Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Videos that I don't like


The three videos that I mentioned loving yesterday ("Take Me Home Please", "My Own Worst Enemy", and "I'm Not Okay") were not just videos that I have liked over the course of a long life of watching music videos, but they were also three that I used to play together. I played them along with a fourth video, except I didn't like that video that much, and was only playing it to hear the song. That song was Alkaline Trio's "Mercy Me":


I love this song, but I don't really care for the video. It is inventive and visually interesting, and the images don't really take away from the song. Obviously the favorites mentioned had strong humorous elements, but there is some humor here too. I don't have any clear reason for not liking the video; it just doesn't do it for me.

There may be a tone mismatch. While I say the images don't really distract from the sounds, at the same time, the images don't have the same energy. Also, there may be kind of an "uncanny valley" effect going on, where they look almost natural, but not quite. That mismatch can repel people. (This may also be my some people find clowns off-putting.)

I'm leaning more toward the aesthetic issue, because as I look back on the various videos that I hated, and would refuse to watch, with a lot of them it was that there was something ugly or gross about them. This included George Thorogood ripping off his face to reveal robot parts in "Bad to the Bone", the Spitting Image puppets in "Land of Confusion" by Genesis, squished hands and residual tentacle slime in Greg Kihn's "Jeopardy", and the clay forming images on and around Peter Gabriel's head in "Sledgehammer".

It may also include the faces morphing in Godley & Creme's "Cry". I'm not sure that it does, because morphing has been used in a lot of other videos and not bothered me. I think maybe the problem was that I didn't like the song that much, which kind of leads to one of my most hated videos of all time, "Ebony & Ivory", by Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney.

I did not start out hating "Ebony & Ivory", but then it started stalking me. The climax was when I came home from school one day and turned on the television. It was on MTV, so I switched to VH1, and it was there too. I turned off the television and switched on the radio, and it was there too. Obviously with all of that switching I had already started hating the song, but that was the clearest sign of its level of infiltration.

Just two years earlier I remembered not minding that songs got overplayed, because they were songs I liked. Why did I hate this one so much? I think the issue is that it's not a very good song.

I hate saying that, because I'm in favor of racial harmony, but if we are going to address such an important topic, can we do a little better lyrically?

We all know that people are the same wherrrrre EVer you go
Side by side on my pi-an-o keeeeey-board, oh Lord why don't weeeeee?

Cake gets away with having the lyrics mismatch the tempo, but they're edgier. I think it's a bad song, and in small doses you can overlook it, but over and over again it could actually increase racism and desires for segregation. And Stevie Wonder, I know you can and have done better.

I have been re-watching these videos before writing, and one thing I remember from some kind of "I Love the '80s" special was them talking about music video cliches, and that if you didn't know what to do there were a few standbys like curtains blowing in the wind. Guess how "Ebony & Ivory" starts?

So maybe it's easier to make a lazy video for a lazy song, but there's one other video that really bugs me. This is the one where everyone will know my judgment can't be trusted, so I guess it's good that I saved it for last. I'm not a big fan of "Thriller".

I never got into Michael Jackson. I tried, because it sure felt like everyone else loved him, but eventually I just accepted it. Because I did not really like his music, I never grew to love any of his videos, but I would still watch them, except for "Thriller".

Part of this is the ugly/gross thing, which keeps me from enjoying zombies. Beyond that, looking back at it now, I feel like the song does not serve the video. The length is monstrous, but very little of the footage actually has the song playing, and playing the song over those segments would not feel right.

There are things that are interesting about it. The opening segment does definitely hit some points for harking back to the '50s creature features, and we use some of the dolly tracking shots that we associate with the '70s - it hits some of the right notes - it just takes too long, and it feels like with too little purpose. Whether that is more of a John Landis issue or a Michael Jackson issue, or just an issue of them collaborating, I don't know.

Most likely their goal was to make something really cool, rather than thinking specifically about what the music video would do for that song. The song did end up being very popular, and Michael Jackson made a lot of money, so it's hard to argue with success. I still don't like it.

Nonetheless, tomorrow we will spend some time on the purpose of music videos.




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