Craig Marks (1)Rezensionen

Poor Billy Squire.

I was born in 1982, so I missed a lot of the early history of MTV. It was good to fill in a lot of holes in my pop culture knowledge.

A lot of fun to read the book and watch the videos knowing a lot of the backstory behind them.

Very entertaining and interesting oral history style book.

This book is a great read for anyone who loves the music video scene, particularly of the 80s. I stayed interested for most of the book with only very few parts getting too wordy for me. It goes into great detail about how early music videos were created. Be warned though, it is not a politically correct book. It’s describing in detail the attitudes and lifestyles of rising rock stars in the 80s; and it’s done through interviews with those rock stars, a lot of whom haven’t changed their mindsets. Women were objectified and racism was rampant.
Also, 85% of the book talks about the 80s. It’s touts itself as a book that follows the music video era from start to finish, but there is only one quick chapter devoted to 90-94 music. I certainly felt the music video scene of the early 90s deserved more attention than what it got, considering the amount of attention paid to Paula Abdul and Flock of Seagulls’ hair.
Either way, if you’re a big music buff (especially classic rock) like I am, then you will enjoy this read.

The longest book (that shouldn't have been long) that I've ever read. Some interesting stories, but could benefit from a "Greatest Hits" edition.

Even though this book is a big ole reminisce on 1981-1992, it's not only whining on how things have become...

But for us, 1992 marks the end of MTV’s Golden Era, which was brought to a close by a series of unrelated factors. Video budgets rose steeply, leading to wasteful displays; digital editing arrived, making it a snap for directors to flit between shots and angles; all the good ideas had been done; record labels increasingly interfered in video decisions; many of the best directors moved on to film; Madonna made Body of Evidence. It’s also the year MTV debuted The Real World, a franchise show that sped a move away from videos, the network’s founding mission, and into reality shows about kids in crisis, whether an unplanned pregnancy or how to un-marry Spencer Pratt. The Real World was the culmination of the network’s initiative to create its own shows and was also the last time MTV could claim to be revolutionary. MTV created the video music industry, then abandoned it, leaving behind a trail of tears—disgruntled music-video fans have stamped the phrase “MTV sucks” and “Bring back music videos” all over the comments pages of YouTube.

...but shows how history has repeated itself, and mainly, I think Lady Gaga hit the nail on the head with this quote:

LADY GAGA: I do miss when MTV played more music videos. However, it’s important to be modern and change with the times. As MTV changes, so does the Internet, and we all change with it. It’s now up to the artist to re-revolutionize what it means to put film to music.

There's a lot of teenage reactions recorded from artists who experienced MTV when it first came:

JANET JACKSON, artist: I loved watching it. How exciting back then, being a teenager and having something so creative, so fresh, so new. It was about waiting for your favorite video, and not really knowing what hour it would hit, so you’d have to watch all day long.

We remember all that we liked and what we disliked:

ROBERT SMITH, the Cure: “Bohemian Rhapsody” was number one every fucking week. I fucking hated it.

...and on how lack of experience but love of music seemed to permeate the entire MTV infrastructure:

FRED SEIBERT, MTV executive: When I was six weeks into being a chemistry major in college, I was learning how to kill a rat so I could dissect it. I looked at my lab mate and said, “The Beatles are more important to me than this,” and I walked out. That was it for being a chemistry major. I marched uptown to the college radio station at Columbia University, because I heard I could get free records if I worked there.

And yes, videos existed way before MTV. But...

TOM FRESTON: When we went on the air, we had something like 165 videos. And thirty of them were Rod Stewart.

...Van Halen and their ilk (including bands like Duran Duran) changed this. In wrong ways, at times:

PETE ANGELUS: I stood on the set, going, “Seriously, can anybody find the little people? Where are they?” After twenty minutes of searching for them, I thought, I’ll walk around and see if I can turn up anything. I got to the transvestite’s dressing room and I opened the door. This is what I saw; I don’t want to be held accountable, it’s just what I saw. The little guy was wearing a black cape. He was holding the transvestite’s penis, which seemed kind of erect, and he was pretending it was a microphone. And he was singing “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones while doing a Mick Jagger impersonation. I thought, This is not going well. Then I closed the door and let him finish whatever the hell they were doing.

And there are anecdotes everywhere in this book.

SHARON ORECK, producer: Prince’s “1999” and “Little Red Corvette” videos were just smoke, then Prince’s face, then smoke, then Prince’s butt, and then smoke. Prince was interesting, and I liked the songs, but the videos were profoundly bad. They were, like, porn bad. His videos were so filled with smoke that everyone on the set would get diarrhea, because mineral oil was so thick in the air.

BILLY JOEL: For “Uptown Girl,” the director told me, “Look at the picture in your locker as if you’re in love with this woman and then dance around with a wrench in your hand.” I said, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

DON LETTS: I was in Texas with the Clash to shoot “Rock the Casbah,” and Mick Jones showed up one day wearing red long johns, because he was in a mood. I said, “You really want to wear that for a video? If you look like a cunt on film, you’ll look like a cunt forever.” So he changed what he was wearing. I’d hit playback and the Clash would just go, go, go. They were like four sticks of dynamite. Putting a Jew and an Arab in the video was just about breaking taboos. Yes, the Muslim in the video is drinking a beer. They pull into a petrol station and the Arab makes the Jewish gentleman pay for the gas. These days, with all the sensitivity towards religion, you wouldn’t get to make that video.

MICK JONES: We were showing how people can get along—by drinking beer and going to Burger King. The idea of the video was about oil, really. We were in America, so we went to the oil fields in Texas. That was the subtext of it. I wanted to wear red long johns, but Don wouldn’t let me. That’s why I put a mosquito mask on my face, ’cause I was in a bad mood.

RUSSELL MULCAHY: I collaborated on the storyboard for Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” with Jim Steinman, who wrote and produced the song. Jim is fabulously, fabulously crazy. We would banter ideas over a bottle of red wine. I’d say, “Let’s set it in a school and have ninjas in one scene,” and he’d say “Let’s have a choirboy with glowing eyeballs.” We shot it in an old abandoned insane asylum in London. We had one sequence, which was Steinman’s idea, where a shirtless young boy is holding a dove and he throws the dove at the camera in slow motion. Bonnie came around the corner and screamed, in her Welsh accent, “You’re nothing but a fucking pre-vert!” And she stormed off. There was nothing perverse intended. The imagery was meant to be sort of pure. Maybe slightly erotic and gothic and creepy, but pure. Anyway, the video went to number one, and a year later Bonnie’s people rang up and asked if I would direct her new video. And I told them to fuck off, because I was insulted about being called a fucking pervert. And I was a little mad because pervert wasn’t pronounced correctly.

DAVID MALLET: “Let’s Dance” was Bowie’s big comeback, pretty much a straight pop song as opposed to introverted, darker stuff. It was a superb gamble on his part and it paid off handsomely. He said, “I want to go to Australia and film videos.” He came up with this concept of two Aborigines in the modern world who were a bit lost. The videos has these mystical red shoes—if you had them on, you could dance. He got that from the Emeric Pressburger film The Red Shoes, an early Technicolor film that’s haunting and surreal. We shot in a bar in the morning and it was one hundred degrees outside. The people in the bar hated us, absolutely hated us. We were faggots from somewhere, and they were horrified that we had a young, attractive Aborigine girl in there, because they thought Aborigines were lower than dirt. She was dancing, and in order to show their hatred they started imitating her. I said, “Quick, film them.” It looked as if they were enjoying themselves. Actually, it was a dance of pure hatred. Why do the two Aborigines stomp the red shoes at the end of the video? People have asked me forever. I don’t know! Because it’s a music video, that’s why. End of story.

ADAM HOROVITZ, Beastie Boys: The first time we went to LA as a band was when we opened for Madonna. That was the greatest. Kids were literally in tears when we were playing. It was one of the most punk rock things we’ve ever done. And Madonna is the best. After the first night, her manager, Freddy DeMann, said, “These guys suck.” “No, seriously, they suck. They need to go home.” And Madonna was like, “These guys are staying.” She put her foot down. We didn’t realize until later that the audience’s hatred for us worked in her favor. When she got onstage, they couldn’t have been happier to see her.

On The Jacksons "Torture":

JEFF STEIN: I’ll take the blame for many things, but not for that video. We were constantly waiting around for everybody to be ready. It was endless. I don’t even know if there was a budget. I mean, it was not my company, I was not the producer, I did not make the deal. I have no idea what it ended up costing. For certain videos, I remember the cost only in terms of human lives. One of our crew members lost control of her bodily functions while we were making the video. The crew motto used to be “Death or victory.” I think that was the only time we ever prayed for death. I had a gut feeling Michael wasn’t going to show up. So I had the foresight to get a wax figure from Madame Tussauds to double for Michael, and that proved to be a good decision. That wax figure was put through the ringer. Its head ended up in the salad bowl at lunch one day.

And on how wonderfully weird the videos became:

NIGEL DICK: Roland Orzabal told me what he envisioned for “Head Over Heels”: “I see myself in a library, there’s a beautiful girl, we’ll grow old together, and there’s all this random stuff like a rabbi and a chimp.” And I’m rapidly scribbling on a piece of paper: “Chimp. Rabbi.”

HOWARD JONES: When I was playing clubs as a one-man synth band, I had a mime, Jed, who danced onstage. That’s about as un–rock n’ roll as you can get, really. Jed’s in the “Things Can Only Get Better” video, doing a Charlie Chaplin character, and I also had a magician—people had never seen that before.

B-REAL: My favorite hip-hop video is “Night of the Living Baseheads.” When I saw it for the first time I went ape-shit. I liked dark, aggressive, in-your-face shit like that.

HANK SHOCKLEE: If Public Enemy was going to do a video, we wanted something outside the norm. My thing is, I hate literal translations. The video should always tell you what the lyric doesn’t.

LIONEL MARTIN, director: I didn’t even know who Public Enemy was.

HANK SHOCKLEE: The song was about drug addiction, especially crack. The crack epidemic was destroying the black community. Everybody I know, including myself, had close family members who were on crack or trying to recover from it. The fact that the song was disjointed gave us the impetus to create skits within the video. I didn’t want to make light of crack, but a video needs to have entertainment value.

LIONEL MARTIN: They had some crazy ideas. Hank Shocklee said, “Could we stop the music and insert a commercial?” Flavor Flav was a mess. He was full of surprises, like when he said, “Kick the ballistics.” He was always late, and he would disappear for drugs or for girls. He was just a crazy dude.

CHUCK D: “Baseheads” was brutal. It was my first video, it took a long time, and we had a lot of different locations. We knew we had to go over and beyond, make something that had never been seen before.

LIONEL MARTIN: When you’re in telecine doing color correction, there’s a term you use: “crush the blacks.” I like my blacks to be dark and deep and rich. Flavor and Chuck were in the room and I kept telling the colorist, “Crush the blacks, crush the blacks.” Flav jumped up and said, “What the fuck are you talking about? Yo, Chuck, I gota problem with this dude.” So I explained it to them.

ANTON CORBIJN: Courtney knew my Echo & the Bunnymen videos, and Nirvana asked me to do the video for “Heart-Shaped Box.” Kurt was fantastic. He wrote most of the ideas for the video. He sent me a fax, very detailed, of how he saw it: the field, the poppies, the crucifix, the fetuses hanging on a tree, the girl with the Ku Klux Klan–type outfit. I’ve never even seen a director be that detailed about a video. It was very long finishing that video, because we shot in color, then transferred to black-and-white and hand-tinted every frame. Kurt wanted to shoot in Technicolor, and Technicolor had been sold to China, so he wanted to shoot it in China. My producer didn’t like that idea very much. So we used colorization, a technique Ted Turner used for old black-and-white films, which created really vibrant colors. Because it’s so colorful, it got past the MTV censorship board. They didn’t ask for a single change.

And the end:

JEAN-BAPTISTE MONDINO: I thank God it’s over now. I’m happy that MTV doesn’t play videos. As soon as they stopped, music came back. People are making music for the pleasure of it, not to make money, because money’s not there any longer. There are good videos on the Internet, done by kids with no money, that are poetic and beautiful. Videos now are better than videos were in the’80s, because they are not made as packaging.

ADAM CURRY: I quit on the air in the summer of 1993. I was doing the Top 20 Countdown, Beck was number one with “Loser,” and I said, “Beck is number one. That’s it, I really think the Internet is the place to be, I had a great seven years, I’ll see you on the Internet.” I walked out and never went back.

ADAM HOROVITZ: I fucking love Jersey Shore. “You’re excluded from cutlet night!” That’s one of my favorite lines ever.

JOHN SYKES: If you look at MTV recently, they were belly-up, until Snooki saved the network.

All in all: minutiae that's of great interest of novelty-hunters re. music (like myself) and of purveyors of pop culture. After all, MTV was part of The Big Change of pop culture, not only in the western lands, although this book is about Northern America and a tad about bands from Europe. Recommended.

The book is divided up into two main types of chapters, which sort of alternate through the book: chapters on the goings-on at the network MTV - business decisions, hirings, firings, and later TV show production - and chapters of behind-the-scenes tales of music video production. Both parts are engaging and fun, but the anecdotal nature of the music video stories is sometimes at odds with the more narrative flow of the MTV-focused stuff.

At times I actually wished this was two separate books, each going into a little more depth, since the books seems to be aiming for two separate markets: those who like crazy stories of rock excess, and those who want to read the story of a highly successful entertainment company.

Still, it's an engaging book, exhaustive on its subject, if only just a little bit exhausting as well.

I liked the "he said/she said" approach to this book as we hear from various folks involved on all the topics relating to the glory days of MTV.

MTV, one of my favorite things about the 80's. The hair, the shoulder pads, the music videos....reading this book brought me right back to those times. Duran Duran, Cindy Lauper, Culture Club, Pat Benatar; these bands became famous because of MTV and the images played over and over in those videos.
This is an oral history told through interviews with some of the major characters associated with MTV. It was interesting to learn how the whole thing got started and how MTV and the music industry ended up hurting themselves in the long run. MTV's monopoly on the industry didn't encourage healthy competition and only bands with the bucks to make good videos got air time.

Definitely worth a read!

This is impeccably researched and constructed but I discovered that I was far less interested in the subject than it takes to be enthralled for 572 pages. It wasnt the writers, it was this reader. If you are interested in the history of music video direction, there's a lot here i enjoyed the trip back to the 80s and random dry quotes from Jon landau and Paul McGuinness but it took me forever to get through it. I did discover that my hatred of Downtown Julie Brown is entirely justified, however.

The 1980s are sometimes dismissed as an era when style trumped substance, and MTV and its influence are a big part of why it has that reputation. In its early years, MTV was radio with an enormous potential reach, and as the book notes, it reached audiences that hadn’t had the chance to be exposed to cutting-edge popular culture--many smaller, more isolated markets had cable television well before the big coastal cities did. (MTV was produced in New York City, but it actually wasn’t available for New Yorkers to watch it for a while.) But the “television” part of Music Television was what made the difference--the channel’s reach was amplified by the visual images that accompanied the music, and presented us with style and attitude that soon seeped into the mainstream.

I Want My MTV delivers on the style and attitude. I thought it resembled the channel’s early, all-music-video years in the way it kept me reading, eager to see what would come along next--but it also mimicked the exhaustion that would set in after watching MTV for hours, seeing some videos half a dozen times while the ones you were waiting to see never turned up at all. The book includes quotes from hundreds of people who were involved with MTV during its first decade in both its business and creative operations, and result is rarely dull, but it’s often scattered and not particularly insightful. It’s not at all difficult to imagine a multi-part TV documentary based on this--the talking-head clips are already here, and there’s certainly plenty of suitable video footage to edit in among them.

READ MORE: http://www.3rsblog.com/2013/12/book-talk-i-want-my-mtv-rob-tannenbaum-craig-mark...

5 stars: An exceptionally good book (large part nostalgia in this case-- perhaps a 7 or 8 if you weren't part of the MTV generation?)

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I found this book, and knew I had to get it right away. I loved how it was organized--- by topic, (sometimes very specific, such as Billy Squier's "Rock me tonite" video and how it was his downfall) to more general (hiring the VJ's). There was a lot of gossip and fluff (Girls on Film, Hedonism weekend in Jamaica) but also lots of serious issues (was MTV only showing white music? ) There's a brief introduction by the editors, then the rest of the chapter is specific quotes by the over 500 people they interviewed, from musicians to directors to staffers to , yes, the VJ's.

yet overall, it tells a story, and answered the main question I had: why doesn't MTV play music any longer and how did that happen? As you might expect, it was ratings. They had a 10 fold increase in ratings for the Real World than any half hour snippet of videos. The station evolved, but always wanted to be a station for young people--not necessarily a station about music. It also talked about the firing of 3 of the 5 original VJs (JJ then Nina, and the Martha later) and the subsequent leaving of the other 2 (Mark and Alan). Directly after I read this book, I got the newsly published "VJ" written by the 4 remaining Vj's (JJ has passed away) which was also a lot of fun and more about them personally.

The review below is by Dennis Amith from amazon.com. It's lengthy and gives some good quotes and a feeel for the book. I could hardly type my favorites all out here...just read (again and again).

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I was one of those young kids who grew up with MTV.

I can easily remember those days of watching Michael Jackson's "Thriller" music video during the premiere, multiple times throughout the day. I can easily remember watching Duran Duran's "Planet Earth" and "Girls on Film" and just amazed of how cool they look and wanted to dress like them. Seeing David Bowie's "Let's Dance" and being mesmerized by the video, to watching the Police "Don't Stand So Close to Me" and going out surfing during my grom years and loving the Police and seeing this group of hot young women known as The Go-Go's singing "Our Lips are Sealed" and jumping into a fountain.

I remember watching Friday Night Videos and wondering if Michael Jackson would beat Def Leppard or Quiet Riot's "Cum on Feel the Noize". Or being titillated with videos such from Van Halen's "Too Hot for Teacher", ZZ Top's "She Got Legs" and being introduced to R&B videos with Musical Youth's "Pass the Dutchie" or New Edition's "Cool It Now".

I can easily remember being scared by watching The Scorpions "Rock You Like a Hurricane" or seeing Eurythmics and Annie Lennox with a shaved red head singing "Sweet Dreams are Made of This" and me and my friends hiding behind the couch because we were freaked out about it.

I can remember Music Videos being part of my life, Spring Break MTV being part of my life as teenager and seeing shows such as "Remote Control" and later on, "Beavis & Butthead" and then question the decline of MTV which now became more of a reality TV show channel and less about the music.

Sure, I tuned into MTV once in awhile within the last decade to watch an award show or to see what was the hype of a certain reality TV show but the MTV today, is nothing like the MTV that I grew up with.

Back then, people were proud to say "I want my MTV!" and for those nostalgic of those years will definitely want to read the newly revised edition of Rob Tannebaum and Craig Marks popular book, "I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution".

The book includes so many people who were part of the MTV generation. Included are the following chapters:

PART 1: Pictures Came and Broke Your Heart - "Video Killed the Radio Star" to "Thriller" (1981-1983)

PART 2: I Play My Part and You Play Your Game - "Burning Up" to "Here I Go Again" (1983-1987)

PART 3: Where Do We Go Now - "With or Without You" to "U Can't Touch This" (1987-1990)

PART 4: Nothing Lasts Forever, and We Both Know Hearts Can Change - "Justify My Love" to "Jeremy" (1990-1992)

What Tannebaum and Marks were able to bring to this book is validity. From bringing in those who worked at MTV behind-the-scenes and made those important decisions, those who were VJ's at MTV, the music label execs to the artists themselves.

And the way the book is presented is by subject of a certain time period. Instead of written via paragraph after paragraph, important people related to that artist or song would chime in with a quote. And these are not a few quotes, the authors of the book made sure they had as much information as possible.

In fact, I would go so far to say that if you watched any music videos from the '80s, you will get a ton of behind-the-scenes information. Information that is fascinating, exciting and also shocking!

Here are a few excerpts from the book:

Stevie Nicks on "Gypsy": "There's a scene in `Gypsy' where Lindsey and I are dancing. And we weren't getting along very well then. I didn't want to be anywhere near Lindsey; I certainly didn't want to be in his arms. If you watch the video, you'll see I wasn't happy. And he wasn't a very good dancer."

Dave Holmes about Duran Duran's "Rio" and Nick Rhodes: The clothes were beautiful, they were on a yacht. It was an escape to a beautiful place with beautiful people, which is what all of television is now. It blew my mind that girls were attracted to Nick Rhodes, because he was so feminine looking. It just didn't seem right. Up to that point, men hadn't been erotic.

Dave Mallet on David Bowie's "Let's Dance": We shot in a bar i the morning and it was one hundred degrees outside. The people in the bar hated us, absolutely hated us. We were Fa**ots from somewhere, and they were horrified that we had a young, attractive Aborigine girl in there, because they thought Aborigines were lower than dirt. She was dancing, and in order to show their hatred they started imitating her. I said, "Quick, film them." It looked as if they were enjoying themselves. Actually, it was a dance of pure hatred."

Susan Silverman on Madonna's first introduction: Madonna came into our office on a skateboard, all sweaty and dirty. I was like, "Shit, what's with this girl?" She went to see Bob Regehr - a big product manager at Warner Bros. - and left a note on his bulletin board that said, "Sorry I missed you, because I'm going to be a star."

Cindy Lauper on "Girl's Just Want to Have Fun": I had women of every race in my videos, especially "Girls Just Want to Have Fun," so that every girl who saw the video would see herself represented and empowered, whether she was thin or heavy, glamorous or not. I absolutely did not use sex to sell my first album, even though I sang a song about female masturbation.

Pat Benatar on "Love is a Battlefield": So there I was, like, "Oh good Christ, what have I gotten myself into?" I hated it so much, I was crying. I'm happy I did it, but I can't say there was one moment when it was pleasant. When I do the song live now, I go back by the drums and do the Battlefield" dance for like eight seconds, and the crowd goes nuts.

Tamara Davis on New Kids on the Block: I started hanging out with them, listening to what they wanted to do. They were having a crazy time, sleeping with lots of different girls every night. I was saying, "You guys better have condoms." They were totally unsupervised and had everything they wanted, as much as they wanted. Even the record company girls were trying to sleep with them.

And there are so many behind-the-scenes quotes from the music videos and directors from many artists and bands, that I was impressed that so much was included in this book.

But most importantly, we get to hear two sides of the coin when it comes to how music videos featuring Black artists were shown on TV, especially Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean". Who took the credit for that? CBS who supposedly threatened MTV that they would yank all CBS music videos if they didn't play Michael's video or MTV who said they planned to show it all along?

We learn what took place behind-the-scenes of "We Are the World" and "Live Aid" to the creation of the MTV Video Music Awards and bringing hip hop to MTV. Also, a chapter of why the VJ's left. Were they fired or did they quit?

What was surprising was to read how some of the VJ's felt about other VJ's and those who worked with the VJ's, some are quite blunt how they feel some were total divas. But what was intriguing was how people felt about Downtown Julie Brown. Watching her on MTV, I thought she was a cool and sexy VJ but after reading this book, she even admits that she was a bitch. She was offensive to the crew and was against reshots and was unprepared many times. The crew who worked with the VJ's spared no punches when talking about Julie Brown (and sometimes Adam Curry). Also, we find out that Carolyne Heldman was fired for wearing shorts.

Every artists that you can think of that was popular from the '80s to very early '90s is featured in this book. There is something to be said about the music videos and you don't get one side, you get different sides of the story, good and bad. The same goes with the VJ's, people working at MTV to record label execs, there is a lot of information and a lot of emotions that can be felt by some of the words of people. Some who felt they were wronged by MTV, some who felt that MTV made their career successful and more!

Overall, "I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution is possibly the definitive book on MTV and the music videos of the time. As a person who grew up during that era, I'm pretty blow away by this book. I never knew about the things that went on behind-the-scenes of the making of these videos. But it's what makes this book so exciting and entertaining.

I know there are some people who don't like the format of books that are based on quotes but because there are so many people that were behind the popularity of these music videos. From the director, the artists, management, etc. I just don't see any other way of how it could be done. This was the best way to have a varied representation of everyone involved and personally, it's great to have so many people involved in the making of this book. I'm really impressed and it's one of those books that you may find yourself re-reading because it's that good!

As for differences between this new revised version and the previous version of the book, there are more people included, more music videos and information provided and suffice to say, these new additions for 2012 have made this book even better!

If you want to read a bunch of random quotes from musicians and TV personalities, you will have a ball with this book. If you want a comprehensive history on the founding of MTV you’re going to have to look elsewhere.

Taking interviews and piecing them together doesn’t work when the people interviewed are not connected. There are good books about Saturday Night Live and ESPN that use the same format, but those have a coherent flow. With this you just get a bunch of random quotes that are vaguely related.