Learn Manners, History, & the Secrets of Auto-Tune the News: VICE Today 002
Uploaded by vice on 26.04.2012
Transcript:
RYAN DUFFY: On today's episode, we ask a question of
the day, meet the Gregory Brothers,
and learn about etiquette.
Hey, I'm Ryan Duffy, and welcome to Vice Today.
On today's episode, we meet some of our weird and
wonderful friends from YouTube.
It's the first installment of My Life Online, and it's with
the Gregory Brothers.
Then we get some updated etiquette rules from John
Martin, but first up, we sent the nicest person we've ever
met, Shan Shan, out into the streets of New York to talk
about MLK Day.
SHAN HUANG: This is Shan for Vice Magazine, and I'm on the
street today because today's Martin Luther King Day.
And I want to know how much people know about Dr. King.
So do you know what's today's holiday?
MALE SPEAKER 1: Martin Luther King Day.
MALE SPEAKER 2: Martin Luther King.
FEMALE SPEAKER 1: It's Martin Luther King Day.
MALE SPEAKER 3: Yeah, MLK.
Martin Luther King, yeah.
SHAN HUANG: Oh, MLK.
MALE SPEAKER 3: Yeah.
SHAN HUANG: Ahhh.
Do you know what's today's holiday?
FEMALE SPEAKER 2: Yeah, Martin Luther King's Day.
Yeah.
SHAN HUANG: Do you know what he stands for, for America?
FEMALE SPEAKER 2: I don't know.
He break--
broke, the abolish?
Maybe?
MALE SPEAKER 4: He's just black guy, and he worked for
black people right?
Yeah.
SHAN HUANG: Are you going to do anything to celebrate?
MALE SPEAKER 1: Yes.
SHAN HUANG: What are you going to do?
MALE SPEAKER 1: I'm going to go south where it's warm.
And I think that's about it.
Get warm.
That's what black people like.
We like to be warm.
So this cold weather shit's for like white people.
SHAN HUANG: Are you going to do anything to celebrate?
MALE SPEAKER 5: No, I have to work.
All day.
SHAN HUANG: What are you going to do today?
MALE SPEAKER 6: Um, I might do the same thing I did last
year, was I read a little bit about him when I got home.
And like, that's mostly it.
Just read about him and like, yeah.
What he did.
SHAN HUANG: So you read a little bit
about him every day?
I mean, every year?
MALE SPEAKER 6: Mm-hmm.
SHAN HUANG: So maybe when you're 50, you would know
everything about him.
What do you know about Dr. King?
FEMALE SPEAKER 1: Um, well, he was leader of the Black Civil
Rights Movement here.
MALE SPEAKER 7: The whites didn't like him, and so he
protested, and he had this speech that he had a dream for
everybody to be the same equal rights.
SHAN HUANG: Very, very impressive.
FEMALE SPEAKER 2: I had a dream my English teacher came
out, and he said, oh, your English is so poor.
You have to try more.
MALE SPEAKER 5: I had a dream that I was teaching kids, and
one of them turned into my boss.
FEMALE SPEAKER 3: We're actually experimenting with
dreams at the moment.
You have to go this forest in your dream and then meet this
cat there while a brass band is playing.
SHAN HUANG: So what about if you're going to cook one
dinner for Dr. King, what would you serve him?
FEMALE SPEAKER 1: Crispy kale.
MALE SPEAKER 3: Maybe I'd just have a burrito, right?
Everybody likes Mexican food.
FEMALE SPEAKER 3: Fish.
SHAN HUANG: What type of fish?
FEMALE SPEAKER 3: Whitefish.
And steamed potatoes.
We call that nursery food.
SHAN HUANG: Nursery food?
FEMALE SPEAKER 3: Yeah.
It heals everything.
And we'd make him miso soup as well.
SHAN HUANG: What do you think that Dr. King needs to be
healed for?
FEMALE SPEAKER 3: Needs to be healed for?
Being assassinated, I suppose.
SHAN HUANG: Oh, OK.
RYAN DUFFY: So you try to go out and have a nice
conversation with people on a holiday here in New York, and
you just hear about their bullshit dreams.
Next up is My Life Online, where we go and meet the
Gregory Brothers.
And you may think that you don't know who they are, but
when you see these videos, you're going to realize you
know them all too well.
[MUSIC - GREGORY BROTHERS, "DOUBLE RAINBOW SONG"]
EVAN GREGORY: The Gregory Brothers are mostly known for
online videos that we do.
And those videos are a realization of a Utopian
vision in which we uncover hidden songs from within the
speech of ordinary people.
ANTOINE DODSON: Well, obviously we have a rapist in
Lincoln Park.
[MUSIC - GREGORY BROTHERS, "BED INTRUDER SONG"]
EVAN GREGORY: Um, we started in a musical background and
had toured together with my brothers.
ANDREW GREGORY: I don't know.
We toured a lot as a band, but in a very small-scale way
where we were playing to crowds of anywhere between
zero and 200 people.
MICHAEL GREGORY: Nobody likes a regular band.
SARAH GREGORY: We were definitely pursuing the arts
in very traditional ways when we first
started working together.
But then once your imagination gets a little crazier and
crazier, there's stuff that you can only produce using
technology.
JIM LEHRER: Senator Obama, two minutes.
[MUSIC - GREGORY BROTHERS, "DEBATE HIGHLIGHTS"]
SARAH GREGORY: Back in the 2008 presidential election,
Michael made a video out of the first debate between Obama
and McCain.
And he wanted to write a song, basically, about the issues
that he knew that were going to be
coming up in that debate.
So he successfully made that video and just thought it
would be way more fun if we could somehow get the
candidates to sing along with us.
[MUSIC - GREGORY BROTHERS, "AUTO-TUNE THE NEWS 5"]
EVAN GREGORY: We took some technology that we had a grasp
of, pitch correction technology that includes
Auto-tune, and used it to modify their voices so it
sounds like they're singing with us.
And then we could create duets and melodies that we're
actually participating in together.
And that became Auto-Tune the News
MALE SPEAKER: He said, any world war--
MICHAEL GREGORY: Uh, I'm laying down a beat for you.
Keep going.
SARAH GREGORY: We spent about a year auto-tuning the news,
and then realized that we shouldn't limit our quest for
music to just news and politics.
[MUSIC - GREGORY BROTHERS, "REALITY HITS YOU HARD BRO"]
[MUSIC - GREGORY BROTHERS, "CAN'T HUG EVERY CAT"]
SARAH GREGORY: So then we just started calling it Songify,
because that's essentially what we were doing, was just
finding songs out in the universe.
EVAN GREGORY: Where are we, Andrew?
ANDREW GREGORY: Well, as you might notice, our office is
very spacious.
Why, you might ask?
Because it used to be a horse barn.
EVAN GREGORY: This is where all the audio magic happens,
where we try to summon various types of sonic wizardry to
coax songs out of those places in the universe that
heretofore have been dark, songless corners.
[MUSIC - GREGORY BROTHERS, "TAXI DAVE SONG"]
EVAN GREGORY: We are trained musically, but not in the art
of video editing.
So we just kind of accrued those skills by saying, let's
try this in the video.
I don't know how.
OK, let's figure that out and let's do the next thing.
MICHAEL GREGORY: Nearly everything that we shoot for
our videos is done on a green screen.
EVAN GREGORY: Let's say if we needed a floating head.
MICHAEL GREGORY: Or arms waving around?
We'll still use the sheet.
EVAN GREGORY: But we upgraded this year and
just painted the wall.
It's like, why hang the sheet?
Just paint the wall, man.
MICHAEL GREGORY: So let's take you back to the
area where we edit.
Hey, Sarah.
SARAH GREGORY: Hi guys.
MICHAEL GREGORY: We run After Effects stuff and Final Cut
stuff in tandem to sort of put the videos together while the
audio is being made.
EVAN GREGORY: That's a gold record.
MICHAEL GREGORY: That single just went gold in January.
I mean, something like "Friday," Rebecca Black's
"Friday" has gotten watched a lot more than "The Bed
Intruder Song," but people are not as excited about
downloading "Friday" for $0.99.
EVAN GREGORY: Little known fact.
You have to buy the plaque for yourself once you get it
certified gold.
But we got, we got a couple of them and--
and sent one to Antoine.
So he's got one hanging in his house, too.
MICHAEL GREGORY: And unfortunately, solid pure gold
does not come cheap.
INTERVIEWER: Do your moms understand what you actually
do for a living?
MICHAEL GREGORY: She understands, but she still
says YouTubes, plural.
[MUSIC - GREGORY BROTHERS, "WINNING"]
EVAN GREGORY: Once the number of--
SARAH GREGORY: Really great feeling.
EVAN GREGORY: Once the number of views exceeds the number of
moms related to video producers, then you feel like
you're beginning to hit your stride as an auteur.
We have found success on YouTube, if only by the metric
of we all left our day jobs to just do this.
[MUSIC - GREGORY BROTHERS, "WINNING"]
SARAH GREGORY: And we're getting into comedy, and we're
doing more writing.
MICHAEL GREGORY: We're in the middle of a development deal
with Comedy Central, which is really cool.
EVAN GREGORY: It's, I mean, pointless to plug, since no
one could actually watch it right now.
If it was about to air on TV, then we would be like plugging
it like silly.
CHARLIE SHEEN: Duh.
Winning.
EVAN GREGORY: But it is true that a lot of doors have been
opened to us based on our videos being seen a lot.
ANDREW GREGORY: Basically, YouTube actually works.
That's a huge first--
MICHAEL GREGORY: YouTube actually works.
ANDREW GREGORY: It actually works.
MICHAEL GREGORY: It's just so egalitarian.
It doesn't matter if it's very grainy footage of a bunny
making a weird sound or whether it's very
high-definition footage of Newt Gingrich giving a speech
that he later regrets.
[MUSIC - GREGORY BROTHERS, "SONGIFY THE NEWS 1"]
MICHAEL GREGORY: The desire of the American workforce to not
be working while on the clock is just really impressive.
[MUSIC - GREGORY BROTHERS, "SONGIFY THE NEWS 1"]
MICHAEL GREGORY: They don't need Solitaire anymore.
They have cats.
[MUSIC - GREGORY BROTHERS, "SONGIFY THE NEWS 1"]
RYAN DUFFY: It took me about a year to get that Antoine
Dodson thing out of my head, and now it's just back
permanently.
And finally, we have John Martin's Etiquette Update.
Rules for living from the biggest blowhard we know.
JOHN MARTIN: Some rules for food.
When you're out to lunch, you do not touch your food before
everyone else has theirs.
No sneaking French fries.
No Floridian table Jenga.
That means when you get in, if there's a four-top and a
four-top and there's eight of you, you
don't push them together.
Using forks in Chinese restaurants, McDonald's
breakfast, skim milk, granola.
Not classy.
Making lists of etiquette that have
declining values of humor?
All day long.
RYAN DUFFY: Hope you enjoyed another episode of Vice Today,
and keep an eye out for new episodes Monday and Thursday
of next week.
And if you like the channel, please subscribe.
Thanks for watching.
the day, meet the Gregory Brothers,
and learn about etiquette.
Hey, I'm Ryan Duffy, and welcome to Vice Today.
On today's episode, we meet some of our weird and
wonderful friends from YouTube.
It's the first installment of My Life Online, and it's with
the Gregory Brothers.
Then we get some updated etiquette rules from John
Martin, but first up, we sent the nicest person we've ever
met, Shan Shan, out into the streets of New York to talk
about MLK Day.
SHAN HUANG: This is Shan for Vice Magazine, and I'm on the
street today because today's Martin Luther King Day.
And I want to know how much people know about Dr. King.
So do you know what's today's holiday?
MALE SPEAKER 1: Martin Luther King Day.
MALE SPEAKER 2: Martin Luther King.
FEMALE SPEAKER 1: It's Martin Luther King Day.
MALE SPEAKER 3: Yeah, MLK.
Martin Luther King, yeah.
SHAN HUANG: Oh, MLK.
MALE SPEAKER 3: Yeah.
SHAN HUANG: Ahhh.
Do you know what's today's holiday?
FEMALE SPEAKER 2: Yeah, Martin Luther King's Day.
Yeah.
SHAN HUANG: Do you know what he stands for, for America?
FEMALE SPEAKER 2: I don't know.
He break--
broke, the abolish?
Maybe?
MALE SPEAKER 4: He's just black guy, and he worked for
black people right?
Yeah.
SHAN HUANG: Are you going to do anything to celebrate?
MALE SPEAKER 1: Yes.
SHAN HUANG: What are you going to do?
MALE SPEAKER 1: I'm going to go south where it's warm.
And I think that's about it.
Get warm.
That's what black people like.
We like to be warm.
So this cold weather shit's for like white people.
SHAN HUANG: Are you going to do anything to celebrate?
MALE SPEAKER 5: No, I have to work.
All day.
SHAN HUANG: What are you going to do today?
MALE SPEAKER 6: Um, I might do the same thing I did last
year, was I read a little bit about him when I got home.
And like, that's mostly it.
Just read about him and like, yeah.
What he did.
SHAN HUANG: So you read a little bit
about him every day?
I mean, every year?
MALE SPEAKER 6: Mm-hmm.
SHAN HUANG: So maybe when you're 50, you would know
everything about him.
What do you know about Dr. King?
FEMALE SPEAKER 1: Um, well, he was leader of the Black Civil
Rights Movement here.
MALE SPEAKER 7: The whites didn't like him, and so he
protested, and he had this speech that he had a dream for
everybody to be the same equal rights.
SHAN HUANG: Very, very impressive.
FEMALE SPEAKER 2: I had a dream my English teacher came
out, and he said, oh, your English is so poor.
You have to try more.
MALE SPEAKER 5: I had a dream that I was teaching kids, and
one of them turned into my boss.
FEMALE SPEAKER 3: We're actually experimenting with
dreams at the moment.
You have to go this forest in your dream and then meet this
cat there while a brass band is playing.
SHAN HUANG: So what about if you're going to cook one
dinner for Dr. King, what would you serve him?
FEMALE SPEAKER 1: Crispy kale.
MALE SPEAKER 3: Maybe I'd just have a burrito, right?
Everybody likes Mexican food.
FEMALE SPEAKER 3: Fish.
SHAN HUANG: What type of fish?
FEMALE SPEAKER 3: Whitefish.
And steamed potatoes.
We call that nursery food.
SHAN HUANG: Nursery food?
FEMALE SPEAKER 3: Yeah.
It heals everything.
And we'd make him miso soup as well.
SHAN HUANG: What do you think that Dr. King needs to be
healed for?
FEMALE SPEAKER 3: Needs to be healed for?
Being assassinated, I suppose.
SHAN HUANG: Oh, OK.
RYAN DUFFY: So you try to go out and have a nice
conversation with people on a holiday here in New York, and
you just hear about their bullshit dreams.
Next up is My Life Online, where we go and meet the
Gregory Brothers.
And you may think that you don't know who they are, but
when you see these videos, you're going to realize you
know them all too well.
[MUSIC - GREGORY BROTHERS, "DOUBLE RAINBOW SONG"]
EVAN GREGORY: The Gregory Brothers are mostly known for
online videos that we do.
And those videos are a realization of a Utopian
vision in which we uncover hidden songs from within the
speech of ordinary people.
ANTOINE DODSON: Well, obviously we have a rapist in
Lincoln Park.
[MUSIC - GREGORY BROTHERS, "BED INTRUDER SONG"]
EVAN GREGORY: Um, we started in a musical background and
had toured together with my brothers.
ANDREW GREGORY: I don't know.
We toured a lot as a band, but in a very small-scale way
where we were playing to crowds of anywhere between
zero and 200 people.
MICHAEL GREGORY: Nobody likes a regular band.
SARAH GREGORY: We were definitely pursuing the arts
in very traditional ways when we first
started working together.
But then once your imagination gets a little crazier and
crazier, there's stuff that you can only produce using
technology.
JIM LEHRER: Senator Obama, two minutes.
[MUSIC - GREGORY BROTHERS, "DEBATE HIGHLIGHTS"]
SARAH GREGORY: Back in the 2008 presidential election,
Michael made a video out of the first debate between Obama
and McCain.
And he wanted to write a song, basically, about the issues
that he knew that were going to be
coming up in that debate.
So he successfully made that video and just thought it
would be way more fun if we could somehow get the
candidates to sing along with us.
[MUSIC - GREGORY BROTHERS, "AUTO-TUNE THE NEWS 5"]
EVAN GREGORY: We took some technology that we had a grasp
of, pitch correction technology that includes
Auto-tune, and used it to modify their voices so it
sounds like they're singing with us.
And then we could create duets and melodies that we're
actually participating in together.
And that became Auto-Tune the News
MALE SPEAKER: He said, any world war--
MICHAEL GREGORY: Uh, I'm laying down a beat for you.
Keep going.
SARAH GREGORY: We spent about a year auto-tuning the news,
and then realized that we shouldn't limit our quest for
music to just news and politics.
[MUSIC - GREGORY BROTHERS, "REALITY HITS YOU HARD BRO"]
[MUSIC - GREGORY BROTHERS, "CAN'T HUG EVERY CAT"]
SARAH GREGORY: So then we just started calling it Songify,
because that's essentially what we were doing, was just
finding songs out in the universe.
EVAN GREGORY: Where are we, Andrew?
ANDREW GREGORY: Well, as you might notice, our office is
very spacious.
Why, you might ask?
Because it used to be a horse barn.
EVAN GREGORY: This is where all the audio magic happens,
where we try to summon various types of sonic wizardry to
coax songs out of those places in the universe that
heretofore have been dark, songless corners.
[MUSIC - GREGORY BROTHERS, "TAXI DAVE SONG"]
EVAN GREGORY: We are trained musically, but not in the art
of video editing.
So we just kind of accrued those skills by saying, let's
try this in the video.
I don't know how.
OK, let's figure that out and let's do the next thing.
MICHAEL GREGORY: Nearly everything that we shoot for
our videos is done on a green screen.
EVAN GREGORY: Let's say if we needed a floating head.
MICHAEL GREGORY: Or arms waving around?
We'll still use the sheet.
EVAN GREGORY: But we upgraded this year and
just painted the wall.
It's like, why hang the sheet?
Just paint the wall, man.
MICHAEL GREGORY: So let's take you back to the
area where we edit.
Hey, Sarah.
SARAH GREGORY: Hi guys.
MICHAEL GREGORY: We run After Effects stuff and Final Cut
stuff in tandem to sort of put the videos together while the
audio is being made.
EVAN GREGORY: That's a gold record.
MICHAEL GREGORY: That single just went gold in January.
I mean, something like "Friday," Rebecca Black's
"Friday" has gotten watched a lot more than "The Bed
Intruder Song," but people are not as excited about
downloading "Friday" for $0.99.
EVAN GREGORY: Little known fact.
You have to buy the plaque for yourself once you get it
certified gold.
But we got, we got a couple of them and--
and sent one to Antoine.
So he's got one hanging in his house, too.
MICHAEL GREGORY: And unfortunately, solid pure gold
does not come cheap.
INTERVIEWER: Do your moms understand what you actually
do for a living?
MICHAEL GREGORY: She understands, but she still
says YouTubes, plural.
[MUSIC - GREGORY BROTHERS, "WINNING"]
EVAN GREGORY: Once the number of--
SARAH GREGORY: Really great feeling.
EVAN GREGORY: Once the number of views exceeds the number of
moms related to video producers, then you feel like
you're beginning to hit your stride as an auteur.
We have found success on YouTube, if only by the metric
of we all left our day jobs to just do this.
[MUSIC - GREGORY BROTHERS, "WINNING"]
SARAH GREGORY: And we're getting into comedy, and we're
doing more writing.
MICHAEL GREGORY: We're in the middle of a development deal
with Comedy Central, which is really cool.
EVAN GREGORY: It's, I mean, pointless to plug, since no
one could actually watch it right now.
If it was about to air on TV, then we would be like plugging
it like silly.
CHARLIE SHEEN: Duh.
Winning.
EVAN GREGORY: But it is true that a lot of doors have been
opened to us based on our videos being seen a lot.
ANDREW GREGORY: Basically, YouTube actually works.
That's a huge first--
MICHAEL GREGORY: YouTube actually works.
ANDREW GREGORY: It actually works.
MICHAEL GREGORY: It's just so egalitarian.
It doesn't matter if it's very grainy footage of a bunny
making a weird sound or whether it's very
high-definition footage of Newt Gingrich giving a speech
that he later regrets.
[MUSIC - GREGORY BROTHERS, "SONGIFY THE NEWS 1"]
MICHAEL GREGORY: The desire of the American workforce to not
be working while on the clock is just really impressive.
[MUSIC - GREGORY BROTHERS, "SONGIFY THE NEWS 1"]
MICHAEL GREGORY: They don't need Solitaire anymore.
They have cats.
[MUSIC - GREGORY BROTHERS, "SONGIFY THE NEWS 1"]
RYAN DUFFY: It took me about a year to get that Antoine
Dodson thing out of my head, and now it's just back
permanently.
And finally, we have John Martin's Etiquette Update.
Rules for living from the biggest blowhard we know.
JOHN MARTIN: Some rules for food.
When you're out to lunch, you do not touch your food before
everyone else has theirs.
No sneaking French fries.
No Floridian table Jenga.
That means when you get in, if there's a four-top and a
four-top and there's eight of you, you
don't push them together.
Using forks in Chinese restaurants, McDonald's
breakfast, skim milk, granola.
Not classy.
Making lists of etiquette that have
declining values of humor?
All day long.
RYAN DUFFY: Hope you enjoyed another episode of Vice Today,
and keep an eye out for new episodes Monday and Thursday
of next week.
And if you like the channel, please subscribe.
Thanks for watching.