Matt Hanson

I was asked to write this piece to accompany the MuVi programme for the Oberhausen Short Film Festival music video programme and awards this 2008. It was a great follow up to being on the jury in 2007, and an opportunity to think of the current big narrative and aesthetic trends in the area.

Conceptually Yours

Dynamic flux is the natural state for the music video artform. The TV station with the three-letter acronym that once dominated pop promo culture has been emphatically sidelined to the offline broadcast past, rendered obsolete in an online age where the embed is king. Without a dominating presence channeling us prescribed, sanctioned (and often sanitised) artist clips, it is harder in the music video world to discern any major overriding theme.

We’re still going through a transitional phase to a full connection with online video’s possibilities. Music video is having a muted moment. There are no great dominating presences, no great white hopes. The visual blockbusters are few and far between. Motion graphics are not hot. Stop motion feels so last year [1]. CG is out, and slo-mo is in [2]. So does this mean things have finally frayed at the seams? Not at all. Is there anything to get animated about? Of course. A brief flash of neon, and a splash of CMYK may be all we get at the moment in terms of visual trends, but the creative threads directors in the field are currently exploring are still an enticing proposition.

The next wave is rolling in, and it is not a stylistic one but conceptual. There is a significant swell in emerging directors creating interesting work. They are tinkering and developing ideas free from being pulled along by any dominating currents. While there’s still room for quirky photorealistic rapping fish (Dom & Nic’s Salmon Dance for The Chemical Brothers), and rutting rabbits wrangled into 3D by Pleix (Groove Armada’s Get Down), animation is more chaotic [3] and aggressive [4] when it is actually seen in the wild compared to the polish and clean vector lines of the near past.

This is, as ever, a reaction to the dominant trend in the last few years of graphic effects saturation. For current directors the tide has definitely shifted: music video’s leading edge has changed from high end animation to lo-fi, rough and ready video creation. Live and spontaneous is the order of the day, which we see in clips for Deerhof’s The Perfect Me and RJD2’s Work It Out. These clips use natural environment to the fullest, and camera composition is defiantly freeform. This change is made explicit in the visual legerdemain of My Robot Friend’s Robot High School video. Director Roel Wouters focusses in on a glossy black ball rolling over a monochrome, geometric landscape evoking early computer animation experiments, only to pull away to reveal a simple handcranked cylinder which is being used to perpetrate the illusion.

The move to everything working ‘in camera’ can undoubtedly be tracked back to the ever-dominant presence of Michel Gondry. His latest Bjork collaboration, Declare Independence, taps into the other clear emerging element. It is what Bjork’s partner, art world luminary Matthew Barney, is absolutely familiar with: moving image as sculptural form. The video performance as performance art–as video art–has never been nearer. This intermingling and borrowing has never been clearer. Mike Mills himself even uses acclaimed performance artist Miranda July as the sole focus for Blonde Redhead’s Top Ranking video.

Music video has gone back to basics. The trawling of high concepts through the video art masters has been catalysed, paradoxically, by the immediacy of YouTube’s webcam hits, and off-the-cuff recordings. Who’d have thought the rise and influence of user-generated content would lead to anything so highbrow?

Matt Hanson is the author of Reinventing Music Video.

Footnotes:
[1] A sublime exception to the rule: Koichiro Tsujikawa’s video for Like A Rolling Stone, by Cornelius
[2] See Kanye West’s Flashing Lights clip, directed by Spike Jonze.
[3] Corin Hardy directed She’s The New Thing by The Horrors.
[4] $$ Troopers for Huoratron, directed by Las Palmas is a prime example.

Some additional follow up thoughts, as I was asked to provide some quotes for Wired magazine on the resurgence in music video…

What was the state of the music video around the turn of the millennium?

At the turn of the Century music video was in the midst of a second Golden Age. People like Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, Chris Cunningham, Jonathan Glazer were at the top of their game. Visual trickery hadn’t become too saturated or masturbatory, and record company budgets were still good to produce promo’s for some visually adventurous artists. It was dominated by creative personalities. At the same time, these dominating personalities were papering over the cracks of a predominantly moribund form, stultifying under commercial performance video.

How has the Internet changed music videos?

The Internet has destroyed the superstar music director in a way. It would be easy to say democratisation and the ubiquity of digital equipment and effects has had a negative effect on music video. The collapsing budgets, and competition to get in front of eyeballs was always there though. And in actual fact online has become the saviour of music video, its redeemer, and the natural playground for it. What I’m actually surprised about is how few music artists have taken advantage of this fact and stuck with a kind of ‘legacy broadcast channel form’ for the medium.

How do you think the quality of music videos has changed?

It’s harder to find the quality, but the inventiveness has never been more in evidence. You just need to find it which can be hard. There is a need for more serious curatorial outposts, like the visual equivalents to Pitchfork – I’m attempting to get around to transforming Eternal Gaze into one. Because of the immediacy of the net, the ripples of visual trends are so much stronger, and you can feel and see in realtime the online conversation often drowning the stuff which is more idea-based and less just eye candy. Everything becomes familiar on one level. Dive under the surface though and there is a coral reef full of exotic creatures.

What do you see happening for music videos in the future?

It is a potent form, where the mainstream language of moving image meets the avant garde. In the same way that Michael Jackson was made by MTV, I think more music artists will transfer into the iconic through successfully using online video and the possibilities of the network for remixing, realtime, and generative effects which may well inherently involve the participation of there fans. If you look at the way Massive Attack have been pushing their concert visuals in collusion with United Visual Artists, or Radiohead’s embrace of the data stream and online channels, then you can see what a fertile ground it is for imaginative musicians. An artist like Takagi Masakatsu who weaves both visuals and music into an seamless artistic composition shows the direction forward.