Love YouTube. The YouTube art gallery: Not Great!
I made a Cut Limbo soundtrack on YouTube the other night for 2 reasons:
1. I love YouTube and the millions of songs and videos it offers. It is truly amazing!
2. I wanted to share and develop the concept of my novel Cut Limbo having a ‘punk’ soundtrack.
I love YouTube’s accessibility, its freedom, its ease of use and its excellent and innovative technology. YouTube is, without a doubt, a major contribution to everything that’s good about social media and the Internet revolution.
YouTube is just 100% Nirvana for music lovers! I made a 1 hour and 6 minute homage to the punk era. A great selection of top songs by some legendary punk bands.
I put 19 classic punk songs together and it was easy and took no time at all. Not all the songs were that punk, certainly not as far as the bands and their style are concerned, but they were all bands from that era. What I mean is, I wouldn’t necessarily call Talking Heads or Devo punk bands, but they were a big influence to us as ‘fledgling musicians’ back in the late 70′s.
Of course, the Cut Limbo soundtrack doesn’t include every punk band we were influenced by, by that I mean that the likes of ATV, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure and The Buzzcocks aren’t there, but The Clash, The Sex Pistols, PiL and Gang of Four are, among others.
How come the novel Cut Limbo has got a sound track? Well, it’s simple, each song relates perfectly to a ‘scene’ in the book and that’s because Cut Limbo was originally written as a 97 minute movie script. It was shelved for a decade due to production issues and brought back to life as a novel, thanks basically to Amazon, Kindle and the self publishing revolution. The story of what went on just outside Amsterdam, at Schipol Airport, just had to be told.
Here’s the soundtrack…
That’s all great, right? Brilliant songs, easy to put it all together. Except, I switched to the new YouTube format and I can’t switch back and some of the new design doesn’t seem so good to me.
On the previous design, I had a great grid with all the thumbnails of my selected bands on, it looked really good, but now I can’t have that great design. It’s gone!!
I’m still totally happy with the music side of things, but the presentation just isn’t as good. The fact that I can download the tracks and create a soundtrack and then share it on Twitter, Facebook and StumbleUpon etc. is pretty amazing. But I don’t like the new format, sorry YouTube.
I didn’t find my channel format too exciting either. It was hard to find a photograph that was 2560 x 1440 and even after a few hours fiddling around, I wasn’t over excited about the result.
It’s great to be able to leave an outline of Cut Limbo on YouTube for people to refer to and I’m happy to leave a link to my blog, but once again, it’s a little bit dull. I’d like to be able to leave some thumbnail photos and make the writing more individual, maybe change the fonts, make it a bit more punk or something??
I wanted to get nostalgic too, and have some Spasmodic Caress references without being too over the top (read egotistical) and I wanted to add some stills from the Spaz 1980 video.
I tried and tried for a good couple of hours, but without success. You would think YouTube would have the design capability to make it a bit more interesting and simple to use, wouldn’t you?
New versions of social media platforms generally offer the ability to return to the old format, but I couldn’t find the way back. Shame. As you can see below I ended up with a fairly naff ’pretty lights’ design, the choices were limited and included an out of focus bookcase and a sleeping cat! Not exactly rock ‘n’ roll is it?
In fact, just for a laugh, here’s the choices:
How rock ‘n’ roll is this selection?
It’s not the most exciting selection ever is it? There are a few more, but they’re much the same. You’d think YouTube could do better or at least offer more selection or maybe just make it easier to crop and add your own art work, right?
Here comes the ‘pretty lights’ design and the dull fonts and format.
Thanks must go to YouTube for being wonderful and continually innovative and please consider this as positive, constructive criticism from someone who has been saying lots of good stuff about YouTube on this blog over the years!
However, if you’re thinking about changing to the new YouTube, give it some thought and if you want some great punk songs, listen to the Cut Limbo soundtrack while you’re reading the book. Cut Limbo the novel is on Amazon and Kindle… it’s adults only, it’s a satirical crime thriller, it’s violent and in parts a little crazy, but it’s very, very funny….
