ART OF MUSIC VIDEO
And moving beyond the boundaries of so-called high art, what about the Soundies and Scopitone, the obvious forerunners of music videos, which are not only excluded but unmentioned in Nash’s catalog? Soundies were short black-and-white films produced during World War II and exhibited on tiny screens in jukeboxes; some were merely straight performances, but many others had fully articulated narratives to go with the tunes. Scopitone was a similar system developed in Europe about 20 years later that generally employed color and larger screens. The style, the form, and the very concept of music videos have their roots in Soundies and Scopitone, but as far as this series is concerned, neither of them ever existed.
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Obviously, this gaping hole in the collection is a matter of expediency, but I’d be a lot happier if Nash had bothered to point this out. The degree to which non-American culture is routinely ignored in this country seems to grow every year, and succumbing to this xenophobic bias without acknowledgment also seems to be routine practice, which doesn’t make it any more excusable. Even with my own minimal acquaintance with non-American music videos, I’m rather astonished that a major English figure like Julien Temple–who directs many of the Rolling Stones’ videos and whose related musical inventions can be seen in his features Absolute Beginners and Earth Girls Are Easy–is completely unrepresented. (I’m less astonished that the rock videos Raul Ruiz incorporated into his rarely seen 1985 feature Regime sans pain are omitted, because they clearly aren’t even in the running.)
The problem is there’s not a whole lot going on in rock that’s musically interesting. It also appears that musical quality hasn’t figured at all in the criteria for selections: bad rock is apparently just as valuable as good rock, if the visuals are sufficiently fancy.
The first program in the series, “Audio Auteurs,” illustrates this point with a vengeance. The three subsections in this program are “Rock Visionaries” (David Bowie, David Byrne, Peter Gabriel), “Audio/Visual Concept Bands” (Devo, the Residents, the The), and “Performance Crossovers” (Laurie Anderson, David Van Tieghem); one reason I prefer the third category to the previous two is that Anderson and Van Tieghem clearly view their techniques as means toward specific and graspable thematic ends. After the onslaught provided by their predecessors in the program, one begins to appreciate minimalism simply as a form of clarity.
The worst parts of this program are undoubtedly those that reek the most of “art”: especially the ugly colorization of an edited-down version of Bunuel and Dali’s Un chien andalou by G. Brotmeyer–the sort of stupid, tacky vandalism that would be offensive anywhere but is unspeakable in a program called “Art of Music Video”–and the square piety of Paul Simon’s Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War (1984), directed by Joan Logue, which is light-years away from the elegance of a single Magritte painting, and never even allows us to see a single Magritte painting undistorted.
After sitting through nearly eight hours of these videos, I happened to stumble by chance upon the last half of Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation on MTV: nothing special, just a nicely choreographed, crisply and inventively edited video in black and white and ‘Scope. But it made me aware of the kind of everyday entertainment virtues that are missing from “Art of Music Video,” a somewhat pretentious assembly of selections that excludes the kind of art that won’t end up in museums. Like the false complexity of the overloaded videos, Nash’s selection doesn’t give you the whole story: the relative absence of good, clean dancing in these tapes is perhaps even more unfortunate than the total absence of jazz. But at least you become aware of some intriguing possibilities kicking around in this limited form, and in that respect the series performs a welcome service.
