly professional manner), but I was lucky enough to see the band several times during this era. It's striking how footage from almost (good lord) twenty years ago still looks so fresh.
At this stage of the proceedings, a resumption of duty for Cop Shoot Cop is about as likely as Sarah Palin becoming a spokesman for PETA. As such, I remain eternally grateful to YouTube for allowing me to relive the skronk. Here they are playing "Burn Your Bridges." Crank it.
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