The future of music videos
Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal contains an interesting piece about how music videos are undergoing a reinvention. Here’s the story. You’ll note several videos featured that I’ve embedded into this blog in recent years, including Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice,” a superb video that famously features Christopher Walken performing a gravity-defying dance throughout a hotel, and the new interactive Devo video, which allows viewers to determine the shots and click to buy featured products, which I wrote about here. (Rebecca Black gets no mention.)
The form is evolving and so is the distribution method. Yes, almost 30 years ago, my generation was glued to MTV daily in search of the latest great new music video. They were for the most part brief and memorable. I still don’t like Van Halen, but “Hot for Teacher” remains stapled to my consciousness thanks to the video, and I just wish I could cease mentally seeing Steven Tyler opining about love in an elevator. (Shudder.) When MTV transitioned into faux-reality programming for teenagers underburdened by things to do, my generation drifted away. Smart move on MTV’s part in its search to remain relevant to a younger demographic. Forty-somethings still have music videos, but now we find them on YouTube, and we find them there via Facebook. I’m glad these sometimes brilliant little musical vignettes still get produced, and I look forward to new examples that will help pave over “Love in an Elevator.”
May 14th, 2011 at 9:10 am
99% of the music videos I see, I see at my gym, which has music videos running on 4 tv sets on the wall over the running machines. It is a limited selection, and I see the same videos nearly everyday. As a result there are many I now absolutely hate. However, there is one, by Hanson (Hansson?) that seems absolutely joyous and I always stop my exercising (not that I won’t grab any excuse to do so) to watch it.