OK Go Slap a Tetherball for "This Too Shall Pass": Behind the Clip

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OK Go's insanely complex video for Of the Blue Colour of the Sky single "This Too Shall Pass" will finally make its (embeddable!) premiere tonight at 7 pm EST, but before the band reveals their latest viral achievement, Rolling Stone has another behind-the-scenes clip from the video's construction site in a Los Angeles warehouse.

UPDATE: Watch it here!

As Rolling Stone previously reported, for their second "This Too Shall Pass" clip, OK Go and the geniuses over at Syyn Labs and MIT's Media Lab created a two-story-tall Rube Goldberg-esque structure. Picture that old board game Mouse Trap and multiply it by several thousand. In our short exclusive clip, we present a blooper from the contraption's test run, with a tetherball somehow figuring in to the grand scheme.

Given the amount of time and effort OK Go put into the video, it should come as no surprise that frontman Damian Kulash was adamant that his label EMI disregard their own "No Embedding" policy so that "This Too Shall Pass" can be distributed freely throughout the Internet, much like the band's star-making treadmill vid for "Here It Goes Again" in 2006. Kulash successfully pleaded his case, both in the band's blog and in the New York Times. Be sure to check back here later tonight to catch OK Go's new viral video, and until then, enjoy the blooper above and OK Go's making-of video here.

Related Stories:
• OK Go Hire Big Brains for "This Too Shall Pass" Video: Watch a Clip
• OK Go Explain Viral Video Woes in "New York Times" Op-Ed
• OK Go Struggle With Label's Rules Banning Embedded Video

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Song Stories

“Everyday People”

Sly and the Family Stone | 1968

"Everyday People" managed to trailblaze in two different ways -- it was one of the first pop hits to deal with the subject of racial harmony, and it utilized Larry Graham's "slap" technique on the bass guitar, which would soon be copied by countless other bassists. Graham once said about his pulsating style, "I'd never done that before … that's where the freedom of creativity came in for the band, that we'd be allowed to do that." In 1978, the song's line "Different strokes for different folks" would be borrowed for the title of the hit television show Diff'rent Strokes.

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