Art of Music Video
Review for Wire, 1/9/90
I will hear no grumblings about whether the 911 Contemporary Art Center was proper in running The Art of Music Video, five Saturday nights of video clips screened in 911’s new, beautiful but as-yet unheated room. Yes, you hippie Luddites and punk purists out there, the music video is an art form. And, yes, most of it isn’t worth the magnetic media from which it can be erased. But the existence of Patience does not diminish the power of Accidents Will Happen, just as Harlequin Romances do not nullify the work of Daphne Du Maurier.
It’s an older art form than most people realize. Even in the silent era, animators Max and Dave Fleischer made sing-along cartoons, accompanied in theaters by an organist. The first experimental sound films were musical shorts. The images in Busby Berkeley’s 1930s musical numbers often held no relation to the narrative of the films surrounding them. Through the ’50s, top singers and bands made shorts for theaters and “movie jukeboxes”. By the ’60s, TV channels in Europe ran clips by the Beatles, the Stones and others. In the early ’70s, the Residents and Frank Zappa were setting their idiosyncratic identities down on film. Devo made videos before they made a record.
Since The Art of Music Video was a series of clips that themselves were sequences of momentary images, it may be best to review it with some random highlights:
* Bruce Conner has pioneered the collage film almost since the first mushroom-cloud stock footage became available. He’s worked with Devo and David Byrne, but back in ’61, he put together Cosmic Ray, using Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say” as the rhythm for intercut shots of burlesque dancers and explosions. Typical music-video cliches, done first and more intense.
* The Residents, in a medium known for self-aggrandizement above all else, have been making videos since 1972 without showing their faces. They may even work better on video than on record, since images and narrative give a greater immersion into their refracted universe.
* Megadeth’s Peace Sells But Who’s Buying? proves that art and art-pop bands aren’t the only ones who can do good video. Director Robert Longo succeeds with these guitar antiheroes by cutting image after image into a visual assault as aggressive as the band’s aural one. (Longo was also represented with Tonight Tonight Tonight, a one-minute dialogue sketch done entirely in song titles. That was shown in a selection of MTV Art Breaks, little fillers commissioned from avant filmmakers, a concept whose logical extreme lies in G. Brotmeyer’s colorized version of Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou.
* Jim Blashfield of Portland may be the first great Northwest filmmaker. Blashfield (co-founder of Clinton St. magazine) uses an unmistakable “cut-out” animation technique with still photos. Whether the artist in question is Paul Simon or Byrne (or even Tears for Fears or Michael Jackson), they’re but tourists, traveling in the form of hand-painted matte shots through Blashfield’s world.
* Two contractual-obligation videos, made with as little participation as possible by bands still scorning video (at the time), proved to be among the best. Noted UK filmmaker Derek Jarman supplied the Smiths with appropriately moody, slowly-moving visual wallpaper. Bill Pope and Randy Skinner gave those back-to-basics Replacements about the ultimate in back-to-basics video: just a throbbing bass speaker on a stereo system playing the song on a vinyl record. (It’s one of a series of Replacements clips with slight differences; in one, a Young Fresh Fellows LP can briefly be seen.)
* La La La Human Steps’ modern-dance film only vaguely qualifies as a music video, but it was a great clip and may be the final filmed record of the great Showbox (whose fate is open again, the Empty Space Theater having decided not to use it after finding asbestos in all the walls).
In conclusion, a good video DOES NOT turn your mind to mush, obliterate the imagination or overpower the music. It adds another dimension to the ideas being communicated. Of course, acts with no ideas in their music tend to have none in their videos either; as video became more popular, more formulatic people made them. The trick now is to reclaim the creativity behind the best of both sight and sound media, to insist that music and music video can and should be wonderful.
