Ahhh, yes, age. At least that's what I think it is. I am of an age where I grew up without music videos and I have never grown to appreciate them.
If a song works, a video won't make it, if a song doesn't work, a video won't make it. I feel about videos what I feel about novels I love being made into movies: not only does it seriously fuck with my imagination, my ability to have a minds eyes vision of the narrative, but, worse, it detracts from the experience. I don't even like audiobooks.
I get the Thriller argument but look at it this way:
1. "Thriller" wasn't a good song.
and
2. "Billie Jean" didn't need it.
So what videos did was turn iffy material into money.
Music needs to stand up first and foremost as something you put in your ears and not in your eyes. It must be heard -even live it must be heard first and foremost. Video isn't icing on a cake it is a MARKETING TOOL. The thrill of MTV, gone in this days of Internet ubiquity, is it brought you very close to performers. But it also did something else: it forced BREAKING INTO TO THE MUSIC SCENE to be more generational then ever. Remember, pop pickers, TONY BENNETT HAD TO BE RESOLD TO THE MTV GENERATION.
Music is magical because it is ethereal, translucent EVEN, in the end it is as virtual as the internet, more so, it is always vibrations in the air caught for prosperity. Hence it is more like us then we are, always drifting off and dying on the wind: it is like a wave (it is a wave), crashing on the shore, ebbing and flowing, abiding.
Video kills all of that: it switches metaphors on you.
Ballet, music video, movie soundtracks: since the 1600s to be accurate, we have tried to transmogrify sound but it remains the other in the arts. It stands by itself. To change formats is to take it away from where it needs to be. "Swan Lake" sounds what it is. It doesn't vision what it is.
All dancing is not simply (though surely partially) vertical sex: it is always also a changing of format.
When you play invisible guitar and sing at the mirror, your ears are hearing the music and you are acting it out. Video influences this to the nth degree. It is the positively 4th street of rock and roll: it is a drag to see it.
Or maybe I am just from the wrong generation.
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