My Top 100, No. 49: "There's a Fire" by OK Go

There might not be a band I'm higher on, compared to public perception, than OK Go. I might have said this about another artist already, but if I did, I was lying, because OK Go rules.

It drives me absolutely nuts that OK Go has become the band with the cool music videos, because people know them as the band with the cool music videos and not as a band that's been putting out stone cold Grade-A power pop music with alarming consistency for 15 years.

And don't get me wrong, they're great videos ("Needing/Getting" is somehow even better when played on a subcompact than with actual instruments), but it distracts, to a certain extent, from how good the music is.

I guess the primary assumption from which OK Go operates is that music ought to be fun above all else. Like, there are certain levels of quality and craftsmanship at work, and certainly not all their music is upbeat or happy, but there's a comforting self-assuredness in their music. It's not the music you make if you're trying to achieve worldwide popularity or create a new songwriting paradigm. But it's great.
I'm not a big concert person--I'm not crazy about crowds, and on balance I'd rather listen to a recording than a live performance, but OK Go live is amazing. It's just a blitz of confetti and electronic noise and using jokes to kill time during technical difficulties and crazy computer graphics, and when the time comes to play "There's a Fire" they do this:

It's a little weird, but everything is done in an overwhelming spirit of being happy to be there, which makes an OK Go concert just a delightful place to spend two hours. 

"There's a Fire" isn't OK Go's noisiest or weirdest or happiest or most affecting song, but it's catchy beyond believe, and the third verse, in which frontman Damian Kulash goes from his normal smooth tenor to...it's not really shouting. It's more like a melodramatic staged fake-sob, but it's the best thing to sing with the windows down at a crowded intersection. That's the quintessential OK Go moment, of doing something strange and not caring that you've freaked out everyone else around you, because you're having a good time and all other concerns are secondary.