\n\n"}\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEmergency Broadcast Network came out with this in 1993, over 10 years before Youtube was founded. They\u2019re the forebearers of Youtube poop. Still holds up too.
\nthis was made 22 YEARS AGO.
\nholy shit
\noldtube poop
\nthis has the structure and most of the standard joke formats of a modern 2015 youtube poop i\u2019m completely blown away
\nI consider EBN one of the great influences in my life and have been fortunate to know a couple of it\u2019s members Joshua (a tiny bit) and Greg (a lot.) Joshua is a brilliant video editor and Greg frikkin wrote frikkin After Effects (the greatest post production software of all time, imo.)
\nReally good YouTube Poop is hard to make. Making videos like EBN did in the early to mid-90\u2032s was nearly impossible. This is because the tools for transforming video digitally were primitive, the machines costly (an Avid or Media 100 NLE cost upwards of $50,000 to build and thousands more to maintain) and hard to access (the only people who owned them were broadcasters, post production studios, and the like.) The source media itself had shitloads of copyright on it which has no practical meaning now but meant quite a bit way back when.
\nThe 1990s were an age of tightly controlled analog mass media outlets and in it,\u00a0EBN\u2019s work was subversive for both its politics and its disregard of intellectual property rights. EBN wasn\u2019t commercially viable (the legal sampling war had just begun) and it wasn\u2019t pop (even though it was danceable in that 90\u2032s techno rave sort of way) which meant that their work never traveled far beyond its most immediate social networks of media, art, and technology. EBN was signed to\u00a0the indie TVT Records imprint but they considered themselves, primarily, live-remix performance artists who occasionally \u201crecorded\u201d albums (TVT distributed licensed versions of EBN\u2019s work on CDs, VHS tapes, and 3.5\u2033 floppies.) This combination of factors made it nearly impossible to experience the bulk of their work.
\nThat isn\u2019t to say that they weren\u2019t extremely influential. If you ever saw or heard about the remixed visuals of U2\u2032s groundbreaking ZOOTV tour, then you\u2019ve seen the work of EBN. The group was also commissioned by MTV to make a half hour special about their work with U2 (back when it seemed like everyone watched MTV) and they even made a bunch of visual idents for the network. This exposed millions of people to the EBN remix aesthetic, rhythm, and structure even if they didn\u2019t know where it came from. (Of course, that aesthetic had it\u2019s own immediate roots in the work of The Bomb Squad and Public Enemy but that is a post for another day.)
\nSo while it\u2019s unfortunate that more YTP creators aren\u2019t conscious of their Emergency Broadcast Network ancestry, considering the time and circumstance under which EBN existed, it\u2019s totally understandable and it\u2019s great that people have even discovered it at all.
\nWatch (and listen) to their work here. We Will Rock You, Psychoactive Drugs, and Get Down are some of my favs.
\nThis is all amazing but of great personal importance: I loved Zoo TV\u2013The Television Program and whenever I bring it up no one ever knows what I\u2019m talking about. To the point where I was starting to get convinced I made it up / hallucinated it. I had no idea it was an EBN project! This is very exciting and validating for me.
\nWhat the fuck one of the guys from EBN made after effects???
\nboobtube poop
\n