REVIEW · Broadcast & Video
OK Go’s “Here It Goes Again”: losing your place on a treadmill
A treadmill lets a runner move forward while remaining in place. OK Go’s “Here It Goes Again” makes that familiar function a condition of dance. On a moving floor, staying still becomes an action. Where a body is placed determines whether the machine assists the dance or takes its balance away.
Co-directed by OK Go and Trish Sie, the video centres on four band members and an array of treadmills. Repurposing an object is an idea that can be explained quickly. Keeping that idea watchable for an entire song is another problem. The video solves the difference through bodies in motion.
OK Go - Here It Goes Again (Official Music Video)
The floor moves too
A dance floor usually supplies stable support. Here, it keeps moving. The duration of a foot’s placement matters alongside the act of stepping. An identical gesture can carry a body in different directions depending on the belt beneath it. We read the operation of the machines while watching the dance.
A small calculation joins the pleasure: where will that position carry someone, and what changes on the neighbouring treadmill? This creates anticipation without an explanatory plot. A familiar object makes its rules legible, which makes a departure from those rules particularly clear.
Sharing four places
The available space is tighter than a stage used by one person. Occupying a position changes someone else’s route into it. Four people sharing the apparatus turn individual gestures into a connected problem. We watch both a person’s movement and the way four people’s sequences align.
Choreography also becomes memorable in relational units. We may remember someone entering the place another has left. Exercise equipment becomes a small stage mechanism for changing positions. Keeping its familiar shape visible helps: the audience can understand what is being used and how.
Practice after the idea
The band’s account in Vevo’s Footnotes is concrete. They arranged the treadmills, explored possible movements, and connected those movements into a choreographic sequence. Damian Kulash identifies the location as the dance studio at Sie’s home. The initial idea was followed by testing the space and establishing an order.
With that background, spontaneous play and careful rehearsal seem to occupy the same screen. Familiar machines make the idea look like something anyone might imagine; the sequence of several bodies reveals the difficulty of carrying it through.
A bodily map for remembering a song
It is understandable that recalling “Here It Goes Again” also calls up the arrangement of treadmills. Movement leaves the song’s progression as a changing spatial pattern. Even when we already understand the machines’ rules, another viewing invites us to follow the four positions again.
The pleasure differs from amazement at enormous technology. Human bodies propose another use for an everyday machine. Equipment designed to keep someone in place becomes a means of exchanging places. The idea is easy to describe, but the description contains a reason to watch the whole song again.
Music and production information
OK Go · Here It Goes Again, official music video ↗ · MTV · Here It Goes Again production credits ↗ · OK Go / Vevo Footnotes · Making Here It Goes Again ↗
