Muse - Survival (London 2012 Olympics Official Music Video) (SLYT)
July 4, 2012 11:15 AM   Subscribe

 
Wow. Love it. Epic and ridiculously over the top. I'd expect nothing less from Muse.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 11:23 AM on July 4, 2012 [2 favorites]


Nice -- they sure do love modulating their scales.
posted by spiderskull at 11:27 AM on July 4, 2012


The 2012 font is horrible.
posted by fullerine at 11:29 AM on July 4, 2012 [5 favorites]


For the first 1:45 I was planning to come back here and say something along the lines of: "It's sure no Waka Waka."

But then they really do pull out the stops for the second half. God, I love Michael Phelps.
posted by 256 at 11:31 AM on July 4, 2012


yesssss.

new muse album this year, too!

if you've never seen them live... watch this performance from 2004. truly epic.

i guess i'm also excited for the olympics.
posted by raihan_ at 11:33 AM on July 4, 2012 [2 favorites]


I was concerned that Muse wouldn't be able to capture the melodrama of the Olympics. I wish they'd been more ostentatious!
posted by ChuraChura at 11:46 AM on July 4, 2012 [2 favorites]


It really does capture the spirit of every aesthetic decision made for these Olympics.
posted by howfar at 12:05 PM on July 4, 2012 [9 favorites]


The longer they go on, the less they try to hide their massive debt to Queen.

Not knocking this: it does the job pretty perfectly.
posted by Decani at 12:06 PM on July 4, 2012 [2 favorites]


This video made me smile for the first time in two days. You can always count on Muse for some awesomeness, and the music and video really fits the melodrama of the Olympics. I saw them in concert four times from October '09 to October '10, and they were great at each one of them. Can't wait for the new album and tour!
posted by gemmy at 12:17 PM on July 4, 2012


I was just coming here to say that every new album they get closer and closer to becoming Queen and I'm alright with that. But, Decani you beat me to it...

So instead I'll say: I love it when I come across a piece like this that really reminds me why I fell in love with my chosen profession, which is editing. This was really well edited.
posted by matt_od at 12:24 PM on July 4, 2012


This is the first 2012 Olympics-related thing that's broken through my supreme indifference and made me actually want to pay attention. But only because it's Muse. Man, I love those guys. (T on the Fringe 2006 - what a show!)
posted by rory at 12:43 PM on July 4, 2012


Well, they used to get ripped on for being a Radiohead clone- which is unfair, as there are a few similarities but a lot of differences. I think people just want to compare MUSE to someone else (and yeah, there was a lot of 'Queen'-esque elements in their last album- but you can't compare the Exogenesis songs to "Queen"). I guess they're becoming "Queen"-like if you mean they have symphonic elements and lots of atypical-for-rock-and-pop harmonic changes?

When this song first came out a few weeks ago, I was thinking "Who hires MUSE for an Olympics song? Do they want a bunch of lyrics about how you can't trust the IOC as they are all conspiring to deprive us of free will?".

That said, while MUSE is absolutely my favorite band, and I adore their albums... I'm not sure I'm liking this mutation of their sound, as well as that on their last album. I prefer the more Rachmaninoff-inspired, piano driven paranoia rock sound, but maybe this new will grow on me. Then again, "The Resistance" is still the least played of their albums on my iPod- and yet that's the one that is their most commercially and critically successful: most albums sold, and won them their only Grammy so far with last year's "Best Rock Album"*.


* I didn't realize the "Best Rock Album" Grammy that they won has only been around since 1995, and yet has been won by Foo Fighters four times. What the what?!
posted by hincandenza at 12:45 PM on July 4, 2012


"This video contains content from the International Olympic Committee, who has blocked it from display on this website"

Righty ho. Good job there, LOCOG.
posted by The River Ivel at 12:48 PM on July 4, 2012


The Pet Shop Boys came out this week with a new Olympic-themed song: Winner.
posted by ericb at 12:51 PM on July 4, 2012 [1 favorite]


BBC Releases Pixar-like Animated Olympic Trailer.
posted by ericb at 12:56 PM on July 4, 2012 [2 favorites]


Any six syllables!
(Or five if you like!)
Can be a line in this!
Song! Try it for yourself!
posted by Wolfdog at 1:00 PM on July 4, 2012 [3 favorites]


I approve any Olympics theme song which includes the line "Vengeance is Mine"
posted by delmoi at 1:02 PM on July 4, 2012 [3 favorites]


The London 2012 Olympic Games FOXTEL commercial featuring morphing Australian athletes.
posted by ericb at 1:04 PM on July 4, 2012 [2 favorites]


I approve any Olympics theme song which includes the line "Vengeance is Mine"
Indeed. It should have been this one, in fact.
posted by Wolfdog at 1:05 PM on July 4, 2012


Man, Underworld is handling all the music for the opening and closing ceremonies and then Muse does this? I don't even hate on Muse but Underworld is right there, you guys!
posted by beaucoupkevin at 1:06 PM on July 4, 2012 [4 favorites]


Yep, this absolutely fits the bill for the Olympics. That video is also really awesome, which is a nice change, given how awful most of the visual design has been for this Olympics so far.

Muse have a special place in my heart for the way that they wholeheartedly embrace pretty much every overblown ostentatious musical trope they can find, and they somehow make it work. I saw them live at Wembley Stadium a couple of years ago, when Matt Bellamy came on stage in a suit made entirely of shiny silver fabric, slid across the stage on his knees doing epic guitar solos, did a couple of songs on a platform slowly rising above the audience, and came out for the encore wearing a suit with pulsating LEDs all over it. It's as though they found The Big Book of Rock 'n' Roll Cliches and gleefully grabbed every single one, without a trace of irony, and I love them for it.

(Although yes, I do think The Resistance is their weakest album - it's all about Absolution and Black Holes and Revelations for me.)
posted by ZsigE at 1:30 PM on July 4, 2012 [5 favorites]


"This video contains content from the International Olympic Committee, who has blocked it from display on this website"

That made me crack up. I did actually click and watch a bit of it on youtube; the music was nice enough but the visuals didn't float my boat.
posted by Forktine at 1:31 PM on July 4, 2012


That sounded way more like My Chemical Romance than Muse should ever sound. I've always liked their Queen-esque big arena heavy glam rock sound, but... bleargh. If I was making fun of Muse I'd write something that sounded like that. I say that as someone who has a poster for the release of the "New Born" single hanging in my house.

It *was* well edited, though.
posted by oneirodynia at 1:40 PM on July 4, 2012


Perhaps not the best possible encapsulation of the olympic spirit ("I am gonna win ... whatever it takes" vs "The important thing is not to win, but to take part"), but at least it doesn't break into dub/brostep like the new album trailer.
posted by ikalliom at 2:46 PM on July 4, 2012


Queen? Radiohead? sorry Muse-apologists, but these are not valid comparisons. Andrew Lloyd Webber would be closer to the mark.
posted by moorooka at 2:54 PM on July 4, 2012 [1 favorite]


All I know is the Olympics are going to be boring unless they shoot something with those missiles. Now that would be entertaining.
posted by homunculus at 3:45 PM on July 4, 2012


The clay pigeons never stood a chance
posted by dng at 4:10 PM on July 4, 2012 [1 favorite]


Even going in expecting Queenishness, this went to 9 Flashes on the May Scale, but only 7 on the Mercury because it doesn't seem to be a sing-a-long unless you happen to have a handy choir with out. And a castrato.

It's probably stompable. That's what people do at the Olympics, isn't it?

And the Pet Shop Boys haven't been on their game for 20-odd years, but I sort of prefer their song. Although, it's probably more Eurovision.

The Foxtel advert is impressive.
posted by Mezentian at 5:21 PM on July 4, 2012


Survive? It seems the IOC is afraid it won't survive if it lets people embed this video on other sites... Weak.
posted by Jimbob at 6:02 PM on July 4, 2012


I didn't want to like it.

But I did!!!!
posted by cacofonie at 8:04 PM on July 4, 2012 [1 favorite]


I loved it.
posted by rollbiz at 8:08 PM on July 4, 2012 [2 favorites]


They should have just covered "We are the Champions" and be done with it.
posted by KMB at 12:07 AM on July 5, 2012


There's got to be a point as you get older before you start screaming "kids these days" and "get off my lawn" and feeling like nothing makes sense at all. A point where you see something that is executed so badly and is so nonsensical to you, but you're just absolutely sure it's the bad aesthetics of the thing and not the just one thing swept up in a whole culture of things passing by your fixing sense of what good looking things should look like anymore.

I'm trying not to be negative or snarky, so I think that howfar said it best with "It really does capture the spirit of every aesthetic decision made for these Olympics."

The video also made me a little bit emotional, which made me angry. The same angry I felt after the first two minutes of "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" when I found myself involuntarily tearing up, even though the director's emotional puppet strings WERE RIGHT THERE.

I'd like to think the tears were pre-mourning for the time spent watching such things that I would never, ever get back. But really, it was more that my thinking brain got vetoed by my feeling brain. And even though I recognize that it was an underhanded trick, I now found myself in too much a tough situation to bother doing much about it. It's like when a kid goes an asks one parent after the other has told them "no". So I give in and decide to sorta like the video.
posted by iamkimiam at 1:38 AM on July 5, 2012


The melody in the first section reminded me of Now those days are Gone by Bucks Fizz. But they made up for it afterwards.
posted by rongorongo at 2:18 AM on July 5, 2012


I can't stop watching this. It's so perfectly edited, it adds enormously to an already excellent song.

I was trying to think what the expression on Kelly Holmes's face in the last few seconds reminded me of. But of course: it was another video that made me very happy indeed.
posted by rory at 4:03 AM on July 5, 2012


Another subliminal parallel: Bellamy singing "race, it's a race" at 2:23 brings to mind "snake, it's a snake" at 0:24.
posted by rory at 4:44 AM on July 5, 2012 [1 favorite]


Sometimes the feeling brain should win, and I think "The Olympics" is one of those times. I think this whole thing is great, but at 2:57 the music+video combination becomes truly sublime.
posted by Eumachia L F at 6:25 AM on July 5, 2012


I love Muse, really enjoyed the video and adore watching the Olympics.

Which makes me all the more sad that the 2012 Olympics organizers appear to be asking musicians to perform 'for the exposure' - that is, without pay.
posted by pianoboy at 6:25 AM on July 5, 2012


I have been excited for the 2012 Summer Olympics since the 2008 Summer Olympics finished. This video made me jump in the air and pump my fist. I LOVE SPORTS, the Olympics (summer + winter) most of all.
posted by sc114 at 7:23 AM on July 5, 2012


Queen? Radiohead? sorry Muse-apologists, but these are not valid comparisons. Andrew Lloyd Webber would be closer to the mark.
posted by moorooka at 10:54 PM on July 4


I regret to inform you that you have the syndrome that in Yorkshire is known as "Cloth ears".
posted by Decani at 12:54 PM on July 5, 2012 [1 favorite]


Skimmed the thread and don't think anybody posted it, but this song may or may not be from their upcoming new album "The 2nd Law" which they just released a trailer for. Needless to say the musical influences will be broad in this one.
posted by Defenestrator at 10:01 PM on July 5, 2012


may or may not be from their upcoming new album

It is. The track list was revealed a while back.
posted by rory at 12:43 AM on July 6, 2012


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