IT'S LIKE THAT: Highlights For Your Music

Thursday, October 30, 2008 | 8:01 AM

sportscenter indie ear.jpg

If anyone has read the Indie Ear blog since it's inception, you should know that I have a not-so-secret obsession with sports.

C'mon, pairing indie bands against each other in a NCAA-style tournament didn't give it away? How about when I sketched out drawings of my favorite indie artists posing as 2008 Summer Olympians?

(above: Music and sports have more in common than you think.)

Though a high school band geek getting bullied by a varsity football player on a daily basis might disagree, music and sports have a lot in common. Both have the ability to inspire, make us root for an underdog, or give us a good reason to cry. Music, like sports, can also bring out the best and worst in us (both have a rich history of triumphs and tragedies, bloated egos and fist fights, and heart-warming affairs of humanitarianism and love).

Up until the advent of online video though, sports was different than music, because following any athletic event you could go home and re-live the (good or bad) highlights on TV. So accustomed to turning on highlights after I attended a sports event, sometimes I would come home from a concert and turn on my TV hoping for some type of recap package. Oh wait a minute, this is music not sports--damn it.

Then came YouTube.

Fans armed with cell phone cameras, camera cameras, and actual video cameras began taping footage of concerts they attended. Upon arriving home, they uploaded it to YouTube, and presto, the rest of the known world can see how The Morning Benders performed last night in San Francisco. Want to know what songs the Black Keys played in Texas yesterday? No problem, a quick little YouTube search will take you to the front row of their show.

Is the footage always great? No. How 'bout the sound? Nope. But like a live athletic event, being at a concert is a totally different experience than watching video snippets on television. But when all you want is a taste, highlights will do.

Because I couldn't attend any of Weezer's east coast concert dates on their current tour, I've been attending their shows vicariously through YouTube. If I can't be there, at least I can see what it was like to be there. I've also been keeping daily tabs on the Beastie Boys Get Out And Vote tour. In the past couple of days I've already seen highlights from their shows in Charlotte, Richmond, and Youngstown. It's like Sports Center, except with less sports and more Beastie.

Speaking of not-so-secret obsessions...