Blog Posts by John Kordosh

Hola, readers! If you're looking for great music videos, you've sort of come to the right place! Framed is your one-stop shop for the best music videos in history!

Plus, we have captions!

Heck, nothing could go wrong now!

This week, at long last, we welcome the great Queen to our blog. We have no idea why it's taken all these years to get these guys in here, but it's a happy day all around.

Queen, of course, were one of the biggest acts in rock history -- but let's let Wikipedia do the talking:

"The band has released a total of 18 number one albums, 18 number one singles, and 10 number one DVDs. Estimates of their album sales generally range from 150 million to 300 million albums, making them one of the world's best-selling music artists."

Yes, they were that big. And rather than cheese out with an obvious mega-hit, we're posting the excellent "Radio Ga Ga," off their 1984 album, The Works. The song -- which gave Lady Gaga her stage name, of course -- is a damning indictment of commercial radio, a subject no other artist had ever pondered. And the video is a charming retro nod to Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the classic 1927 expressionist film that accurately predicted the horrifying dystopia in which we now live.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Framed, a blog.  This week we're excited to feature Guns N' Roses, the storied Californian rockers who were once the biggest band on the planet!

And not some other planet!  Our planet!  Earth!!

It all happened in the late 1980s, after the release of their now-revered Appetite For Destruction album.  It not only hit #1, it sold over 28 million copies worldwide.

Earthwide!

Well, GNR was off to the races, quickly following up with G N' R Lies, which hit #2, and an ambitious double-album, Use Your Illusion, which hit both #2 and #1 in the same week!  They were up to 87 million sold.

It's occurred to us that readers probably don't know that Framed is generally written several weeks before it's posted. Here's how it works:

Every Monday, about five minutes after the blog posts on Y! Music, we receive an encrypted e-mail cosigned by President Obama and Justin Bieber. The e-mail tells us which artist we'll feature next, which of their videos, and just "how funny" our captions can be. The directions are unexpectedly precise. For example, we've been told stuff like "Go light on the irony, please," and "Hold off on Gummo this week."

(As an aside, we've also gleaned some insight into future policy plans of the current administration. We don't want to say hold on to your guns, readers, but, seriously, hold on to your guns.)

In any case, we were surprised to be assigned this week's video, "Lean On Me" by Kirk Franklin. For one thing, we'd never heard of Kirk Franklin. For another, "Lean On Me" was released by Bill Withers about 40 years ago; it was a big hit. Confused, we decided to call the Y! Music Blogger Suicide Prevention Hotline.

You know what we need more of here in Framed, right, readers?

We need thrash metal. Screw it, we need death metal. We need all sorts of metal to compensate for the grievously poppish music we feature all too often. Anyway, that's what we hear from the kid next door, Charlie.

And seeing that we still owe Charlie's dad for backing over their mailbox with our truck, we've decided that Charlie is probably right.

Rather than feature some humdrum metal group -- heck, we've had Metallica, Motley Crue and others in Framed -- we've decided to get a real group for this week's blog. It's Testament, the great and long-lived band from Berkeley, California. Although their line-up has gone through many changes over the years, they're still revered by fans everywhere.

With mild apologies to our regular readers, it's time -- once again! -- to introduce Framed to any newbies who may have come by this week.

Why do we do this every now and again?  Is it because we're unbelievably sensitive to the needs of others?

Or is it because we like to drink to excess and shamelessly pad our word count?

Yes!  It is!

It so is!

Ahem.  Framed is a light-hearted blog that features a different music video every week.  We go through the video and freeze interesting frames... and then we write captions for those frames.  To put it simply, we make stuff up; usually, stuff we wish the people in the picture were saying.

Some would say our captions are droll, ironic and quite good.  Others would describe them as esoteric, petty, and the sort of self-indulgent crap that turns everybody off.

And we're OK with that!  We're not the boss of you!  Or anyone else!

This week's video is a funny one in its own right: it's Cake's "Love You Madly."  The whole thing revolves around an Iron Chef-type shootout between drummer Pete McNeal and horn player Vince DiFiori, complete with celebrity judges and a theme ingredient, pumpkin.  It's a hoot and a holler, no kidding.  We wish other artists put as much thought into their videos as Cake has here.

We were working on this week's blog -- to be candid with you, sometimes we work pretty hard on this blog -- when a thought popped into our head.

"Framed is beloved in America and all the other enlightened, English-speaking countries," the thought went. "But how do people who live in places where they don't speak English regard this very fine work?"

It was a difficult thought! In fact, our very next thought was "Go away, thought!"

But it wouldn't! Thoughts can be troubling!

While this was going on, we were going through Vevo, Y! Music's new, excellent partner in videoness, and absentmindedly typed "video" into the Vevo search box. And, lo, it turned out that there's a band named Video.

A Polish band named Video. A band that speaks Polish and sings in Polish that is actually named Video.

Wow, we thought. Is this the synchronicity Sting sung of so eloquently? We didn't know, but maybe!

Well, we had an excellent week off, readers. You'll remember we took some time to drink lots of beer and listen to Naked Raygun and Smoking Popes records... and, damn, we feel refreshed!

We even listened to the Aluminum Group! How cool are we?

Plus, we must've drank, like — seriously! — 13 or 14 beers last week. What a binge it was!

Furthermore, Smoking Popes' first two records seriously rock! Agree or disagree?

Anyway, we're back and — hopefully — better than ever! This week we're bringing in Journey, the great '80s band who rendered a massive service to musicdom with their brand of progressive arena rock, the kind everybody likes.

We've always wanted to feature Bon Jovi here in Framed, but one thing after another keeps coming up.

Sometimes, a really hot band or singer would simply have to be covered. Or a holiday would loom, and we'd want a themed blog that week. Then there's our bimonthly obligation to Justin Bieber, and, before him, Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift.

One time, we were all set to go and then we decided to wash our hair. And when it was dry, we had forgotten what we were doing.

So it's always been something. This week, though, we're happy to say that the guys from New Jersey are finally here. And it's all thanks to last week's big news: Jon's hooked up with Avon and will be endorsing their new fragrance(s), Unplugged.

Wait, it gets better.