Following on from my previous post about DIY culture in music, I’ve started a real nostalgia trip by rewatching a few of my favourite music videos from back in the day. And it got me thinking about how much impact these videos had on me, especially in light of MTV closing down it’s 24 hour music channels back in October last year. I lived for music videos. Yeah, seeing a band you loved play live on TV was cool, but i used to want to see their latest video WAY more. I brought collections of them on VHS when they came out, (and DVDs when the switch came), and watched them on repeat. The biggest impact for me, however, was that many of these promos were my first introduction to the video director, and subsequently the work these directors went on to make.
I think it must have been John Landis who started it all with the Thriller video. Yes i know he was already a big hollywood director at the time, but I wasn’t old enough to have seen any of his films at this point. This was definitely the first time i heard of something being “directed” and it stuck.
But the first, bonified, “I care about who made these videos” moment came when I brought a VHS of Staring at the Sea by The Cure. I was already a big fan of The Cure, and had seen many of their more recent videos played on Top of the Pops, but to get to watch them all, in their entirety and to discover they were crafted by a man called Tim Pope, was brilliant. That was it, the moment i wanted to make videos. It would take a few years, and a lot of careful needling of my parents that they should buy this thing called a video camera, and let me play with it. Which i did, of course, badly, but in turn that led to my career path into university and my determination to set up a production company with my best mate straight out of uni.
Other worthy mentions from that time would definitely be: Richard Stanley, who I discovered through the band Fields of the Nephilim and the song Preacher Man. Hardware remains one of my favourite films. Richard Lowenstein who i discovered through his work with INXS, again his film Dogs in Space is a firm cult favourite of mine. Last, but not least, Russell Mulcahy, who I was introduced to because of Highlander, but who I then tracked back to his great litany of music videos, including Video Killed the Radio Star, Making Plans for Nigel, Turning Japanese, and numerous videos for Ultravox, Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet.
Of course, the one that changed it all for me, as i’m sure it did for many others was Sabotage by the Beastie Boys. Directed by a little known skate kid called Spike Jonze. This was the kind of fun, goofy, guerrilla, DIY filmmaking I aspired to do. More than that, though, I applauded when he shifted into film and watched all his movies with excitement, from anticipation after announcement to fulfilment after viewing. And he was just the first of many; Gore Verbinski, Antoine Fuqua, Michel Gondry, Sofia Coppola, Jonathan Glazer, Marc Webb, hell even Zack Snyder (he directed Black Gold by Soul Asylum amongst others FYI).
Music videos and their directors changed my life. So I’m left wondering what does the same for the youth of today? In a world of instant access to media, and the disposability of content, do people still watch music videos? Do they still care who makes them? Is directing music videos still a legitimate pathway into filmmaking?
