MTV has pulled down the shutters on its dedicated music video channels, casting off what remained of its original raison d’être. In the age of YouTube and TikTok, the only surprise is that it’s taken so long. This is a signal moment. As a truly mass medium, the music video is – after almost half a century – over. Who mourns for it? Not me, anyway. For me, video shrunk music down rather than opened it up.
The form emerged from the homespun promotional films shot by record companies in the 60s and 70s. These ‘pre-video’ videos, such as they are, are often more interesting than what followed, simply because the deadening smack of rote production, of This Is The Way Of Doing It, hadn’t yet occurred. The film for the Kinks’ minor 1966 hit ‘Dead End Street’, for example, accidentally captures pre-multicultural Kentish Town in its expiring days. More often than not, though, these affairs were slung together, spliced like home movies on grubby 16mm film. To avoid even the small bother of syncing up the music, they usually depicted the singer just mooching about the streets like someone who’d lost their front door key.
This wasn’t food for the soul – on the contrary, it ate you
The advent of the music video as The Video in the early 80s changed the relationship between artist and listener. Often, when we listen to music, we close our eyes. But the video was now all that you could see in your head. The more successful the video, the less space for the song: what are ‘Thriller’ or ‘Take On Me’ apart from spectacular adverts? There was no longer any space for the listener to weave their own thoughts.
In fact, videos prevent the listener from thinking. It was decades before I noticed what ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was actually about, or indeed that it was about anything. The music video aided late 20th-century pop music in its flattening of the panoply of human emotions down to about three: sexual bragging, maudlin whimpering or unhinged egotism.
It makes you think: how we titter at Bollywood or Japanese martial arts movies for their oddness – and on what very shaky ground. Our own Western pop stars are portrayed as pouting demi-gods, forever teleporting, transmogrifying, stopping the flow of time, causing windstorms to blow up, etc. Who knew Kylie had such powers?
The early products of the 80s video boom were bafflingly pretentious and significant. As ever, everybody else raced ill-advisedly after David Bowie, trying to be all arty and European but generally falling flat on their silly faces. Ultravox’s ‘Vienna’ and the early efforts of Duran Duran famously spurred the creation of Not The 9 O’Clock News’s ‘Nice Video, Shame About The Song’ sketch.
My favourites of this vintage are similarly clumsy but more obscure; Olivia Newton-John’s ‘Landslide’ is a bold attempt to recreate Jean Cocteau on videotape in 1982, with the addition of Olivia in a red plastic jumpsuit. Sheena Easton’s ‘Machinery’ is, I think – though it’s anybody’s guess – a call against capitalism that features René from ‘Allo ‘Allo as the overseer of a space-age sweatshop. These things were tragic. But such was the crushing banality of the video form by the noughties – everything edited and sequenced identically, every cut a cliché – that these tawdry attempts at futurism began to seem like lost relics of a smarter age.
Even by the mid-80s, such weirdness had been replaced by something even worse: ham-handed literalness. Everything was now crushingly clear and, more often than not, achingly dumb. Even the supposed leading lights of this new art form were hobbled by it. Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’, as a piece of music, is a slab of non-specific angst and paranoia. The video? Aborigines watching a nuclear explosion in the outback. YES, WE GET IT DAVE. Kate Bush’s music opened your mind up to infinite possibilities – but her videos often made you want to curl up in cringe by spelling everything out.
There have been many accidental and unintended pleasures along the way, true. Madonna’s ‘Papa Don’t Preach’ and Pat Benatar’s ‘Love Is A Battlefield’ both feature their stars playing rebellious teenage girls long after this was remotely feasible. Madonna became the Queen Of Video – ticking all the boxes from the safely sleazy to the sacrilegious to the techno spectacular to the geriatrically grotesque.
In the 90s and noughties, music videos took on a cold, deadening sci-fi glamour that was about as far from the warm, bonding purpose of popular song as possible. This wasn’t food for the soul – on the contrary, it ate you. The thrusting of bits and bobs became the norm. The video for Eric Prydz’ mash-up ‘Call On Me’ reduced the business to its basics, being nothing but erotic physical jerks, a kind of pumped-up Razzle, the prolefeed of a privatised Pornosec.
In fact, the gym became the perfect home of the music video: rows of huge screens over rows of treadmills. I joined a gym for a few weeks in 1994, and every tedious second of the videos then in heavy rotation on MTV is burnt into my cortex forever. A Walkman could protect your ears, but not your eyes. How can people stand it, for years? The thought of ‘Baby I Love Your Way’ by Big Mountain still makes me murderous.
Video was the instrument with which the worst aspects of corporatised youth culture burst its banks, dragging everything else down to its inane level. MTV in its original form is gone, for which three cheers. The end of the video itself will hopefully not be too long behind it.
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