There are numerous techniques to get popular on the World wide web, from cutting a warbly music video about your favorite day of the weekend to becoming a New York congressman with an uncertain grasp of Twitter’s immediate-message function. Here’s how the 31-year-previous Australian-Belgian musician Wouter De Backer, who sold out the El Rey Theatre on Thursday night when he performed as Gotye, got observed.

Initial, he recorded “Somebody That I Used to Know,” a quiet, stately breakup song brightened around the edges with samples and vocal harmonies. Then he made a modest video in which he’s painted to blend into a mural and gets an earful when the song’s guest vocalist Kimbra emerges — painted in related stripes — to inform him off.

An adorable cat video really should be in a position to tear this clip to ribbons in Internet site visitors figures. But “Somebody That I Utilized to Know” is at the moment zeroing in on 60 million views, and it’s producing an American star of the genre-bending Gotye. He had a prolonged career prior to this, releasing numerous independent albums of reggae-influenced, electronics-infused folk-pop in Australia, in which he’s currently a main artist. But he may possibly be one particular of the greatest examples of YouTube helping to break a non-novelty pop star in America. His El Rey show proved there is severe musicianship behind individuals on-line likes.

De Backer cut a great-guy, alt-dude visage onstage at the El Rey, complete with bedhead, a deep V-neck T-shirt and a heartfelt vocal functionality. His last L.A. show in the fall, at the Silver Lake indie-rock club the Satellite, sold out quickly, and for this tour with a complete backing band Gotye proved he’s currently aiming for festival crowds.

De Backer (a drummer and multi-instrumentalist) decked the El Rey stage with acoustic and electronic percussion kits that he wandered among amongst verses. At the back of the room, a video-manipulator tweaked animation samples that lent often-amusing, at times-haunting edges to his songs.

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Nowadays M.I.A., aka Maya Arulpragasam, debuted her video for new single “Bad Girls,” working yet again with “Born Free” co-conspirator Romain Gavras. Filmed in Ouarzazate, Morocco, the country’s film capital also seen in “Lawrence of Arabia,” “The Last Temptation of Christ,” “Gladiator” and many other Western motion pictures, the video is meant to evoke a Persian Gulf landscape – dusty, baked, semi-apocalpytic and in the hands of M.I.A. and Gavras, utterly challenging-core.

Set to M.I.A.’s Punjabi-laced chill-banger, “Bad Girls” is a lady gangsta fantasy but one particular that plays off quite true substances from lifestyle in the Middle East. There is crumbled architecture, sustained over many years of attack smouldering oil tankards young males in kaffiyeh, standing around dangerously bored mysterious women covered from head to toe, with only their kohl-lined eyes flashing out. Most of us Americans have noticed that existence only in bits of CNN video, left to venture our very own conclusions about their day-to-day grind.

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On “A Various Sort of Truth,” the 1st studio album from Van Halen to characteristic original lead singer David Lee Roth considering that “1984,” the charismatic front guy sings about trying to land that “stone cold sister soccer mom” he’s chasing in “Honeybabysweetiedoll.” But hooking up is the least of the challenges facing Diamond Dave and his bandmates in this year of their comeback.

Some of the higher hurdles: Can they pull off this reunion minute with no killing every other? Can they convince their fans that bassist/son-of-the-guitarist Wolfgang Van Halen truly has earned his spot in the band and can lock in with drummer/uncle Alex Van Halen? And, most essential to the band’s accomplishment, is guitar maestro/dad Eddie Van Halen even now in a position to easily dance his fingers up and down the neck of his instrument in techniques that not only help his claim as 1 of the great rock guitarists but advances his craft in a meaningful way.

And then there’s the challenge of the marketplace: In the 28 many years because Roth recorded a total album with Van Halen, the landscape has entirely changed. When the band’s original lineup final released a record, home taping was “killing” music and the query was regardless of whether to purchase “1984” on LP or cassette, or borrow a friend’s copy and tape more than Foreigner “4.”

Photographs: Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth