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Like an infant burping up his dinner, the internet offers up new content and then it goes away – only to reappear on another site where Mommy comes in and wipes it off again.

The most recent one of the ‘watch this link before it goes away’ clips is the Kanye-Spike Jonze collaboration for ‘We Were Once a Fairytale.’ I gather this is a mini-movie and not technically a music video, but that hardly matters.

Kanye does some of the most interesting things in popular culture today – whether it is his wide-ranging blog, his ALL CAPS rantings or his awards show appearances. On that note, what do we want Kanye to do at the VMAs? In my mind we need him to act like the Lord of the Egos. Of course that is what ‘Ye is gonna do, that is his role. Did we want the 1989 version of Axl Rose to come to the VMAs and sit quietly in his seat like a good boy? No, we wanted Axl to swig from a bottle and make a messy fool of himself. In that vein, I praise Kanye’s lack of self restraint. Hooray for rock stars!

Kanye also does some of the most interesting videos. This clip with Spike certainly falls into the ‘I’m glad they made this’ category – even if it does go on a bit long. The link is below (or it was at the time of posting) so watch it and mind the spoilers.

‘Fairytale’ is a lengthy set-up with a pay-off that is both surprising and somewhat expected. I was a little bored by the end and the ‘twist’ was not really a shocker. The main problem was the eight minutes of the part leading up to that. In stand-up comedy, the phrase is ‘a long walk to the store’ – the kind of set-up than can render any punch line muted because the audience has ceased to pay close attention.

And the very end, where ‘Ye offers his inner furball a miniature knife, and I kept expecting the little guy to pull another internal tormentor out of his own miniature gut. The point of that (imagined by me) ending would have been, ‘All of us have us have our own demons,’ but the ending Spike and ‘Ye went with instead says, ‘Poor Kanye, it’s not his fault.’

On the other hand, I guess that re-twist I suggested may have been avoided to lessen the already inevitable comparisons to another ‘pulled out of the chest’ clip.

watch: Kanye - We Were Once a Fairytale - dir: Spike Jonze

watch: Gnarls Barkley - Who's Gonna Save My Soul - dir: Chris Milk

In any event, the above is probably better than your beauty/rock climbing video making everyone think of a Marine Corps recruitment commercial.

watch: Alicia Keys - Doesn't Mean Anything

Labels: Chris Milk, label, leaks, music video, Spike Jonze, video link

This is, I freely admit, an odd idea for a post and I imagine doing more of these, but who knows how that will really turn out.

In 1995 Spike shot a video for the band Wax – the one where the guy runs in super slow motion to catch the bus. You know, the video where the public transportation enthusiast just happens to be on fire. It made a stink with MTV at the time because of the fire and the possibility that MTV’s viewership might be inspired to set themselves alight. This seems like a silly worry on the part of the people in charge – no one watching MTV is that colossally dumb. The Gs to Gents guys are all on MTV, not watching.

I started wondering where that video had been shot and, at the end of the clip, a glimpse of the sign for TOI, a hipster Thai restaurant on Sunset Blvd gave me the answer. Not far from the mullet-topia known as the Guitar Center and surrounded by shops selling drums, amplifiers and the like – this section of Sunset gives a very rock and roll vibe.

Check out the map and click onto streetview - the place on the corner is still a guitar shop, but the name has changed. Watch the video of 'Southern California' here.

In ‘Southern California,’ the station wagon starts on Gardner, north of Sunset with the camera pointed west. The bus that Mister Burny Pants is pursuing is on Sunset itself. That’s it, pretty simple and not much of a story to it – but I find this kind of stuff fascinating.

There is one bit of story. Famous director (Maltese Falcon) and actor (Chinatown) John Huston seems to have run over a pedestrian at this intersection back in the 20s/30s.

According to a documentary film about Huston's life, he struck and killed a female pedestrian with his car at the corner of Gardner and Sunset in Los Angeles when he was in his late 20s. He was exonerated of wrongdoing at the follow-up inquest. - wiki

Labels: MAPS, music video, on the set, Spike Jonze

Over on Videostatic there is post about the Pharcyde (sort of) reunion video, but the hidden gem in there is the original treatment for the Pharcyde video “Drop.” You know, the one in the alley where everything goes backwards. You can watch it here.

Now check out the treatment. One page from Spike, complete with teenage text0r spelling (see, he WAS ahead of his time). The concept and the execution were brilliant, but I especially love the low-fi presentation of the idea.

First of all, check out the date at the bottom of the treatment. 1995. How long ago was that? More than just 13 years. The Hollywood address was still in the 213 area code. There is absolutely no email or web address on the Satellite letterhead. 13 years is longer than I thought.

It seems clear to me that Spike was presenting this technologically tricky idea in a simple conversational way. Helped to make it seem like no big deal that the band would have to learn the lyrics in reverse. The way the treatment is written also captures the swirly, improvisational and hallucinatory feel of the finished video (and most Pharcyde music). Were all these things purposeful? I’d have to see more Spike treatments of the era to judge, but who am I to doubt the master?

When I see all the effort that must go into winning a job now, this Pharcyde treatment seems quaint. I bet Spike, caught in his current Sendakian nightmare, sighs and thinks back on when everything was simpler.

On even moderate budgets today, many labels want reams of reference photos and video clips included with the director’s pitch. They want adjustments and tweaks and input from the manager and commissioner – all before the job is ever awarded. And modern directors are competing against a much, much larger field of directors that anyone had to back in the mid-90s. The amount of energy modern MV directors put in to even getting themselves in the running continues to grow, even as the financial and creative pay-offs shrink up.

One Page Treatment Writing Directors UNITE!!!



On a side note, someone took that classic video for ‘Drop’ and re-reversed it so we can see the way the action really played out on set. Watching the clip again, my thoughts are that this was a lot of well thought out gags (disguised as an effortless goof) and that the alley they were shooting in must have really smelled like urine.

Labels: insider, music video, on the set, Spike Jonze, videostatic

There is this dim-bulb chick from a dopey reality show who has recently made a “music video.” The clip is not very good, but if you see how they made the thing – this is no kind of surprise. The song is goofy and the video is worse – even the fact that the video’s star is a blonde in a skimpy swimsuit showing off the goods in a way that seems like it is aimed at getting clicks 9and other one-handed activity) on dailymotion rather than airplay on music television.

My point in bringing this up is not to pile on the already well-mocked artist/song/video. There are plenty of other people doing that. The reason I mention this clip is because I have come to see the response to this video as a good thing. Not because people are finally rejecting reality TV trash (ha, like that is gonna happen) – but because …

Everyone seems to realize this is NOT a real music video. I was actually surprised that the general public could tell this waste of pixels apart from a genuine video. Pleasantly surprised, indeed.

It makes me happy that people can discern a real music video shoot (like Timbaland – complete with professionals shouting in funny accents) apart from this other thing. Though one could speculate about who's body is more artificial - Timbo or Heidi.



On a side note, there is a five part interview series with Spike Jonze, Kanye and special guest Hype over on vbs. A cool bit of insight into the thought process of a star who really cares about his videos. Thanks to najork for posting on antville.

Labels: Heidi Montag, media, music video, Spike Jonze, Timbaland, trainwreck, video link, viral video, YouTube

I have posted before about Obtusity and how different the posts are from what I do here. I poke around in the whys and the hows of video making and the 'Tus captures the layered meaning and art of it all.

Another web source I turn to a lot is obviously Videostatic and I have written about that before as well. But Steve over at VS has gone and flipped the script on us.

Check out his philosophical review of the latest Fray video. He digs into the choices made by video directors and comes up with his own, well-reasoned and insightful answers.

[D]ebate whether a band is best served by an artistic, highly conceptual clip or a more basic, performance-driven. The former works very well for bands that derive a portion of their cache by being associated with the avant garde — think Radiohead, Bjork or most indie rock bands — but it also runs the risk of overwhelming an act hasn't yet developed or communicated an identity. For instance, will anyone remember Justice and the song "D.A.N.C.E." as anything more than The T-Shirt video?

Ha. That is great stuff. Read the whole thing (it's actually much shorter than my usual ramblings on such matters). Steve even casts a stone or two at the sacred cows of the MV world - and you know I love that shit.

Labels: music video, philosophy, review, Rihanna, Spike Jonze

HBO’s new comedy show “Flight of the Conchords” has obviously brought a lot of comparisons to Tenacious D. It is easy to understand why – two guys play guitars and sing funny songs while seemingly waaay too into it and believing they are (or are soon to be) massive rock stars. Jack Black and Kyle Gass have dreams of arena rock while the Conchordians imagine (or joke about imagining) a world where fey strummers are the coolest dudes around. Perhaps a decent metaphor of differing mindsets in the US and New Zealand, but anyway …

“Conchords” is a reasonably funny show with a very unscripted “post-comedy” feel for most of the episodes. But then comes the main event – the joke music videos. The show is not a parody of musicals where people suddenly break into song in the middle of their lives. There is plenty of that in the under-seen Top Secret where Val Kilmer cuts a rug and surfs with a 12-gauge.

What “Conchords” parodies so well is music videos. The two stars of the show don’t just break into song, they break into song with “edgy cool” camera moves and Caribbean-appropriate post effects. There is even a little Spike Jonze-ian Daft Punk action, all with charmingly low-fi budgets.

The parodies demonstrate just how welded into modern pop-culture MVs are. A few seconds into the music video sketches you can see what the Conchords guys are going for – even if they are not doing a specific famous video send-up (that is preserved for the genius of Indian Thriller). The Conchords perfectly capture the silliness of their (and our) favorite videos – turning the conventions of MTV into comedic punctuation for their slightly silly songs.

Music Videos are headed into a more and more fractured future where kids can delve deeper and deeper into their favorite sub-genres of music. The clips are sorted and arranged on the Inter-Tubes so that no music fan must be exposed to goth rock if he likes emo and saves the backpack rap fans from ever hearing or seeing R&B or drug-rap unless they choose to.

Conchords is obviously aimed at people old enough to recall MTV as a dominant and relatively omnivorous musical force and not just the pre-teen reality hoe-down it has become. As the conventions of music video are further and further Balkanized I wonder if only a few kids will be able to laugh at music video parodies because they won’t get the narrow-cast references. That and the parody videos will have the same production value as the “real” clips.

Labels: Flight of the Conchords, HBO, Indian Thriller, music video, selling, Spike Jonze, video link, viral video, YouTube