The primary focus of Movies by Bowes ™ has been, to this point, on narrative features. Personal prejudice, aesthetic laziness, bourgeois attachment to people, stories, and meaning, go have that argument elsewhere and let me know how it comes out so I can light a fart in your face. I'm never going to be a grownup critic like this asshole, so rather than even try, let's assert the primacy of the music video in the development of avant-garde cinema!
For a more thorough—and better—history of the music video than I could pull out of my ass on this lovely summer Saturday, read this. As ultimately damaging as videos turned out to be for pop music (skyrocketing costs led to the industry fucking itself in the ass by keeping the pretty and tone-deaf in the luxury to which they'd become accustomed while bands that could actually play sledgehammered the foundation by learning to use the Internet to circumvent the traditional distribution system) they were an unexpected boon to the movie business.
Many critics, especially the sort whose nipples get all hard at Serious Cinema (read: foreign, political, painful to watch), moan to the heavens about quick cutting and rock n roll soundtracks ruining cinema in the 80s. The older ones, anyway. While, in the wrong hands, the “MTV aesthetic” leads to pointless, attitudinal editing and shallowness, the evolution of these tropes in the development of the music video began out of necessity and for actual reasons. The average pop song being between 3-4 minutes long (occasionally as long as 5 or 6), the music video director needs to pack as much as possible into that time. And it's not as if Russell Mulcahy invented quick cutting:
And, as specifically pertains to the marriage between cinema and pop music, like everything else in music, all roads lead back to The Beatles at some point. Among the impressive list of pop institutions on which they hold the copyright—drugs, dippy experimentation in musical forms like Indian and electronic that they didn't really understand except they were on drugs, letting girlfriends come between the band and the music, self-indulgent side projects, pissing off Jesus freaks, the much-better-than-you'd-think guitarist solo album (seriously, do not sleep on George Harrison, that boy's solo output was fucking fierce), more drugs, the melodramatic breakup—the one that had arguably the biggest input was originating the form of the music video. Much like their music synthesized earlier influences to create something new and wonderful, A Hard Day's Night took its cue from experiments going back to Louis Jordan and even earlier to Bessie Smith and did the same.
While, obviously, the Beatles are most of what make A Hard Day's Night what it is—an exhilarating, fun whirlwind—it wouldn't have been as revolutionary and influential without Richard Lester. The 60s were an exciting time for playing with cinema vocabulary, and Lester matched form with content in such a skillful way that A Hard Day's Night doesn't even feel like an art picture. The story of four dudes from Liverpool who suddenly got retarded famous playing pop songs, the rapid-fire editing emphasizes the new craziness of their lives, as do the non sequiturs—the lolwut gem of the bunch being Paul's grandfather, and everyone saying “He's very clean.” Of course, the fact that it's all scored to Beatle songs helps, but note especially the train compartment/card game “I Should Have Known Better” sequence and the holy shit we're free “Can't Buy Me Love” sequence. In those two scenes, we have the birth of the music video.
Naturally, the Beatles being kind of popular, other people took their cue from A Hard Day's Night and to a similar extent, Bob Dylan's “zup, D.A. Pennebaker, let's make a movie” Don't Look Back. The Stones got in on it, mocking their arrest for the smacked out sex with Marianne Faithfull bearskin rug thing. David Bowie, master of both the homage and getting as much attention as humanly (or alienly) possible, got himself banned by the BBC for excessive gay in the early 70s, and then relaunched his career as a chart-topper in the late 70s. And then there was MTV, and the rest is history.
A lot of that history—Madonna and Michael—has been so thoroughly written about that even I, the White Man in Yammersmith Palais, will refrain from redundancy. Much as “Express Yourself” (key in launching director David Fincher's career) and “Billie Jean” are stunningly good songs and videos, Madonna and Michael were so massively popular and singularly themselves that it's been the rare subsequent pop singer who even dared imitate them directly (hats off to Lady GaGa though; rama oo la la, baby-san).
The following people and institutions I think had more actual impact on the music video, instead of merely its popularity:
Duran Duran
Since the longest stretch of time when MTV actually played videos was the 1980s, most of the important developments in the form took place then. And who was more 80s than Duran Duran? Bored, English, kinky, authors of polished, ludicrously catchy pop tunes (that are impossible to cover due to that bendy shit Simon LeBon always did with his voice on choruses—see “Union of the Snake” and View to a Kill” among others), Duran Duran would be remembered most today by revisionist musical historians insisting that they were actually a pretty good band if not for the videos. This one was banned due to tits:
But this one is the definitive Duran Duran video. Revel in the majesty.
It's pretty simple math: band looking cool + scantily clad women = WIN. Someone else probably would have thought of it if Duran Duran didn't do it first, but just because someone else would have chipped two rocks together and set something else on fire doesn't mean the first cave person to do so wasn't awesome. In short order, bands across all genres, from hair metal to hip hop to harpsichord sonatas packed as many good-looking women as possible in every video they put out, but, learning from the “Girls on Film” controversy, always made sure there was plenty of double-sided tape on hand so there'd be no bikini slippage. Alas.
Pussies With Mullets
Where Duran Duran had balls and a surprisingly well-developed sense of perspective about themselves, many bands in the 80s had neither. Note in the following the band never appearing in the same shot as the scantily-clad woman:
A historically important subgenre for its trailblazing work in the field of unintentional comedy, and providing a never-ending supply of slow-dance and karaoke selections.
Yo! MTV (reluctantly) Raps!
Prefiguring the chart dominance in the 90s of hip-hop and “R&B” (much of which has neither rhythm nor blues), the rap video's evolution began in the 80s with DIY, low-budget efforts by the legendary Grandmaster Flash:
Later, in hip-hop's first entree into mainstream pop, concurrent with MTV sufficiently extricating its head from its ass to start airing videos by rappers other than Run-DMC, we started to see a tip of the hat to the Duran Duran template. For one of the funnier examples, I present Rakim Allah, esq.
Throughout the history of hip-hop there have been internecine struggles between artistic integrity (a focus on the MC and the DJ) and the trappings of commercial success (gold chains, girls, conspicuous consumption), but rarely a focus on the creative possibilities afforded by the music video form. For a while in the 90s, it looked like Wu-Tang would manage to “keep it real,” sell shitloads of records, and put out beautifully strange videos:
However, as RZA and company overextended themselves and oversaturated the market, the rap video became defined by Puff and his mountains of money, leading to the massive budgets of the late 90s, helicopter shots, the same old shots of bored-looking girls without lots of clothes, and nouveaux riche tackiness griming up every frame:
The 90s, and the Disappearance of the Video
Once MTV started showing director credits on videos, stars were made out of people like David Fincher and Spike Jonze, who would later take their talents to Hollywood and make features. This, of course, was partly due to their videos being so creative and entertaining, but also the unfortunate, ratings-motivated decision by MTV in the mid-90s to abandon the “music” part of the acronym for “music television.” As videos got more interesting, they also got more expensive. And, lest we forget, the 90s were notable for the widening schism between the good and the popular in pop music, so the more likely a band was to have an interesting video, the less likely it was for the mass teenage audience to want to see that video. And so it became that the above-mentioned Puff hegemony solidified, as by the end of the decade, the only place you could see videos on MTV was on Total Request Live, and only the same 10 decadently-conceived pieces of crap ever found their way onto the air.
This led to the music video, as an art form, appearing to recede into history, as a curio of the 80s and early 90s, and the increasing relegation onto channels like MTV2 (which eventually stopped showing videos). Amazingly, VH1, started as the vanilla stepchild to MTV, took the lead in reviving interest (however niche it may have been) in the music video by launching VH1 Classic, a reliquary for the great videos of the 80s and before, which was a fantastic and important thing. Initially, they showed no commercials, just videos. And it was good. They showed shit like this—
—all the time. Alas, eventually niche channels catering to nostalgic nerds need to pay the fiddler. VH1 Classic started showing commercials. And so began its slow decline.
A Savior Appears!
Much like in The Hunt For Red October, the submarine ex machina keeps Stellan Skarsgard's torpedo from vaporizing Alec Baldwin and Sean Connery, prompting Courtney B. Vance's “WAY TO GO, DALLAS!” the Internet would save the day. February 2005. YouTube.
Without sounding like a commercial for the fucking place—though note where all the embedded videos came from—YouTube saved the music video by, in true Internet fashion, giving the audience the freedom to watch what they want to watch when they want to watch it (the odd unavailable-due-to-copyright infringement lacunae aside), and leading to bands actually making music videos again! This leads to such wonders as Grizzly Bear's beautifully strange clip for “Two Weeks” (probably the best single of the last decade)—
—being just as available as Lady GaGa (who, to the equal parts dismay and delight of millions, is here to stay):
It's this last development, the archive and breeding ground that is YouTube, that make it possible to study the music video as art, without wasting months watching MTV in the middle of the night, hoping to catch the one time they ever play Grizzly Bear. Being able to write this post in an afternoon is infinitely preferable.
Music videos, as the way most people, for the last three decades, see (occasionally) avant-garde short-form cinema, have served as a kind of Trojan horse to expose the otherwise aggressively uninterested American teenager to techniques and visual concepts to which they'd otherwise never be exposed. This is not to say that suddenly the average dipshit mallrat suddenly sees this (NSFW, as if anything on this fucking blog is SFW)—
—and runs out to MoMA to see Matthew Barney retrospectives, but you gotta start somewhere.
But more than any high-minded purpose as art, music videos are fun. Being short-form, you can watch one in four minutes or thirty in two hours, depending on the mood. At their best, videos can increase one's appreciation for a singer or band, and even at their worst, they're over fairly quickly.
I leave you with the two videos that inspired this post, two of my very favorite ever, from the one, the only, Michel Gondry. Enjoy.
Let Forever Be (Best. Transitions. Ever.)
Je Danse Le Mia (You know why . . .)
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