Musicmythought

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Comment by Dan Fox, 15 hours, 36 minutes ago

True, that Hot Chip video is a fun one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaCZN2N6Q_I
It kind of reminded me of both Chris Cunningham’s videos for Aphex Twin’s ‘Windowlicker’, and ‘Come to Daddy’.

Whatever happened to the music video - that’s a good question. In some ways, the sense of occasion that a new video used to generate has disappeared, just as the number of platforms via which people can watch it has increased: long gone are the days when (at least in the UK) you had to stay in and tune into ‘Top of the Pops’ on a given evening in order to watch the first broadcast of a band’s new video. One thing I always enjoyed about music videos when I was growing up was the sense you got of the director and band’s imagination at work (of course, this wasn’t necessarily the case, with all kinds of interested parties no doubt telling the band and director what they could or couldn’t do) - or at least the feeling that, no matter what sentiments the song was trying to express, the sky (OK, budget too) was the limit when it came to what scenario you could put the band in. ‘Let’s cast the singer as a werewolf who dances with his date, accompanied by zombies!’ (Michael Jackson, Thriller). ‘Let’s put the band in an impossibly small wardrobe on the edge of a cliff and push them off!’ (The Cure, Close to Me) ‘Let’s get a blind student to make a clay bust of the singer who is also her acting teacher!’ (Lionel Richie, Hello) ‘Let’s watch the lead singer drown!’ (Radiohead, No Surprises). You got the sense that each new music video was trying to up-the-ante on the last. Promo videos also seemed to function as testing grounds for directors to play with new special effects or processes, or pushing equipment to its limits: what would happen, say, if you film using 17 different lenses welded to the front of the camera whilst dropping it out of a helicopter into a giant vat of chocolate and then try and develop the film in milk…
The form of the music video somehow evolved in a manner that gave license to bands/directors to indulge in whatever kind of cod-Surrealist image making they liked, and there’s something quite wonderful about that. Somehow, audiences didn’t seem to mind how imaginatively outlandish or over-the-top the videos were - it was all part of the fun; they were windows into of all kinds of visual nonsense, broadcast straight into your living room. Sure, music videos were all part of the marketing package, designed to shift units (though if one stretches the term ‘marketing package’ to also include something like Devo’s ‘Truth About De-Evolution’ then it doesn’t necessarily mean something entirely bad), but they were also sources of sometimes quite startling visual imagination, circulating freely on our television screens.
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Comment by Jörg Heiser, 7 hours, 21 minutes ago

Maybe this is precisely the problem: there’s no challenge in putting something surreal on the Internet, everything is possible there anyway, from porn to splatter (the Gaga-video is 18+ on youtube, but then you watch it on other platforms).
On TV, there was still the ideal of the unexpected encounter, a couch potato with their mouth open vis a vis an Aphex Twin video. For me, the demise of music television is not naturally caused by the Internet; I think it’s largely mismanagement and misunderstandings of the music and entertainment industry. Short term gain (mobil phone download ads etc.) for longterm demise. MTV has already died (ie transformed into some sorry struggling zombie form of TV) not because there wasn’t enough music for them to play, but because they didn’t play enough music (in February MTV USA got rid of the subtitle “music television” under its logo).

I think there’d be loads of people who’d still or again be happy to tune into a large network non-stop video program the way they tune into radio (at least in Germany, there exists none). And then there’d be a reason to do great videos. Maybe this would lead to Bollywood-type mixtures of music and acted sequences? The Flight of the Conchords model?