Music video was about music titularly, but it wasn’t music (Nor was it video, really. Most of them were film.) The most telling fact was that almost all videos were lip-synched, so while the visuals improved to extraordinary levels, there were no actual musical performances in the videos themselves, which is to say: music being created or performed. The reason for this was money, of course. No one wanted to layer the requirement for a musical performance on top of the complexity of video production. Shoots would have taken weeks. What the record company wanted (and the artist more often than not) was “rotation” on MTV or VH1 and the powerful attention television brought to the record. It was packaging with a new, more powerful engine.
I was as guilty as the next guy. We were all engaged in, as Joni Mitchell sang, ”The star making machinery behind the popular song.” It was not an accident that the production company responsible for a large portion of these music videos was called ”Propaganda.” It was all, even more than Ken Kesey pointed out on the set of the Stones’ Rock n Roll circus, being played to the ghost. It was – we were – the Emperor’s new wardrobe.AN AMERICAN STORY
This video is a link from You Tube. All copyrights remain with the original copyright holders.
