Through sophisticated reporting techniques that primarily involve Smokin' Smarties, the WSJ has found that America is "a country in a decidedly negative mood" about the economy, just weeks after we were in a great fucking mood cause the stock market was BACK BABY. Now we're all sad again.

It's called crack cocaine, America. Stop doing it, get some mood stabilizers, and pull yourself up by the bootstraps. That means take your ass to night school until 2:30 a.m. like the other knowledge-crazed poors. Sleep in the closet, then catch your 6 a.m. class before work! It's the American way.

And here's what's not the American way: trains. Spending money on trains! Did Henry Ford make all his money from trains, to make Detroit our greatest city? No, he made cars. Look it up. That's like the opposite of trains. Earlier robber barons did indeed make fortunes on trains, but that has nothing to do with Detroit, or the economic fact we are about to drop on your head from a lofty altitude: "Amtrak loses an average of $32 for every passenger who boards one of its trains." Loses, it says! If you ride Amtrak you are literally costing the taxpayers money. Just hitchhike, like a normal hobo. Print out this post and use it to explain to your night school teacher why you were late to class.

Stop sulking. Go to school. Get off the train and walk. Star in a mawkish music video by Ryan Star that plays your unemployment predicament for sympathy and inspiration. That's been the formula for getting a job in the USA ever since George Washington chopped down a neighbor's cherry tree and then demanded payment, while holding and axe. And it hasn't changed since then. So get with the program.
[Pic via]

The hipster harmonizing, Pet Sounds-aping band probably made a video for "Two Weeks" the single off of their latest album, and it was probably decent, but it hasn't had the viral power of this, which picked up something like 47,000 views on Vimeo since it's debut. Bonus: even the band noticed it. It was animated by a guy named Gabe Askew, and it's truly wonderful. Imagine a world where not only did MTV still play videos, but played the best ones out there. Oh well. Certain arts come and go, but there will always be people to preserve quality in them for their ever-obscured audiences. Enjoy:

Two Weeks - Grizzly Bear from Gabe Askew on Vimeo.

Yeah, it's funny because she sort of looks exactly like the weird hooker in the actual movie. (And Fisher is pretty much a deadringer for a Psycho-era Bale.) So, like her doppleganger, Hearst has a creepy threesome with Patrick Bateman and some doomed socialite. There's lots of bouncing.

Look! Screencaps! I've embedded the video itself down in comments if you want to hear the surprisingly good song. New comments are good for something after all.

Nyle, who's graduating from NYU this spring, told NYU Local that he made the video cover of Lil' Wayne with a $2,000 grant from the school and it took 30 takes to get right. His plans for after graduation: continue to pay rent by throwing parties in his Bushwick party loft and try to make it as a rapper. Or, from the song: "I ain't stressin' this recession if it leads to a depression / It won't be in my mind, I'll be all right / As long as I'm surviving off of beats and rhyming / Then I don't mind surviving off of eating no ramen." Ah, youth.

Neil Young - Cough Up The Bucks

So in this new Neil Young song he is just repeating the words "cough up the bucks" over and over again, for a while, and then he sings "where did all the money go? Where did all the cash flow?" So as you can see Neil knows as much about this crisis as your average newspaper columnist or congressional finance committee member and his song is 10 times more insightful than watching 24 hours of CNBC or reading The Nation or whatever else you're doing to figure this thing out. (Bonus: a bit about his car, and his girl, and his world.)

If you dislike repetition and laughably simple political non-statements then you may not like this, but if you like crunchy guitars alternating with pretty harmonies than this will basically be right up your alley.

Yes, the best part of this may be the self-directed video, in which Mr. Young rides around in a limo, reading The Wall Street Journal, and shouting into a mobile phone, because that is what those WALL STREET FAT CATS do with their time, he is pretty sure.

There is your financial and music news for the week.

The effort, codenamed "Vevo" according to the Wall Street Journal, would involve a new showcase for music videos on YouTube, with the notion of commanding higher advertising rates. Right now, YouTube makes pennies per view — if it's lucky. Most of YouTube's bandwidth-consuming video funhouse goes unburdened with revenue.

In December, Warner abruptly withdrew its music videos from Google. Most people assumed Warner was throwing another typical record-label fit and being unreasonable. The word from the Googleplex, though, is that the Warner deal was a victim of CFO Patrick Pichette's cost-cutting crusade. In YouTube's early days, the video site had struck a deal, then hailed as groundbreaking, to pay Warner to play copies of its music videos uploaded by users and thereby avoid a massive copyright-infringement suit. But that deal was rather richer for Warner than for YouTube. Google executive Jonathan Rosenberg explained the move on a recent conference call with analysts:

... we'd love to work with Warner. But I think we're going to continue to do what we've been doing; try to continue to make mutually beneficial deals and then try to do some of the things like we talked about on the earlier call with respect to better monetizing YouTube ...

In other words, Google just doesn't make enough off of videos to justify the rates it's been paying Warner and the other labels.

Did Warner walk, or did Google dump it? It's still not clear. What is clear: There's not enough money in online music videos to go around. Google and Universal are negotiating a deal in the hopes that there will be.

But what if there's not? In the '80s, teenagers stared slackjawed at MTV, because there simply wasn't anything else like it on the air. But now, thanks largely to YouTube, there's a surfeit of video everywhere you go. And traditional three-minute music videos, while they satisfied an '80s attention span, are too long for the YouTube generation, which likes its clips a minute or less. (A classic video like Take On Me seems epic now.) Perhaps the record labels should count themselves lucky if they get a link to iTunes, let alone a revenue share — and that anyone still wants their music videos at all.

Dash's post falls into the "academic analysis of black music" genre most significantly shaped by the Village Voice's ""This Is Why I'm Hot": A graphical dissertation on the number one song in America."