Well, I’ve decided to make it official – at least inasmuch as anything on this blog is “official” – and replace the link to my YouTube channel with a link to my Vimeo site. I’ve been contemplating this for the better part of a year, after the YouTube Music Nazis gave me a ration of shit about using The Bangles’ “Walk Like An Egyptian” in my Egyptian Embassy solidarity demo piece in January of last year, and they stripped the audio track out of it, leaving my video silent, as if I was engaged in some nefarious scheme to mass-produce DVDs of that protest video and sell them out of the back of a friend’s van without paying royalties to The Bangles’ record label. So, the very day YouTube pulled that bullshit on me, I set up my Vimeo account, and posted the Egyptian Embassy piece there unmolested.
As many of you who follow my video work might have noticed, I’ve been using obscure mid ’60s garage-rock instrumentals for background music in a lot of my work lately – partially because I’ve kind of gotten into mid ’60s garage these days, but mostly because almost all those tracks are long forgotten, released by long-forgotten bands on long-forgotten regional labels, available only on old 45s, never reissued on CD, and so damned obscure and under-the-radar that I can avoid being jerked around by the YouTube Music Nazis.
Still, on general principle, I’ve switched my main video link to Vimeo, not only because they don’t have Music Nazis harassing people left and right, but also because you can find some pretty good quality work there without having to fight through all the footage of cats falling off tabletops, people throwing slabs of dry ice into swimming pools, and plane-crash porn. In fact, I’ve accelerated the process of re-posting a lot of my old work on Vimeo as lately I’ve been pestered a lot by YouTube about music I used in pieces I posted as much as five or six years ago with no problems (at least at the time).
I’m still leaving my YouTube channel active – for those of you linking/embedding my stuff from YouTube – and I’ll still be posting pieces there as well, but from here on in, Vimeo will get first priority. Between their cluttered new interface that pushes “featured” and “promoted” videos and other bullshit I’m not interested in, and their Amazon pop-up ads for the Rolling Stones’ Some Girls under my NYC 9/11 Anniversary piece which used “Shattered” (without giving me a share of the ad revenue), and their pestering me about music I used in a piece I posted six years ago, my attitude is pretty much “screw YouTube”.
