I Shit Music

I’m not one to be moved enough by any advertisement to really alter my perception of a company, but I gotta say the new Lincoln ad campaigns are tugging at my heart strings. Sure, I’m not in the market for a luxury limousine right now, but who knows what could happen after the Powerball numbers are revealed. So first they post this awesome new commercial that shows Abraham Lincoln walking out of the fog like he just blew up a coke warehouse in a Tarentino movie. Then they put up the money to have Beck get 160 musicians together and create this truly epic performance of David Bowie‘s “Sound and Vision.”  The power of the video more or less speaks for itself, so I basically just want to make sure people see this amazing thing. Beck’s own underwhelming voice really adds some humanity to a performance that otherwise be nearly extraterrestrial.  The main thing to really remember watching the video is that this is a 360 degree performance. Now I saw Herbie Hancock perform about 10 years ago in full funk mode, and he had his sound rigged so that his sound-guy could use a joystick to rotate any of the instrumentation around the room in a circular fashion. This Beck thing is a whole other world though. As is somewhat abstractly displayed in the image above, not only is the audience positioned in a circle around Beck with the musicians surrounding them on the outside, the platform that the audience is on is actually moving in a circle. You can’t tell from the video, but these folks are actually rotating inside the music. Imagine if orchestra started setting up in this same fashion – it cloud breathe a whole new life and universe into the act of witnessing a live performance. I’m on board folks – I’ll pick you up in my Town Car.