Now that the music video is packing up and moving from television to the Internet, it's time to take a look at how the form started and how it developed. Saul Austerlitz traces the history of the music video in Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video from the Beatles to the White Stripes
What interested you in this project?
I grew up with MTV, in what turned out to be the last moments of its unquestioned primacy as musical tastemaker. I used to watch “120 Minutes,” on Sunday nights, religiously, and take notes on what videos were shown, who the directors were, etc. Being mad for music as I was, music videos seemed miraculous to me, as cultural products invested with wit and vigor and a sense of cool, and yet flew almost entirely under the cultural radar. This only became more true when music videos were bounced, for the most part, from TV. I became fascinated by the idea of the music video as a shadow cultural history that had been neglected, caught between music and film, and wanted to write a readable, hopefully enjoyable history of a form that possessed a remarkable array of performers, styles, and traditions. When I started, it was also intended as something of a summation of a closed genre- one that had nearly ended its run. It ended up becoming something else because of the Internet-fueled revitalization of the music video, and became an assessment of a form in the midst of major change.
I was struck by the Foo Fighters' video for "Everlong," which you rank as the second best music video of all time. It's an amazing video directed by Michel Gondry, who you regard as a major video director. Yet, as brilliant as the video is, the song is kind of boring--to my mind, anyway. Do you think there are acts that wouldn't have been nearly so popular or highly regard without the music video?
I happen to like “Everlong” as a song quite a bit, but I fully understand your question, and think you’ve hit on something. I think that in the early years of MTV, especially, it was possible to see sonically unexciting bands flourish by virtue of the skill shown by their videos. I happen to like the British New Romantic groups, like Duran Duran or Adam and the Ants, but it’s clear to me that neither of them would ever have achieved the success they did in the U.S. without their videos. It’s even more true for later artists who sell sex in their videos; does anyone think that Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again,” or Warrant’s “Cherry Pie,” would have been hits of the same magnitude without Tawny Kitaen and Bobbi Brown, respectively? Examples like these are only further proof of the power of the music video, which is capable of resuscitating otherwise uninteresting songs, and making classics of mediocre work. Who actually loves “Thriller” as a song?
The music video was originally developed as a promotional vehicle. But you mentioned that certain videos seem to instruct the viewer in how to listen to a song. How did this instruction work?
One doesn’t discount the other. The instruction doesn’t take away from the promotion, or vice versa. What I meant by the notion of instruction was that certain videos tell their viewers how to hear the music- in short, what to look out for sonically, or how to picture the music visually. One of the examples that springs to mind is Dave Meyers’ videos for Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On” and “Work It,” which serve as visual analogs to the processes at work in the song itself. Just like the songs, Meyers’ videos are shattered- split into a thousand pieces, and then haphazardly reconstructed. Seeing Meyers’ choppy, splintered imagery, we grasp the nature of Elliott and producer Timbaland’s enterprise better than we would have been capable of without the video.
There seems to have been an implicit dialog between male and female artists over gender definitions. Who do you think is key in this debate?
You can’t talk about gender and video without talking about Madonna, and David Bowie. Bowie predates the MTV era, but in many ways he is the figure that represents its promise, and its excitement. Bowie goes from video to video without ever keeping to the same look, the same style, or the same aura. Is he straight, or gay? Comic, or tragic? Ziggy Stardust or the Thin White Duke? Bowie is all these things, and his videos understand implicitly the fluidity of persona that music video would come to embrace. Part and parcel of this is a willingness to expand the borders of masculinity to include his 1970’s brand of fey theatricality, bordering on outright homosexuality in videos like “Heroes” and “D.J.” Madonna picks up where Bowie leaves off, messing around with notions of femininity from video to video so that she becomes a larger-than-life Everywoman. In one video, she’s an innocent young girl from around the way (“Borderline”); in the next, she’s a scheming modern version of Marilyn Monroe in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (“Material Girl”); and soon after that, she’s Mary Magdalene for the 1980’s (“Like a Prayer”). With Bowie and Madonna, it’s less a debate than a meeting of like minds. It’s not women vs. men; it’s the video-savvy going up against the unsavvy, and it’s no contest.
Michael Nesmith seems to be kind of a hero in the rise of the video in the 1960's. What impact did he have?
Nesmith was one of the first musicians to appreciate the capabilities of music video. He not only made videos for his 1970’s solo work, he sought to get in on the ground floor of music video in the U.S.. Nesmith was originally involved in the discussions for what would later become MTV, although he was quickly given the boot. Nesmith was never commercial enough to take the music video to a mass audience, but he was one of the first to imagine it being possible. Nesmith was willing to experiment; he was even one of the first to make a long-form video for an entire album. In many ways, Nesmith is the Moses of the music video; he’s the first to imagine the promised land, even if he didn’t quite make it there himself.
Country music was slow to embrace the music video, but eventually the form flourished there. Why didn't the form catch on with other kinds of music such as jazz or classical?
I suspect it’s due to the fact that jazz and classical are less abundantly commercial forms. Music videos are salesmen- they look to close the deal. They want to sell a performer, a song, a lifestyle, or more prosaically, an album. Jazz and classical, being products of high culture (at least relatively speaking), are too high-minded to sully themselves like that, and therefore the music video has never particularly worked for them. It’s also a youth-culture form; music videos are the fruit of adolescence and post-adolescence, and have never translated particularly well to more adult musical genres.
What, if anything, has rock and rap lost with the decline of the music video on cable television?
They’ve lost the ability to talk directly to a mass audience through the medium of video, the way they once did. For mainstream rock and hip-hop, there isn’t much to replace what they once had- although hip-hop still has BET, and rock, to a lesser extent, has Fuse. However, the rise of the Internet as a repository for the music video has greatly changed the equation. While YouTube is not going to cut it for the mega-bands of the world, it has been an enormous boon for smaller artists. YouTube and other streaming-video sites have become places for bands to be discovered, and videos themselves another way of attracting an audience for up-and-coming acts. The Internet has replaced cable as the locus of the music video, and what it loses in unity (everyone watching the same clip) is made up for by its capabilities as a virtual library of music-video history. Go to YouTube, check out Golden Earring’s “Twilight Zone,” and tell me that the Internet isn’t working miracles in preserving the forgotten detritus of music-video history.
You talk a lot about how the production values of music videos improved in the 1990's, making me wonder if the improvement in television technology during this period had something to do with the creation of ever more elaborate visual effects in video. You see the future of the music video in small-screen outlets like YouTube and MySpace. Given the technological limitations of online viewing, in your view how will the music video develop in the next three to five years?
Well, you’re right, inasmuch as watching a music video online remains less vivid an experience than watching it on TV, because of the low quality of Internet video. Computer technology improves so fast, though, that what was once impossible becomes de rigueur in no time at all. Streaming video itself is a fairly recent development, and as computers, and Internet connections, grow more sophisticated, the gap between Internet and TV will shrink accordingly. I think the music video will grow in the same direction it has been heading over the next few years, becoming one of the essential enticements of the Internet. Whether the mainstream will find a place in this sphere, or if music videos will remain primarily under the purview of up-and-coming artists, remains to be seen.
Nice! It very impressive. Well done. Best regards!
Posted by: Baba | June 29, 2007 at 02:56 AM