Music Videos are not what they used to be.

[Guest Paul Wizikowski]

With out specifically addressing anything Rick mentioned I would just like to throw into the mix a personal thought. The music industry much like the film industry has become increasingly independent. More and more artists are able to create their own works separate from a big name label or producer. Many are doing so at home or with an ?underground? label. What this creates is a sea of artists who don?t have to adhere to tradition, popularity, or a specific genre. In theory this is great. Artists can step outside the lines of expectations to meld and craft sounds that truly are unique and interesting and inventive. In practice, however, what you get is a lot of crap. Only the truly gifted artists can take that freedom and make something magnificent. Most tend to just be ?wannabe?s?, ?copy cats? or ?random noise makers?. They just do whatever with no regard to art or logic or form or anything and it just falls down. A growing problem is that more and more of these independent bands are being embraced and are moving farther up the food chain, further into the limelight, getting more and more exposure with works that on many levels simply don?t deserve it. The same could be said of the film/video industry. There are a lot of people at this base level, just entering their careers, working with bands with no budget, scraping a shoot together on favors from the crew, shooting on DV. And there are a LOT of them out there, and what?s more, there are increasingly more and more places to view these works. I can?t remember the last time I watched a MV on TV but I do watch a lot. So in this respect I agree with Rick, there are more and more low budget, independent artists whose works seem rookie and uninspired, whose work is popping up in the circles of more seasoned artists. Hell, I?ve got a lot to learn but I would like to think each piece, in all my efforts, is building and growing to bigger and better looks. Everything I?ve shot, to date is DV (my first project on 16mm is coming up April 1) and the guys I work with spend a good bit of time in post through, film effects, color correction, and animation to give each piece a flair all its own. All in all I feel that most of the rebuttles to Rick?s comments come from people who work around 35 and work in the circles that produce videos for named talent, under big labels, with decent budgets. And to that I would say, I feel that that is the pinnacle ring of the music video industry. There are a lot of videos done within it, but I feel there are a lot more artists nowhere near that level doing videos on what ever they can, and in this day and age they are getting exposure.

 

Well that?s about it. Anyone else want this soap box?

 

 

As a side note, for those of you that would take the time, the MV?s I?ve shot are at www.steelehouse.com under the heading ?production? and I would be interested to hear input from fellow DP?s. After all we are all here to learn and improve.

[James Steven Beverly]

What ever happened to the expliotation of women for meaningless titallation in music videos they had back in the 80's like David Lee Roth's "California Girls" I miss that. :D

Edited February 23, 2006 by Capt.Video

[Jonathan Spear]

""That was Nigel Dick (dir) and Vance Burberry (DP) who have gone on to shoot Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, Mandy Moore, etc... I guess they just bring out what's most provocative in the artist they're working for.""

 

I don't think Britney or the the BSBoys intentionally set out to be provocative. Sure, that's why they're filthy rich and sell out every concert. If you take away the hype, scandal and glam and you've got a bunch of talented young recording artists with great voices -- mass marketed to your doorstep by a hierarchy of businessmen. That's not a music industry, that's a talent brothel.

 

On the other hand, and this goes for the film industry as well, you're probably better off being successful than a starving artist.

 

""If great work were easy and commonplace, we wouldn't find it great anymore.""

 

What about Rennaisance art? Classical music? Baroque music? 50's and 60's jazz?

 

Times have changed. People seem to have desensitized themselves to virtuosity, subtle genious and "the masterpiece", and instead, have grown dependant on quick fixes of sex (Britney Spears, the Backstret Boys, reality TV), violence (CNN, ABC, CBS) and drugs (coca cola, McD's, etc).

Nothing a little nuclear holocaust won't be able to fix. :lol:

[Josh Bass]

I just have to say w00t w00t 'cause that's the second guns n'roses reference I've seen on the forums in the last couple of weeks (that I didn't make myself).

 

also. . ."talent brothel" = great band name.

[David Mullen ASC]

""If great work were easy and commonplace, we wouldn't find it great anymore.""

 

What about Rennaisance art? Classical music? Baroque music? 50's and 60's jazz?

 

I was referring to the ratio of good to crap in artistic production, which I doubt (but cannot prove) was much different in the Renaissance actually. Just most of the crap hasn't survived. You don't think there was only DaVinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, and a few other geniuses wielding a paintbrush in the early 1500's, do you??? What about the now-forgotten artist Guido the Color-Blind of Turin?

 

But I'm also suggesting that IF in certain periods of history, most everything being made was genius and great, probably people (then) set the bar for what would be labelled "great" even higher.

 

But I'm always suspicious of "things were better in the past" sentiment, despite being such a fan of history and classic movies. Nostalgia for a Golden Age can be harmful sometimes (you know, like the "back when women and blacks knew their place" mentality.)

[Tenolian Bell]

I agree that revisionist history can definitely make things in the past sound better than they actually were.

 

But looking over the works as a whole I think its possible to judge one point in time better or worse than another.

 

As far as music videos, the 80's for the most part were pretty bad. I think at that time those creating videos had not yet come to the full understanding of what videos could be, as well as record labels or recording artists were not yet consistently spending a lot of money on them.

 

To me the early to mid 90's was the small bit of time I saw the most creative and inspirational work in music video. That also coincided with a time when the music itself was pretty experimental. That was the time that underground rock moved into the mainstream bringing its unconventional themes. As well as the time that mainstream began take notice of hip hop. Back then you actually had to be a good rapper who actually had something to say. That was still the time the audience was able to pick the top selling rappers and not the record labels.

 

Back in the 90's I used to watch BET and MTV religiously. Now I can barely stand to sit through one video on either station. I hate the video as well as the music. I'm sure getting older can account for part of it, but I have a collection of videos from the 90's and I still find them inspirational.

 

When you have a song and video named Laffy Taffy number one of the video count down. The song mostly consists of a guy singing "shake your laffy taffy." Me disliking that has nothing to do with my age, I would have found that stupid when I was 15.

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

I know what you mean. Also, and perhaps someone who's a subject of this can answer this question for me, is it not getting to the point of being unavoidably crass and tactless that music video overwhelmingly depict black men as arrogant, womanising gangster types?

 

Maybe I'm misinterpreting.

 

Phil

[Adam Frisch FSF]

They are. Bling, bling, booty's, money, cars and all that has been done to death, yet it still occurs in almost every RnB video. I don't particularly like it (because I find it uncreative), but at the same time - every rock act also have the corresponding tired cliches like performance, drugs, drinking and bad behaviour (trashing quitars and so on). It's exactly as unimaginative. It just is a shorthand for the artist to make them belong.

 

Whenever you transcend that - like Jay-Z's 99 Problems video by Mark Romanek - that's when the magic happens. That's when people sit up and listen. That's when awards are won. And rightly so - but it takes a gutsy label and a gutsy artist to do so. Most record labels are as paranoid as their latest market research tells them to be - don't count on them ever rocking the boat or pushing things creatively.

[Dan Salzmann]

Perhaps webTV will be responsible for more "alternative" music videos.

Perhaps belonging will mean having a bit more imagination than that.

[Jonathan Spear]

"""I was referring to the ratio of good to crap in artistic production, which I doubt (but cannot prove) was much different in the Renaissance actually. Just most of the crap hasn't survived. You don't think there was only DaVinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, and a few other geniuses wielding a paintbrush in the early 1500's, do you??? What about the now-forgotten artist Guido the Color-Blind of Turin?"""

 

I'm sure they weren't the only maestros of that era, but I doubt the relative number of artists back then could hold a candle to the relative number of artists there are today. Wasn't being an artist in those days a more exclusive profession -- reserved only for a fairly small and particular crowd?

[David Mullen ASC]

"""I was referring to the ratio of good to crap in artistic production, which I doubt (but cannot prove) was much different in the Renaissance actually. Just most of the crap hasn't survived. You don't think there was only DaVinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, and a few other geniuses wielding a paintbrush in the early 1500's, do you??? What about the now-forgotten artist Guido the Color-Blind of Turin?"""

 

I'm sure they weren't the only maestros of that era, but I doubt the relative number of artists back then could hold a candle to the relative number of artists there are today. Wasn't being an artist in those days a more exclusive profession -- reserved only for a fairly small and particular crowd?

 

What are you talking about? Art was an industry back then, mass-produced by guilds and monasteries. It wasn't even until the early Renaissance that we started to learn the names of individual artists. There was a lot of crap being churned out for consumption, most of it disposable. People like DaVinci went to work as an young apprentice to these workshops; occasionally a genius like him would rise to fame and stand out.

 

If there were fewer people working on art back then, it's only because the world's population was smaller.

[elvworks]

I love this forum, I really do. It makes the internet fun again.

 

 

Rick

[Jonathan Spear]

"""There was a lot of crap being churned out for consumption, most of it disposable."""

 

--

 

I would love to see that crap. It could make an awesome museum exhibit.

[K Borowski]

Dave:

Having been educated in a high school run by Benedictines, let me tell you they did NOT make disposable art. They worked tirelessly to create some of the most fantastic pieces of art ever achieved. Further, this art was designed to preserve the tenets of Christianity, most of it having lasted hundreds of years already. Monasteries were safehouses of high art and intellectual persuit in an otherwise barbaric world. I'm sure there was cheap disposable crap then as well, which obviously hasn't survived. However the trend has accelerated since after WWII, coinciding with the introduction of plastic into everything. We have become not only a society with "disposable" manufactured art, but also a society of disposable technology.

[Josh Bass]

"There was a lot of crap being churned out for consumption, most of it disposable."

 

So nothing's changed, then?

 

 

Speaking of rock cliches, my favorite is the poor, pitiable rock star whose life is sooooooooooo sad. Waah waaah, I'm surrounded by groupies night and day, filthy rich, and completely wasted all the time, and I'm so unhappy.

 

Anyone with the balls to make a video like this deserves to be shot, dismembered, and buried in a ditch somewhere. I'm talking to you, Lenny Kravitz and Kid Rock. You're both giant, flaming twats.

[K Borowski]

Anyone with the balls to make a video like this deserves to be shot, dismembered, and buried in a ditch somewhere. I'm talking to you, Lenny Kravitz and Kid Rock. You're both giant, flaming twats.

 

Amen.

Edited March 8, 2006 by FilmIs4Ever

[Jonathan Spear]

""Speaking of rock cliches, my favorite is the poor, pitiable rock star whose life is sooooooooooo sad. Waah waaah, I'm surrounded by groupies night and day, filthy rich, and completely wasted all the time, and I'm so unhappy.""

 

You're confusing the artist/band with the manufactured label their videos (and album covers) promote. Doesn't the idea for the video usually stem from the artist's record label, manager, video director and cinematographer rather than the actual artist? I bet Lenny Kravitz is a cool, down to earth guy in person.

 

Know what my favorite cliche is? The anonymous joe who's favorite cliche is the poor, pitiable rock star.

Edited March 8, 2006 by TSM

[Emmett John]

All this talk of high art is all good and well, but isnt it all still just a matter of taste and opinion. What you may find utter crap someone else thinks is pure brilliance. So to say that music videos nowdays arent what they used to be, i would take this as a good thing, because after watching through my old music video collection you could be excused for thinking contrast wasnt invented till 1993, among other things. But hey, thats just my opinion.

 

Also i think its undeniable fact that growing up is very much a factor in what you find entertaining or enjoyable, decades ago i would have thought sitting down with a roll of butchers paper and some fingerpaints was a killer way to spend a saturday afternoon. Now i find it hard to believe that the reason i wouldnt find that enjoyable today is because of the drop in fingerpainting standards and not something to do with me being about another 20 years older.

 

Anyway, back to the point, personally i think music videos today look astounding compared to their older counterparts, althought i do admit creativity in ideas does seem to be lacking, but again, thats just my opinion, and you know what they say, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder"

 

Emmett J

Edited March 18, 2007 by Emmett John

[Patrick Cooper]

Opinions certainly differ and here's my opinion - the 1980s was very much a period of the 'classic video clips'. There were so many memorable clips during this decade that are visually creative in a unique and imaginative way. They are certainly burned into my memory and into the collective consciousness of western society.

 

Some examples include Cyndi Laupher's 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun', Michael Jackson's 'Billie Jean' and 'Beat It', Kate Bush's 'Babooshka', The Bangles' 'Manic Monday', Dire Straights' 'Money For Nothing', Peter Gabriel's 'Sledgehammer', INXS? ?Original Sin? and many others.

 

The first time I heard the word 'videoclip' was during the premier of Michael Jackson's clip of 'Thriller' on some tv music special back in the day. That particular clip was very interesting in that it was like a movie. There were scenes of character interaction and dialogue before and after the music. And there were even credits too. The making of this clip was certainly well documented.

 

I found the clip of 'Walk This Way' by Aerosmith and Run DMC to be particularly clever. This is where rock 'n' roll meets rap! It's amusing at the beginning of the clip when both groups of artists are in seperate rooms next door to each other and they are both annoyed by the other's music. At one point, Aerosmith break through the wall between them which seems to be symbolic of breaking down the barrier between the two types of music. Rap and rock ?n? roll are combined and eventually we see Aerosmith and Run DMC standing side by side on stage performing the song to a crowd.

 

They certainly don't make videoclips like that anymore.