by Alexander Ivey
The Last of the Music Videos
a dying art form finds a new home
PrintVideo killed the radio star, but who killed the video?
MTV’s Total Request Live was canceled late last year after a decade-long run. In a sense, TRL defined a generation—ours. In the late ’90s and early ’00s, scores of tweens would rush home from middle school to see the hottest Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys videos. On the show, pop stars showcased synchronized dance moves and flawless bodies that made teenage girls shriek and cry. While TRL was culturally crucial in our younger years, the show’s former popularity also indicates how important music videos once were for MTV. The end of the TRL era also seemed to symbolize the end of the era of music videos.
The demise of music videos seems clear now that MTV has all but done away with them. In the past, MTV played videos around the clock, providing an additional, visual outlet for artists to expose themselves and for viewers to hear new music. The golden age of the music video began with Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” in 1983. When MTV began to credit the directors of music videos in 1992, videos started to take on a cinematic, short-film quality. Video directors like Spike Jonze, F. Gary Gray, and Michel Gondry later went on to direct full-length films.
To help fuel this nascent art form, MTV developed programs like Making the Video, which gave viewers a behind-the-scenes look into the creation of a different hit video every episode. VH1, MTV’s corporate cousin, had a similar show in Pop-Up Video. Videos were almost ubiquitous, the source of iconic images for our generation—who doesn’t remember Sisqó’s silver hair in the “Thong Song” video or the members of *NSYNC posing as puppets in “Bye Bye Bye”?
Just as the quasi-innocent image of Britney Spears in her “...Baby One More Time” schoolgirl outfit has been replaced in our minds with the image of a shaved head and umbrella, MTV has replaced music videos with reality programming, a field it pioneered with The Real World. Now that reality shows dominate prime time, MTV has expanded its offerings to include a slew of dating shows, competitions, and forays into celebrity lifestyles. To remain relevant, it seems as though MTV has been forced to alter its original design to match other major networks.
In addition to MTV’s reality programming, YouTube has also contributed to putting the nail in the video coffin. On the site, music videos with A-list directors and multi-million dollar budgets mingle equally with fan-made videos. As Henry Jones, SEAS ’12, says, “If there’s a song I really like, I’ll search to see if there’s a video. But I don’t go on YouTube exclusively to watch multiple videos. It just doesn’t seem logical anymore to sit down and actively watch a music video.”
This shift away from music videos is also a signal of major change for the music industry. Illegal file-sharing and waning CD sales have crippled the industry, forcing it to adapt in order to stay afloat. But while stories like the lawsuits against college students who download illegally and the closing of the Virgin Megastore have consistently made headlines, it seems as though music videos have more or less disappeared silently from the airwaves.
But, as Jones suggests, while many people don’t search deliberately for music videos, they are directed to them by links or friends’ suggestions. This type of viral marketing represents how popular culture continues to embrace music videos, despite their ousting from television. Videos for songs such as MGMT’s “Electric Feel” gained popularity through word of mouth, and everyone had seen Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” video even before it was parodied on Saturday Night Live.
Furthermore, the original concept of the music video as an additional link to the artist continues to attract viewers. Emma Gillespie, CC ’09, tunes into videos both online and through MTV sister channels that have continued to show videos, like MTV Jams and MTV Hits. “Videos put a story with the music, and it’s fun to see what the artist’s interpretation of the song is,” she says.
Although MTV has abandoned music videos on its main channel, it does make over 16,000 videos available for online streaming. Britney Spears’ “Circus” video, which marked her highly publicized comeback, boasts over 2 million MTV views. One of the many YouTube versions of the same video reports almost 25 million.
Though the music video is not fully dead, it has begun to take on the qualities of a has-been pop star. While today’s tweens may not have the same relationship to music videos as teens in the ’80s or the TRL generation did, the simple fact is that people continue to invest time in watching them. Rather than lamenting the days when music videos ruled the airwaves, we can rejoice in the medium’s status as a lasting art form. Music videos will continue to garner attention and inspire parody for years to come.
5 February 2009
vol. 6, issue 2
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