An Inexplicably Close Look at an Obscure Song: OK Go "Get Over It"

Before they were messing around with your gym equipment and wasting time in abandoned warehouses, Chicago-based alt rockers OK Go were doing something very pedestrian by their standards: Imploring some wanton audience to put things in perspective.



An Inexplicably Close Look at an Obscure Song (or AICLOS, for those of you acronymically inclined) has always been about exegesis of the trivial: Those nonsensical lyrics you just can't get out of your head from a ditty no one cares about. OK Go has rendered that mission difficult, as it is quite impossible to divorce the band from their ingenuity in crafting visual representations of their music that stun and get people talking. Don't believe me? Walk into the next bar you come across and ask the patrons about OK Go's debut album, and they'll sit there, mouths agape. Ask them about those guys that made that music video on a treadmill, and you'll get laughs and pats on the back.

OK Go has taken an era where the music video has been rendered pointless, thanks to MTV's constant marathon of teenagers doing awful things, and embraced the viral nature of today's video content. One could imagine them shooting themselves out of cannon at bullseye comprised of vials of infectious diseases, if only for a couple thousand more hits on YouTube.

"Get Over It" is the band's first official music video, and its nod to the band's future half avant-garde, half bored Americans at work audience is a super slow-motion ping pong game in which the melody halts entirely. Seriously. That's it. The rest of the time they're playing their instruments and having random objects thrown at them.

Like OK Go's other songs, the visual representation has nothing to do with the lyrical content of the song, which is ostensibly a rant to a friend of either gender for complaining about things that are beyond your control and to simply enjoy what pleasures you have in life. Whether one of those pleasures is a ping pong game or a faithless wife is something you'll have to decide for yourself.

Of course, without reading the lyrics and instead simply reading the title of the song, one could surmise that OK Go's been pulling a fast one on us for the last several years. Their nonsensical videos could simply be a commentary on how seriously the music industry was taking itself, though considering these guys shortly postdated things like this, it's hard to take that position seriously.

Maybe I shouldn't be reading too much into the music of a band that named itself after the thing you say while impatiently waiting in line for the waterslide.