My cousin had come to visit for some school break or another. She was a teenager and from
London
. To my four aged suburban American self, she was the epitome of cool. I looked up to her; I aspired to be like her. So when on the second day of her visit, she sat on our toffee coloured sectional, grabbed the remote and selected a channel that would be left on for hours. I paid very close attention. It wasn’t as much fun to watch as cartoons, but my cousin liked it and that made it important.
Every day hours would be spent sitting next to my cousin, watching this one channel. I would never dare ask to change it. When she finally left four weeks later, I missed her terribly. I sat alone on the sofa and picked up the remote. I surfed through the channels until I found it again. As a child it didn’t seem terribly entertaining, but I watched it anyway, every day, for hours until I did like it. The channel?
It’s funny that the earliest videos I can remember watching are Aha’s - take on me, dire straits - money for nothing and Peter Gabriel’s –big time. All involved animation. What a perfect way to sell pop music to the child alongside the teenager.
Through Mtv I began to embrace a teenage youth culture, long before I was of age to be a part of it. By age twelve I was obsessed with radio, had a massive 45 and cassette collection, clothes I could never wear to school (and clothes I should have never worn but did.. we won’t get into the biker shorts and mini skirts ok?), and slang I could never have picked up in my neighbourhood.
(In my predominately white neighbourhood and elementary school, MTV was the only connection I had to hip hop, and to some extent black American culture at large).
I could spend hours in the back of classrooms and at lunch breaks having “did you the new ____ video” conversations. I marvelled as I saw the medium fine tune itself, suddenly, there was an upsurge in narrative work. The genre became another outlet for short films. By this time, it must have been the nineties. But as the channel continued to expand and diversify, the programming went from good to bad
to worse.
I had no interest in getting cable or sky again when I moved to this country. I quite happily forgot about music videos unless I was on a holiday visiting my parents.
And then in my last job, it was my responsibility to source music videos and commercials that had an innovative use of dance. (I was working for a film festival). It was the coolest part of my job, being paid to going to screening events to find edgy music videos. I became very interested in the medium all over again. I watched a new wave of work that involved the talents of animators and graphic designers. And then I started to get a little annoyed. Where had all the live action filmmakers gone?
Due to this project I’m working on (which by the way, is why I’ve been so lame lately keeping up the blog), I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time watching music videos again. The funny/sad/depressing thing about this genre is there is an awful amount of not even rubbish… but solid mediocrity. It really makes any band or director that is bold/free enough to go against the grain, seriously shine. The work is out there, but from what I can tell from the last time I saw Mtv (a year or so ago?) a lot of the really blinding stuff is not being shown to the masses. You have to hunt for it on Youtube and the like.
What went wrong? It’s not just about the transition from music videos to shows. Perhaps it was when Mtv stopped reporting youth culture, and instead branded itself as the very embodiment of youth culture. It speaks for us to major brands, its done the research, you know, it knows what we like… well just out of curiosity, I did a Google search on the phrase “I don’t want my MTV” a subversion of the original tagline
I came up with over 15,000 hits.i don’t want my mtv!
Click on any of them and you will see that this is the generation MTV “raised” in the first place. Our generation is savvier then they give us credit for, and our attention spans are shorter (partly in thanks to them). So maybe its time to concentrate on music video content that does a little more than attach pretty pictures to the band. Like what?
I’ll start with this…and I may just keep adding one every week. So if you like what you seek. Watch this space…
I’m a sucker for a quirky narrative
the following is an example at how two visual takes of the same track can deliver drastically different results… music videos have come a long way since i was little and the following link used to be television worthy
