So many good videos out there.
I have to tip my hat to MJ because his videos are ground-breaking,
Black or White,
Leave Me Alone, and certainly
Thriller.
Beyond their money-is-no-object production quality, they're very well-made.
However, I'm going to take a different path. Sometimes, as an art historian, I know what's good without really liking something and sometimes I like something I know isn't good. These three are videos which I like because I find they somehow add something extra to the music that needed to be there.
My first love, Laurie, made my spring formal one year (prep schools don't have proms) by promising me one dance. I was beyond thrilled to have her attention alone for a few minutes, being nice to a silly sophomore who thought the world of her. The song was
Tainted Love. Since then it's held a very special place in my heart as it wasn't long after that Laurie committed suicide. One of my most horrific fears of old age is forgetting how wonderful those few minutes were and what they meant to me. So when I heard this version of
Tainted Love I was curious, then I was startled, and then I was terrified. It's
Tainted Love as a dirge for the AIDs era and even features Marc Almond in a cameo.
The sets and lighting are dark, spare, and empty. The theme is of a young man dying of AIDs being dumped in an AIDs hospice to die. It's intense, poignant, and very cold.
Tainted Love interpreted in this manner gives it new life even as it speaks volumes about AIDs, dying young, and how most of society views AIDs patients.
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From D'arcy languidly plucking her bass in the most exactingly lit cut I've seen in a video (despite her porcelain pallor you can just make out her features, the light stopping just at the far side of her face), to the exquisite costuming and choreographic matching of sound to action, few videos are so lush and alluring as
Tonight Tonight, by Smashing Pumpkins; a veritable copy of a 105 year old film,
Le Voyage dans Le Lune, by the French genius Georges Melies. Watch it and compare it to
Tonight Tonight and you'll appreciate the exceptional level of detail that went in to copying Melies' original.
Tonight Tonight is a masterpiece in note and frame;
every single frame. I have never seen a video so perfectly executed, even the acting is good. The lighting mimics Melies, the shutter flutter mimics Melies, the movements of the actors mimic Melies. To say that
Tonight Tonight is a lovingly crafted tribute to one of cinema's earliest geniuses is an understatement (note the name of the ship at the end of
Tonight Tonight -- it's the S.S. Melies).
What is perhaps most striking is how the color palette of the video match the music and how the lighting brightens in the more intense passages of the song. Nothing was left to chance and the entire effect isn't so much of a music video but of a film. There's suspension of disbelief in this velvet-lined music box of jewel toned visions and sweetly soaring strings juxtaposed by rich basslines and Jimmy Chamberlain's military snare.
The first frame, where the dowager smashes the Champagne against the ship, she turns to the camera, smiles,
and then nods her head slightly to the side. That's a move lifted straight from period film images. It took an actress and a director to know just how to capture it perfectly. They could have skipped it, not bothered, who the hell who listened to Smashing Pumpkins in 1996 would even have noticed?? But they did it anyway to bring a sense of complete immersion into a marvelous period in cinema history that gets treated like the orphan of a bastard son of a red-headed step-child.
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It's now 22 years old
scared
but when it came out it was like nothing anyone had ever seen. The Museum of Modern Art put it on permanent display.
Michael Jackson copied it for
Black or White, which arguably had better special effects, but this has something
Black or White doesn't quite have and that's humanity. Whereas Black or White made a point to display people of all complexions, this just makes the point of showing people.
Black and white photography isn't used much any more and ever so rarely for videos, yet when done in low-contrast tones, it lends character and atmosphere to the images it captures.
Godley & Creme's
Cry still stands the test of time because it is all about the song that we all sing now and then. You've got to watch it up close and full screen to truly get the effect and what an effect it is. Somehow each of these faces reach out to us and we feel something in them. A few are famous but most aren't. What most don't notice is that the faces aren't all shot for the same period. Some dissolves are held longer than others in mid fade, others are nearly immediate but watch the progression and you'll see it's done with great care and skill.
Cry is a sad song yet I find the video remarkably warm and reassuring because it feels like one big group hug, just two guys singing and everyone relating to an emotion thats always easier to bear when shared. That's the triumph of this simple if striking piece. It brings us closer to each other, celebrates our humanity and reminds us how important that humanity is when we're most alone.
