The Music Video Mini-List

An ongoing project to survey the best films of individual decades, genres, and filmmakers.
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dustybooks
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Re: The Music Video Mini-List

#201 Post by dustybooks » Sat Oct 12, 2019 10:22 am

Another 1980s shout I'd like to give is to Bronski Beat's remarkable Smalltown Boy, directed by Bernard Rose, which still seemed strikingly progressive and realistic as a narrative when I first saw it in the early 2000s and I imagine was even more harrowing when it was actually released.

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thirtyframesasecond
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Re: The Music Video Mini-List

#202 Post by thirtyframesasecond » Sat Oct 12, 2019 10:38 am

dustybooks wrote:
Sat Oct 12, 2019 10:22 am
Another 1980s shout I'd like to give is to Bronski Beat's remarkable Smalltown Boy, directed by Bernard Rose, which still seemed strikingly progressive and realistic as a narrative when I first saw it in the early 2000s and I imagine was even more harrowing when it was actually released.
Yep, Rose also directed the uncensored version of Relax as well (and also UB40's Red Red Wine)!!!

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colinr0380
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Re: The Music Video Mini-List

#203 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Oct 12, 2019 7:03 pm

I'm afraid that I only associate Red Red Wine with Andreas Schnaas now.

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bottled spider
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Re: The Music Video Mini-List

#204 Post by bottled spider » Sat Oct 12, 2019 7:26 pm

domino harvey wrote:
Fri Oct 04, 2019 12:07 am
Lele Pons Celoso I already wrote like a thousand words on this, which was met with polite silence. Fuck y'all, this is pretty much my platonic ideal for a music video. I voted this as one of the best films of last year for a reason.
If it's any consolation, I watched it and read your comments when you first posted it way back when, and was impressed with it, and I've enjoyed revisiting it several times for this list project. It's very well done, and it has substance too. It makes me think about the kind of "front desk"/"backroom" divide at my own workplace, where some of the most able and best educated people are excluded from advancement to supervisory or project managing positions because their English is not quite proficient enough.

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swo17
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Re: The Music Video Mini-List

#205 Post by swo17 » Sat Oct 12, 2019 11:39 pm

I guess this isn't technically eligible as a whole but one of my favorite albums from last year was also released as a "film," which is basically just a bunch of music videos strung together for each song on the album. They're distinct even if they all run together--they're also all very weird and low budget so it's not like that matters. I don't expect anyone to vote for any of this but it's a good thing to watch at 2am on a Saturday night:

Thool: Total Nobrum

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colinr0380
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Re: The Music Video Mini-List

#206 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Oct 13, 2019 5:09 am

In the small genre of music made out of the sound that old dot matrix printers made, I think I will probably vote for Optical Sound, Mika Taanila's short film that combines a camera crawling around and through the insides of working printers with a final Koyaanisqatsi-like scene of the city at night (it is not on YouTube apart from that 'trailer' but is on the Time and Matter DVD of Taanila's films), but I thought that I should also mention Printer Jam by Mistabishi, which is the CGI version of the same principle. Unfortunately Mistabishi as a musician has gone from being the feted light of the movement to pariah dropped by his label after making some extremely racist comments on the social medias, so that's unfortunate, but I don't particularly want to trash the video for that.
Last edited by colinr0380 on Thu Jul 29, 2021 4:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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thirtyframesasecond
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Re: The Music Video Mini-List

#207 Post by thirtyframesasecond » Sun Oct 13, 2019 2:49 pm

I like big name actors turning up in music videos unexpectedly. John Hiatt's Bring The Family is a great album, and one of its tracks - Thing Called Love - was covered by Bonnie Raitt. And look who's in the video, watching Bonnie perform.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krF6LpUXODc

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Feego
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Re: The Music Video Mini-List

#208 Post by Feego » Sun Oct 13, 2019 3:30 pm

Michael Jackson's Liberian Girl might take the cake in celebrity cameos as it's just a nonstop series of them. It's probably the suckiest video he ever made, as it completely sacrifices style, choreography, and even the song just so he can say, "Hey, look at all these cool people I know!"

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colinr0380
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Re: The Music Video Mini-List

#209 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Oct 13, 2019 4:42 pm

On that theme here's ghostly Natalie Portman scaring the wits out of Mackenzie Crook from The Office and Paul McCartney (before trapping them in eternal gigging limbo?) in Dance Tonight. And Rosamund Pike channels Isabelle Adjani's subway freakout from Possession in another Massive Attack video Voodo In My Blood.

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zedz
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Re: The Music Video Mini-List

#210 Post by zedz » Sun Oct 13, 2019 4:57 pm

More of your picks, picked over and ranked.

INVINCIBLE

Beethoven (I Love to Listen To) – Eurythmics: I vaguely remembered this from the time of release as a fun video, but it’s held up remarkably well. A portrait of suburban psychosis that’s well conceived and shot, but the video is mostly distinguished by that rarest of things: a good acting performance from the singer.

The One Moment – OK Go: My head exploded like a bag of paint when I tried to figure out how they figured this video out. It’s up there with 'Come Into My World' in terms of filmmaking ingenuity and precision, and it would have been a much bigger clean-up job after each botched take!

On – Aphex Twin: Directed by Jarvis Cocker, who’s actually a pretty interesting filmmaker on the strength of this and the very different ‘This Is Hardcore’ (which I’ve already recommended and will be voting for). This starts out like a Chris Welsby film (kudos to Cocker for knowing his work!) and then takes a sharp left turn into quirky object animation, on a beach. Possibly the last thing I’d think of to illustrate this music, but it works brilliantly.

Low – R.E.M.: I never even knew this non-single had a video, let alone one this great. Absolutely gorgeous to look at, and a concept that could have been too-cute is brilliantly camouflaged by the amateur patina of shaky super 8 footage. Easy top ten for me.

What’s a Girl to Do – Bat for Lashes: A very simple, eerie film (riding a bike at night as weird things manifest around the singer) that fits its song to a tee. This is kind of the Platonic Ideal of a music video.


THRILLER

Here It Goes Again – OK Go: Now I see what the fuss was about. This is a brilliant low-tech video fuelled by ingenuity and lots of practice. My OK Go vote will be going elsewhere (see above), but this is a worthy contender. If their music was more interesting I might be making space for more than one video.

T69 Collapse – Aphex Twin: I watched this when it was released and thought it was very cool, but would likely look dated before too long. Well, it’s still striking, and has enough visceral pulsating energy on its own terms to keep up the interest. I could have done without the branding that arrives towards the end, though.

Lost in a Moment – Dennis Wheatley: This couldn’t be simpler, but it’s low-key sublime, and a perfect match for the dreamy music: the view of the world from a sushi conveyor belt. There’s a twist, and it’s a great one in that it’s as hilariously low-key as the rest of the film.


DANGEROUS

All Is Full of Love – Bjork: This has always been an admirable video, beautifully crafted, but it’s never really resonated with me compared to the quirky originality of much of her other work. The same goes for the song, I guess.

Baker Man – Laid Back: The freefall idea is clever enough, but it doesn’t really go anywhere (but down, obviously).

Talking to a Stranger – Hunters and Collectors: This one is ingrained on my synapses (though I don’t know if I’d seen the train station intro before), and at this distance it’s a nostalgic mixbag of post-punk video tropes of the day. Richard Lowenstein made lots of videos for Australian bands, and went on to make the definitive student flat movie, Dogs in Space, a few years later, but to me he’ll always be the guy who convinced Mark Seymour to put rubberbands around his face.

The Slab – Hunters and Collectors: I didn’t think I’d ever seen this video, but I remembered the “Slab Dance”, so I must have. One of those 80s videos that looks like it was more fun to make that to watch. Do non-antipodeans realize that the eponymous slab stars in the video?

The most memorable Hunters and Collectors video for me was the one for ‘Say Goodbye’, but looking back at it now, I think that’s just because it’s their most iconic video (and arguably their best song).
Say Goodbye

Acid Rain – Lorn: Fatally injured cheerleaders dance around a diner. I’m finding that ‘edgy’ content in a music video often doesn’t work for me if the delivery is this glossy. This is hardly the worst offender (see below), but it hobbles the film.

Gosh – Jamie xx: Kind of in the same boat, but the concept here was genuinely wonky (thousands of wild kids moving en masse through a vast cityscape, plus narcoleptic albinos – a twist on “white man got a God complex”), and the sheer scale of the images gave it a lot of power. Really dull music floating somewhere in the background.

Wide Open – The Chemical Brothers: Really just a solo-dance-in-a-warehouse video with some simple digital enhancements. I could see where this was going from the first few seconds, and the dance itself wasn’t strong enough to make this work for me.

Strawberry Swing – Coldplay: An amazing piece of filmmaking, and you’ve got to love any 21st century music video inspired by a 100+ year old comic strip, but this falls foul of two personal rules: 1) the video might as well have been accompanying ‘Yakety Sax’ or ‘Prelude à l’après-midi d’un faune’ for all it worked with the music; 2) the song was too shitty to live.

I Changed My Mind – Lyrics Born: Mildly interesting mix of then-current / now-dated CGI and retro cartooning, but I had to shut this off because not being able to remember where that intimately familiar string sample came from just got too annoying. And I still can't place it and I'm still annoyed.

Ten minutes later: Of Course! It’s ‘Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake’! That’s like taking a dump after a fortnight’s constipation.

Playboy – Hot Chip: Nodding in a coal mine. Had a nice look, but this video slotted into the “merely cool” niche for me.

Paptouai – Stromae: All of the Stromae videos suggested were interesting enough to keep me watching, but none of them quite made it into the ‘great’ pile. This one had nicely artificial art direction, good dancing, and a decent, if slightly schmaltzy, concept.

Formidable – Stromae: Really interesting concept here, with the singer performing the song in public as if he’s drunk as a skunk, filmed with hidden cameras. For me, the execution was just too glossy for that idea. He’s filmed with dozens of hidden cameras, it seems, to give the video as “professional” a look as possible, where I think it might have been a lot more effective with more limited coverage, or coverage that mimicked, say, standard surveillance footage. And I found this song the worst of the three I watched.

Ta Fete – Stromae: Very glossy ‘Hunger Games’ knock off (in which gladiatorial games are performed for the delight of a baying crowd of . . . orthodox Jews?) It’s all a metaphor, maaan, but that last shot is graphically strong nevertheless.

Born Free – M.I.A.: A video of its moment, but unfortunately that moment seems to still be here, intensified. A great piece of provocation, where inspiring outrage is entirely the point (imaginary discrimination against white people is an outrage; actual discrimination against non-white people is business as usual), but it’s not much of a music video. The song is just kind of there, until it isn’t, then it comes back intermittently in the background. It’s entirely superfluous to the film.

On the Nature of Daylight – Max Richter: Elizabeth Moss walks morosely through the streets. That’s it folks! Not to slight Moss’s skill at walking morosely – she’s very good at it – but this wasn’t enough for me. The question about music videos for instrumentals reminded me of Jean-Luc Ponty’s ‘Son of Koyaanisqatsi’ video for 'Individual Choice'. The music never really fitted in their indie wheelhouse, but our most interesting music video show in the 1980s, Radio with Pictures, would screen this at the drop of a hat for years:
Individual Choice

200% - Akdong Musician: Cutesy but ordinary. Various effects are tested, but nothing that gives this video a defining identity. The most interesting one is a visual ‘fold-out’ that reveals an unwelcome additional schoolgirl between the schoolboy and his wannabe girlfriend, but this only made me pine for a video in which Michel Gondry explored the filmic implications of Mad Magazine’s old ‘fold-ins’.

I’m Afraid of Americans – David Bowie: This is a fun idea, but the execution is flat-footed (of course we know who the taxi driver is going to be) and the message dumbly obvious (Americans are obsessed with guns? You don’t say. . .)

Pass This On – The Knife: Dead simple video concept that I must have seen done before, but I can’t recall where: flamboyant singer performs to an ostentatiously bored audience that gradually gets into the groove.

Le Petit Train – Les Rita Mitsouko: I’m surprised that their most famous fan, Jean-Luc Godard, hadn’t shot a video for them. This was okay, but it really depends on the audience not having seen a Bollywood musical, as this is an extremely pallid imitation.

Smalltown Boy – Bronski Beat: This song was a very big deal at the time, and the big surprise of the music video was that it didn’t fudge the content. At this distance, it’s a competent narrative video, but it was delivering a narrative that you hardly saw anywhere else in 1984, least of all on prime time television.

BAD

Dayvan Cowboy – Boards of Canada: That opening freefall from space is amazing documentary footage, but then it completely squanders the awe by turning into a surfing movie. A waste of found footage.

The City – Madeon: See my comment on the Lorn video above. Whatever potency and energy this paintball battle might have had in conception is crushed by the wanky execution: portentous slomo intercut with Benetton posing. And the music is abominable: dull, autotuned boyband guff with somebody desperately fiddling with the volume knob to try and impart some auditory interest.

I Touch a Red Button – Interpol: A decent song, but Lynch’s crappy animated video is there for starfucker value only.

Driving This Road Until Death Sets You Free – Zombie Zombie: After five seconds you get the idea – The Thing remade with dolls – and after that, this video is just curiously dull. If I were going to vote for a “they remade this famous film for some reason” video, it would be The New Pornographers’ take on Simon of the Desert (which is much more fun than this one):
The Laws Have Changed

Bitch – Ashley MacIsaac: Mediocre song set to mediocre animation of animals having sex. For people who find South Park too visually sophisticated.

Away – The Feelies: I like The Feelies and I like Johnathan Demme too, but this is a bog standard performance video that could have been shot by anybody.

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domino harvey
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Re: The Music Video Mini-List

#211 Post by domino harvey » Sun Oct 13, 2019 5:10 pm

colinr0380 wrote:
Sun Oct 13, 2019 4:42 pm
And Rosamund Pike channels Isabelle Adjani's subway freakout from Possession in another Massive Attack video Voodo In My Blood.
This one exists far beyond the label of homage and is just a straight-up rip off of the infamous Adjani scene, with a bit of Phantasm thrown in. You have to feel sorry for Pike giving it her all here for such a pointless exercise

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bottled spider
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Re: The Music Video Mini-List

#212 Post by bottled spider » Sun Oct 13, 2019 5:23 pm

zedz wrote:
Sun Oct 13, 2019 4:57 pm
Bitch – Ashley MacIsaac: Mediocre song set to mediocre animation of animals having sex. For people who find South Park too visually sophisticated.
O Noes!

People might find the video terrible regardless, but the use of "bitch" might be less unpalatable knowing the word refers to a male partner -- or so I infer, because I think MacIsaac is openly gay. Anyway, in case I've just done MacIsaac a dreadful disservice by posting that video, he put out an excellent album called 'hiTM, how are you today?', a mixture of traditional and punkified Celtic fiddling. It was hugely popular in Canada at the time. I don't know if he was ever well known internationally. "Bitch" is not representative of his work.

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domino harvey
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Re: The Music Video Mini-List

#213 Post by domino harvey » Sun Oct 13, 2019 5:38 pm

I already submitted my list a week ago, and I learned that fundamentally I really love a very small handful of videos and the rest are just randomly selected things I like more than feel passionate about

I toyed with sticking a Die Antwoord video somewhere on my list, and they're all vibrantly obnoxious variations on the same idea so any one would have done (like Fatty Boom Boom or Rich Bitch or Baby's On Fire [all NSFW] or any of their other videos that come up in the sidebar clicking these). I guess that while I admire their overall schtick for being so thoroughly manufactured in every conceivable way (and creating and maintaining an ICP/Marilyn Manson/et al shock act as a longform art project thesis and never dropping character to acknowledge the obvious has certainly paid off with stadium tours, tens of millions of views, and even starring roles in a big budget film), that same consistency means I couldn't really be bothered to pick one to list. But like OK Go, they strike me as a band that exists solely to make music videos, not the other way around

And I struggled with whether to throw in Pearl Jam's Do the Evolution, which is a terrifically entertaining and well-done video with some wonderfully propulsive animation from Todd McFarlane that for all its relentless forward momentum is nevertheless so thoroughly stupid (and not knowingly so like Die Antwoord) and imbued with a teenager's idea of deep that the admirable technical merits are countermanded by the message here (Wow, society DO be like that -- rly makes u THINK!)

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colinr0380
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Re: The Music Video Mini-List

#214 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Oct 13, 2019 5:39 pm

I think you may have brought up The Laws Have Changed a number of years ago zedz. I remember loving the video at the time but had completely forgotten it in the interim, so I'll try and find room for that on my list as well!

I think Voodoo In My Blood is an interesting concept, and shows that Rosamund Pike isn't afraid to throw herself into that situation but I must admit that I'll always prefer the Adjani scene from Possession for its direct rawness without the need for the Phantasm ball to 'motivate' the seizures and literalise the possession. Though at the same time that slightly different take on 'outside forces' is what makes the video slightly different as well. Its not an internal possession getting externalised through an alien miscarriage, but an external possession straight through the eyeball into the cerebral cortex instead!

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zedz
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Re: The Music Video Mini-List

#215 Post by zedz » Sun Oct 13, 2019 7:09 pm

Four lists in, and as expected, there is very little consensus (so far we only have a top seven, with number one having nearly three times as many votes as the pair tied for second place), so it's more essential than ever to get a critical mass of submissions in order to get an actual result!

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swo17
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Re: The Music Video Mini-List

#216 Post by swo17 » Sun Oct 13, 2019 7:32 pm

I probably shouldn't have waited until this weekend to start diving in on this project...

Here's a nice two-fer on the male gaze:

Caroline Rose: Bikini / Aldous Harding: Blend

(Astute viewers will note that the latter is referencing the playmate scene from Apocalypse Now)

And then here's just a dump of some other recentish videos I've liked:

Rangers: Max Heart Rate
Perfume Genius: Slip Away
chris†††: I Am Death
Young Thug: Wyclef Jean
Algiers: Cleveland
Low: Quorum

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brundlefly
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Re: The Music Video Mini-List

#217 Post by brundlefly » Sun Oct 13, 2019 7:41 pm

thirtyframesasecond wrote:
Sun Oct 13, 2019 2:49 pm
I like big name actors turning up in music videos unexpectedly.
The material's more unexpected than the celebrity, but one of the better Beatle cameos in the SNL musical short I'd favor over "Lazy Sunday" and Sweary Portman: "Stumblin'!"
swo17 wrote:
Sun Oct 13, 2019 7:32 pm

Caroline Rose: Bikini
So great when performers get to direct their videos as extensions of their personalities. See also: Faye Webster's quietly demented Melissa Manchesterishness.

A couple worthwhile near-miss/also-rans:

Savages' "Adore," which doesn't have the courage to live up to its "Nothing Compares 2U" conviction.

Ane Brun's "Humming One of Your Songs." Lovely and seasonally appropriate, but pockmarked by unnecessary subtitles.

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swo17
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Re: The Music Video Mini-List

#218 Post by swo17 » Sun Oct 13, 2019 9:18 pm

brundlefly wrote:
Sun Oct 13, 2019 7:41 pm
So great when performers get to direct their videos as extensions of their personalities. See also: Faye Webster's quietly demented Melissa Manchesterishness.
Nice. I also like Rose's Soul No. 5, which is her take on a cheeky attempt at a rap video

Unrelatedly, Portishead: Only You is the perfect Chris Cunningham video for people who are put off by his creepy stuff

And Yo La Tengo's Sugarcube is a fun collab with the cast of Mr. Show

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domino harvey
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Re: The Music Video Mini-List

#219 Post by domino harvey » Sun Oct 13, 2019 9:43 pm

Sugarcube and Hal Hartley’s vid for From a Motel 6 are on my list— one of only two repeat artists (and the other is far more closely associated with the music video format)

Also, and maybe it’s so obvious that it didn’t need to be discussed, but Let Forever Be is the greatest music video of all time and zedz will undoubtedly be throwing away all ballots that don’t include it at least four times in your top 25

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domino harvey
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Re: The Music Video Mini-List

#220 Post by domino harvey » Sun Oct 13, 2019 10:00 pm

Other videos I voted for that haven't come up yet

Danielson Did I Step On Your Trumpet? Exactly what you'd expect from a Danielson Familie video. Charming one-taker with moving theatrical props and a good burst of Sunday school craftiness

Chavez Unreal is Here The only other Matador video on my list, this is a fun parody of all the behind the scenes tour vids of countless headbangers (using footage of the crowds turned out for the Smashing Pumpkins when Chavez was the opener). Glad I have this on DVD, the video quality of the YouTube upload appears to be from someone's Pixelvision camera. Their Break Up Your Band [NSFW] is pretty good too

God Lives Underwater From Your Mouth I saw this video once in high school, on a Burly Bear TV (can anyone match that level of late 90s obscurity?) program being syndicated on a local public college channel, and spent the next year obsessively hoping to catch it again to no avail. Obviously it wasn't worth that level of hunt, but I'm mainly voting for it for nostalgic reasons (as are many of us in our picks, based on some of the completely average videos bandied about in this thread from just about all of us!)

Lisa Loeb Stay Speaking of

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Re: The Music Video Mini-List

#221 Post by bearcuborg » Sun Oct 13, 2019 10:42 pm

I’ll do my best to avoid the usual submissions...but many of those listed already, I adore. Some I can’t even list because I don’t know the names, or have links-but MTV’s Amp wouldn’t look out of place at a experimental film festival.

Funny that sound is the one thing 99.9% music videos overlook. One would be hard pressed to find a better music video that uses natural sound as well as Fionn Regan’s, Be Good or Be Gone.

Hip Hop doesn’t usually get too much love here, but this gem, Pillow Talking with lil Dickey is hilarious, unless you don’t know shit about Pangea.

Still trying to avoid the obvious, it’s hard to ignore that The Beastie Boys gave us the greatest long music video of all time in Fight For Your Right (Revisited)

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swo17
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Re: The Music Video Mini-List

#222 Post by swo17 » Sun Oct 13, 2019 11:39 pm

zedz, since you live in the future, can you please specify the international time that lists are due?

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thirtyframesasecond
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Re: The Music Video Mini-List

#223 Post by thirtyframesasecond » Mon Oct 14, 2019 2:41 am

Feego wrote:
Sun Oct 13, 2019 3:30 pm
Michael Jackson's Liberian Girl might take the cake in celebrity cameos as it's just a nonstop series of them. It's probably the suckiest video he ever made, as it completely sacrifices style, choreography, and even the song just so he can say, "Hey, look at all these cool people I know!"
Yep, it's a terrible video. Only redeeming feature if Whoopi and Carl Weathers discussing Action Jumping Jackson.

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Re: The Music Video Mini-List

#224 Post by Lowry_Sam » Mon Oct 14, 2019 7:59 am

I started a bit of online research into pre-MTV music videos, but had been interrupted by first a medical emergency & then it was my birthday weekend getaway where I was forbidden to bring any electronics with me. So I will try to catch up as quickly as I can on the last day. First on pre-MTV music videos:

I discovered that the first music video is Bessie Smith’s St. Louis Blues from 1929 (filmed 4 years after the songs release on 78). Apparently it was played before/in between movies (and to promote the sale of the 78).

Early music videos started in the late 1930s, called Panoram soundies were short film jukeboxes, where you could drop in a dime and see musical performances by the likes of Cab Calloway, Count Basie & Duke Ellington. Didn’t find any (yet) that I would say that rise above the others in terms of choosing one for the list. But if you find a good one, let us know.

Then in the 50s & 60s there was another format, the Scopitone, which featured 16mm musical films in a video jukebox. These were most prevalent in France & so there are many French performers of the era w/ such music videos, the most interesting of which I found to be:

Jeanne Moreau Où Vas-Tu Mathilde
Francois Hardy Tous Les Garcons
Brigette Bardot Contact!

And there’s the German Kessler Sisters’ Quando Quando, which was a quite popular title in the format because of its choreography & multi-language lyrics.

Some popular American titles existed. Interesting fact: to film many of these the directors hired prostitutes & strippers for the female (non-signing) roles instead of hiring Hollywood extras because they were cheaper & easier on the eyes, which had the added benefit of eye-candy in the videos. Many of these video jukeboxes were in bars & so the added titilation meant men would be more likely to drop in a quarter for one title because of the eye-candy rather than the music. Most notable:

Nancy Sinatra These Boots Are Made For Walking
Joi Lansing The Web Of Love
Virginia Vee Modesty Blaise [a little disappointing given the material that they could have used from the film]
The Exciters Tell Him
Debbie Reynolds We'll Sing In The Sunshine
Leslie Gore Wonder Boy
Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass Tijuana Taxi
Lee Hazlwood and Nancy Sinatra Some Velvet Morning [not sure if this is an actual Scopitone or a music video]
Serge Gainsbourg Comic Strip
Serge Gainsbourg & Jane Birkin Je T'aime

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Lowry_Sam
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Re: The Music Video Mini-List

#225 Post by Lowry_Sam » Mon Oct 14, 2019 10:00 am

In the 1960s music videos were produced largely so that artists didn't have to go to a television studio to film a music chart show or dance show. Most of the early videos were filmed of songs (artists) most likely to hit the top of the charts (ie. Usually the most popular artists). However many of these (esp. videos of The Rolling Stones), were simply filmed performances in a studio or bar-type scene, so not very adventuruous.

The Beatles' Strawberry Fields Forever is one of the earliest exceptions, drawing upon the same experimentation they did for their feature length films.

John Lennon's video for Imagine is notable for its simplicity & the bit of intro with him walking with Yoko on their grounds & integrating serene ambient noises as an introduction to the song.

George Harrison recorded This Song as an FU to the legal system for being sued for copyright infringement in My Sweet Lord.

The Alan Parson's Project's I Wouldn't Want To Be Like You came from one of those high concept albums of the mid 70s. The video was very high concept for it's time, conveying the dangers of Artificial Intelligence when hi tech was mainframe computers & dot matrix printers.

Hall & Oates beat The Replacements to the punch with their video for She's Gone, which they were so annoyed with their label for having to record that they did it while completely high & remaining seated for the duration of the song, smoking while the vocal track is playing.

There are many videos from this time period on Youtube where it is hard to tell the difference on whether it was recorded specicifally as a music video or whether its a television performance that is simply using the studio recording. However one that shows a much slicker production & is obviously a video is Bryan Ferry's Let's Stick Together

T. Rex's Get It On integrates live action & comic book style visuals in the same manner as Serge Gainsbourg's Comic Strip.

Bob Marley & The Wailers filmed a children's birthday party in London for the video to Is This Love?.

2 Notable disco videos: Magic Fly was obviously the inspiration for Daft Punk.
And the video for Cerrone's Supernature continued to get played on video shows into the MTV era because of its rather odd (but well-suited to the song lyrics) choreography.

Because of how much ahead of the time they were (in the quality of the synthesizer sounds), Kraftwerk had 2 videos from the 70s that retained relevance into the 80s: The Robots and The Model

Suicide's Dream Baby Dream is one of the few more experimental videos of the time that still holds up pretty well.

The 2 artists who probably stand above all others in inventiveness for music videos from the 70s are David Bowie & Pink Floyd. Pink Floyd used animated videos for songs before The Wall, notably for Welcome To The Machine and Shine On You Crazy Diamond. But their monumental achievement is the video they did for the (unlikely) hit Money and predates the film Koyaanisqatsi (for which it was obviously an inspiration) by almost a decade (not to mention all the post-Koyaanisqatsi videos that borrowed from it).

David Bowie's videos were also quite ahead of the time which was why they continued to be played on MTV in its early days.
His first (1969) recording for Space Oddity was obviously inspired by 2001: A Space Oddity, but perhaps because it uses the 1st recording of the song, rather than the more popular re-recorded version, it surprisingly wasn't played very much & hence not very well known.
Boys Keep Swinging is David at his gender-bending best. Look Back In Anger is one of the earliest mini-film type videos obviously inspired by Oscar Wilde's Portrait Of Dorian Gray. DJ & Ashes To Ashes are 2 others that received regular play on MTV when it first launched.

One novelty worth mentioning is Michael Nesmith's Cruisin' which was the first video to win a Grammy Award before MTV existed.

Some other late 70s gems that got airplay on MTV in its incipient days:

Sparks' Beat The Clock
The Boomtown Rats' Diamond Smiles and of course I Don't Like Mondays
Ramones' I Wanna Be Sedated and Rock N Roll High School
XTC'sWe're Only Making Plans For Nigel and Generals & Majors (w/ cameo by Richard Branson before he became a billionaire)

Elvis Costello & The Attractions had 2 of the best early videos. Their video for Watching The Detectives was the best of the first videos to be made exclusively from movie footage, fitting the lyrics of the song perfectly. Their video for Accidents Will Happen is my favorite of the early animated videos.

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