Videos & Pop Criticism

My new locale has a UHF station that plays videos, though. I think it's MTV2, but I haven't really checked it out yet.

I intentionally don't have a TV in my dorm room, so I hardly see any music videos eight months out of the year. I come back for vacation, get around to watching MTV and BET, and watching songs I thought I knew, I'm struck by how much it feels like missing pieces are being filled in.

Pop issues of persona and imagery are tightly tied to the vids, and I think they can play a big role in shaping perceptions of a song. (Examples? Well I just got home, ask me again in a couple days.) This can definitely be worth commenting on; in some cases not doing so would be like writing about Fennesz and not mentioning the album's title and cover art.

[Maybe videos in pop are very roughly analogous to the way the rave/club/"big room" spaces relate to dance music -- an important public-presentation arena that shapes the way the music is perceived? (I dunno if that works actually, just a thought.)]

Anyway, despite all this, I think there's still lots for smart people to say without ever seeing the videos, and personally I'd probably like to see *less* video commentary in popcrit. It's lightyears easier to write about image rather than sound, so sometimes people flail about discussing Brit- and-the-snake as a substitute for actually engaging with the music.

Depends which country you're writing in. Satellite TV penetration is still much lower here: that combined with the sales-based nature of the singles charts means that you don't have to take a video into account when criticising a pop song. If I was writing about pop for money I'd spend my first paycheck on MTV though, for reasons of professional integrity - it *does* help. In America, I think probably the videos are more important.

Actually though we exist in a window of lesser importance for the video - the advance of digital music formats, which currently (thanks to lack of broadband uptake) lack a visual component, is de- emphasising the video for the first time since the mid-80s. Comments centering on the video in the MP3 age feel to me vaguely dated (and as Tim says easy).

I think if the main way you sell your music is through videos then they deserve to be judged as well, on a song by song basis. Radio just isn't as important as it once was.

Pop is weird, if we didn't have videos today's pop (hip hop-whatever is on MTV) would be completely different so by being tv-pop they invite their videos in for judging.

I should add videos don't influence my purchases or what I listen to. And I'd hope a critic would recognize the difference between the two for the reader's sake.

Fuck MTV is a great (grate?) weblog which focuses on clips. I love (wuv?) it.

I have appreciated a nuimber of songs after viewing their videos, but can't name any offhand. A mate of mine, though, said he only enjoyed "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana after seeing its video. He remarked on how appropriate it looked.

I tend to watch a lot of videos, in fact. MTV introduced me to a TON of music (120 Minutes, Alternative Nation, the short-lived Superock) because until leaving for college I grew up in the middle of nowhere w/half-decent college radio only on maybe two nights a week; there really wasn't any other way to hear the stuff. Although I quickly learned not to buy records based on a video I liked.
Most of them are utterly terrible, the sick thing about MTV is one always hopes something decent will turn up & thus keeps watching. I'm often irritated by certain videos being dubbed genius for blatantly ripping imagery from filmmakers (or artists/photographers) probably not known to the general MTV audience a la Paradjanov, Tarkovsky.
I liked PJ Harvey's "Down by the Water" video so much it kept my eyes open & allowed me to learn to love that record; I'd been a huge Rid of Me fan & was shocked by the change. Oh, I know: Pulp's "This Is Hardcore." Really impressed me b/c it suits them perfectly, partic staggering Jarvis & the dancers. Genius.