One thing I like about Jay Smooth is the way he lay things down as far as “the human spirit” is concerned. April 2 of this year, he uploaded a video about “connectedness”, a principal which basically means when you are honoring a person’s spirit by connecting with that person by simply returning the gesture. If you sort of missed what I’m trying to say, in layman’s terms, it means to talk to someone just because they see you genuinely want to talk to them.
I “connected” with this logic even before I heard about it in this way. Everyday, I try to network, but some days, I just want to talk to someone to let them know that there’s something about them I admired and this is my chance to honor that. Any conversation afterwards would be consider a bonus. This logic I have simplified life and made it easy for me to speak to everyone. Of course, it took some time (aka experience) to know when to open my mouth and what to say when I do. And I met a lot of wonderful people via these strange, yet random times.
However, there are times when doing this principal is hard, especially when you are used to a formula of “shaking hands”. It’s natural to just come up to a person and wanting to touch them just to feel at ease with your presence, but what do you do if that gesture isn’t returned? That’s where my story begins.
Sunday, I attended a festival in Brooklyn near the Brooklyn Academy of Music (or BAM). I was passing out flyers to a Marcus Garvey event that’s going down on June 10th when I saw someone familiar. A tall woman that I swear I saw before. Then, it’s one of the Def Poets that I recently favorite and wanted to blog about. Now, I wanted to connect with her as an artist as well as a supporter of her work, so I went though the coward to greet her. Our eyes met and asked her if she was one of the Def Poets. She acknowledged that she was and I was like “Hi, my name is Matthew and I enjoy your work…”, extending my hand and on the tip of my tongue, almost said the name of her poem. Then she said, “I don’t shake hands.” While she said it with a smile in her face, her eyes said another story. It was almost as if she was grossed out by the fact that I recognized her. I thought she said something bad, but she repeated herself, smiling but looking a bit more awkward than before. For 10 seconds, there was this awkward silence. You know, the type that makes you want to hop on a plane and get away like they do in the Southwest Airline commercials. Getting her point, I took back my hand and just said, “well, I enjoy your work” and left it like that. She said thank you and left.
For five minutes afterwards, I was self-analytical. What did I do wrong? Was it my hair? My eyes? Did I give off the impression of being “star struck”? Was my breathe bad? Did I shower? I was talking with a lot of people that day and while my appearance and dress isn’t anything special, it was respected. I even go through mental notes and thought maybe I send off I was hitting on her. Maybe she just didn’t want to be bother. I do recall her speech pattern and she didn’t even say something like “Sorry, no offense, but I don’t shake hands” or something to that effect. She just brushed it off. Even thought I saw her a few times afterwards, I just didn’t want my spirit to be dampened, so I just left her alone.
Now, apart of me knows that I didn’t do anything wrong. The other part actually wanted to call her out because I felt she dissed me when I was being genuine. I even thought of my hands. Did I sneezed in them? I know at times, I won’t even shake people’s hand, but I always let them know why I won’t do it at that point and time. Maybe she was paranoid about the germs I was gathering.
However, I decided that in the end, it was either she didn’t want to be bothered or she just straight up didn’t like what I was sending and tried not to hurt my feelings (or maybe she wanted to hurt my feelings).
So what did I learn? I wish I can say I learned a lesson from all this, but the only lesson I learned was… well… maybe there’s just some people that don’t want to connect.
Oh… and who is this person that refused to connect with me? Well, like I said, I was going to blog about her and even have it so that I showcase two of her videos. However, I now scrapped it and probably won’t showcase her on this site, which is really sad. But hey… what can I say? After all…
… she didn’t want to acknowledge me, so why should I acknowledge her?
Dear Music Labels: Please Use Social Media Correctly!
Today, I wanted to cover Jazmine Sullivan’s “Bust Your Windows”. However, upon finding the official video on YouTube, I also found this:
So, I now have to write up about this. Why? Because it seems that the Music Labels (the major ones) don’t realize what they done. They need to be educated on this:
First off, by disabling embedding, you are driving traffic away from your channel. What traffic you may ask?
Let’s take what I wanted to do for example. I want to feature a music video. What I will do is I will go to “YouTube” and find that video. If I find the video, but can’t embed it, then I will go to another user. However, knowing that if that user gets too popular, you’ll shut them down, leaving me to go off youtube to another site to get the very video that you block from embedding.
In the meantime, the money you could be making from my 100+ views is gone because I’m driving traffic away from your channel and giving it to someone else. Now, you may ask “what money”? Here’s the answer:
Note what you’ll miss out. Advertising money because chances are, a click-though will result in people wanting to find out more music by this artist. But there’s also other things, like the ability to share, add to playlist and chances of them subscribing for even more chances of getting their attention.
What Music Labels (of all kinds) don’t understand is that by giving the user that ability to spread your video, we will more than likely come to the source for things. But when you do something like disable a video or speak to fans as we’re numbers, then it more than lightly turns them off.
Of course, if you want me to name one successful band that will share their music videos, then… OK GO.
This band basically did a simple music video and share it on YouTube. What happened afterwards? Not only did it caught on. Lots of people started to do their own version of the dances, giving Ok Go a brand to recognize.
For those who wants a Hip-Hop example… don’t hate. Once an Internet Star-turned-rapper celebrity Soulja Boy Tellem uses YouTube and it’s features to make sure his movement was felt. While the official music labels prevent users from embedding videos, Souljah Boy just place them on his channel and giving his fans a direct connection to him, which makes him #1 on the grinding side.
So, music labels, please stop making it hard for me and others to cover your guys! It’s bad enough that I have several broken videos on my blog. You want us to “respect your copyright” and even thought you have the tools, you refuse to use them probably.
You are losing out more by NOT allowing us to embed the videos. You might as well stop it altogether. No one will miss it.