The great footage torrent weighs upon the music supervisioners of the world, no relief within reach or in sight. A bountiful font of video releases queued up on digital runways requires an air-traffic controller’s nerve, finding, clearing and assigning songs to each part as it goes out. These must aim to please skaters, filmers and the teeming online masses, whilst avoiding audible ADBs and averting copyright snarls like those detailed this week by Huf talent-wrangler Tyler Cichy, who laments a pipe dream that a Thin Lizzy deep cut could be cleared, among several songs that wound up having to be swapped out for the official online release. It’s tough out there, no doubt.
Huf in the end turned to backup suppliers, including knob-turning steady hand and noted switchstance booster Billy McFilly — sort of a warm blanket and bowl of chicken soup within the often cold and punishing video soundtrack landscape. Since the first ‘skate video’ was produced and released in 1752, a number of bands and musicians have come to be recognized as reliable go-tos and whose tones and twangs and various soundings feature in enough vids over the years to become canon as much as the Es Accel, the Tom Penny frontside flip, the Love Park tiles, the birthday cake shallow end steps: Fugazi, Dinosaur Jr, Andre Nickatina, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Cymande, Mr Dibbs. Some like Turnstile and Devendra Banhart are adopted into the scene; Explosions in the Sky, No Age, Animal Collective and others at times are absorbed into particular brands.
As the seasons change and trap music gives way to dissonant guitar squalling, a new, helium-voiced entity has assumed its position in the pantheon. Ween initially popped up in 1993 with Beavis and Butthead pick ‘Push th’ Little Daisies’ providing the sun-baked backing for switch big-jumper Paul Sharpe in the late-period SMA vid ‘El Video Numero Tres’ (and again in the credits). Thereafter, the band’s tunes sporadically popped up every few years as a left-field choice for free spirits such as Karl Watson in ‘5ive Flavors’ (the gently rippling ‘Mollusk’) and Shane Heyl in ‘Baker Has a Deathwish’ (future meme fuel ‘Ocean Man’) but just as often as a safe choice for wacky hijinx, such as in the 2002 ‘Land Pirates’ vid, or Pontus Alv’s full frontal send-off at the end of Cliche’s ‘Bon Apetit.’
Matt King and Steve Davenport fully channeled the bleary-eyed ‘Pure Guava’ mumbler ‘Little Birdy’ in their 2012 ‘Nagajoose’ video, and a year later Cooper Winterson’s seminal ‘\m/’ touched off a reconsideration of Ween music’s function in skate videos, drizzling no fewer than three numbers, skewed toward the Scotchgard-powered sessions at the ‘Pod’ abode. In 2017, both Brad Cromer and Pat Gallaher would use the dreamy, meandering ‘Sarah’ in ‘LSD’ and ‘Clean,’ respectively, and Bill Strobeck shortly afterward reached way back in the catalog to situate the abrasively syrupy ‘Birthday Boy’ for Ben Kadow’s initial stuff in ‘Blessed.’
In the past few years it’s become a binge, with Limosine going extremely deep to a ‘White Pepper’ off-cut for Santino Gagliarducci in 2021’s ‘Paymaster,’ and other numbers since then tapped by Fancy Lad, Alltimers and WKND, which took the ‘Quebec’ stab at stadium rock ‘Transdermal Celebration’ for Jordan Taylor in ‘Bottle Neck Sewage.’ This year the trotting twangler ‘Tried and True’ did the heavy lifting for Curren Caples’ career statement for Vans, and last week, the Pangea Jeans imprint from the recently de-hatted John Shanahan, going back to ‘Springtheme’ for some thumping switch backside heelflips and bar ollies in the ‘Roadrage’ vid. Ween’s current clout is such that Dial Tone wheels has developed and is offering a ‘Pure Guava’ product pack endorsed by Trevor Thompson.
Whereas most of the to-date adventures in Ween music supervision have drawn from the band’s various experiments with mainstream pop or the bent psychedelia of its early period, does Ween’s move into the skate-video soundtrack mainstream require future editors and executive producers to reach outside this comfort zone — chiefly, to the bewildering and elementary schoolish ‘Poop Ship Destroyer,’ with its washes of distortion, cheap-sounding xylophone and half-intelligible mumbles? In the current epoch, is the even-more punishing ‘Mourning Glory’ somehow a safer choice than ‘Poop Ship’? Was the ‘nitrous oxide-powered bong’ rig featured on the cover of Ween’s 1991 album ‘The Pod’ a lasting influence on the gas mask-themed imagery that later logoed multiple Alien Workshop boards and soft-goods?
boil the ocean 