Video having reached middle age had a tough choice in front of it. Maybe meandering along in the margins of what was its maternal motherlode, Music Television, amongst the debris washed up on the Geordie and Jersey shores? Or try and keep up with the new bastard child of technology, the so-named Internet, the world wide home of at least 50 billion wicked thoughts of porn, minority interests, porn, memes, narcissism, slightly stranger porn and its best buddy ever, Youtube. The choice was not that difficult and so just as mature middle aged Vid has outgrown his Vid Vicious phase and is not, repeat not, on the tweak again and looks back on his childhood friends VHS, his strange Dutch cousin Philip, or V2000 as he liked to cruise the electric grapevine as, and the slightly odd compact little Japanese buddy Sonny Beta with nothing but fond memories, Vid more Mature is now happy with the bits and bytes.
Vid's best buddy Youtube registered over a trillion hits in 2011 and thats not a slap around the face. In a pique of bravura it is forecasting Vid to be over 90% of all web traffic by the time MTV disappears into musical insignificance on its 35 year birthday, in 2016, and changes its name to something more nominatively deterministic, probably involving an assortment of arsewipe, crap, puerile, Shitwoww in random order. All those third world youf who will leap from atavistic starvation to connected, missing out the web and going directly to mobile, will be watching old Vid as will all of us, globally accounting for over 50% of all mobile traffic. Now the viewing subject of choice in sub-saharan Africa or Brazil may not be all frisky, fun and frivolous and may feature evangelical exhortations to punish gays or un-believers along side clips of Lionel Messi doing his annoying schtick. However in its maturity and creativity it is an amazing medium for emotional and aesthetic grand gestures. Take every trick in the Hollywood, BollyWood and le Bois de la Nouvelle Vague and cram it into 3 minutes and we have the visual laugh track to our musical lives. We have every palette, color, texture and tone. We go slow, oh, yes, we go slowly slow and slowed further and we so love to destruct and deconstruct at a glacial pace. We can use light and dark as a continuum; reality, cartoon reality, clay-motion reality and its all so real. Bunuel's art house has met the XXX house and the Bear in the Big House and it has coalesced to provide the incredible diversity of what is arguably as integrated into our musical experience now as the double gatefold album cover of yore was the visual ying to the aural yank of our consumer chain.
Our Vid has grown up under the spotlight of high definition and moved on from what Uncle Frank derided as the atrocious cheap stereotypes found in all music videos for about 10 terrible years:
"I’ll make you wear red shoes
There’s a cheesy atom bomb explosion
All the big groups use
Atomic light will shine
Through an old venetian blind
Making patterns on your face,
Then it cuts to outer space"
Now Frank did produce a couple of claymo gems including Baby Snakes which is a neanderthal ancestor on the evolutionary path to today's vimeo world order. I have been enjoying a couple of examples that are one way of showing how far this has come as an integrated part of our musical experience. I am not arguing for these as the ne plus ultra of what this fabulous mature art form can look like; rather that these are three well executed individual pieces and just for giggles - not a lot of color but lots of texture, palette and tone.
Die Antwoord are very fucking clever, don't think this is low art from low class Afrikaners - these two have their dystopic world down, and I fink dey are freeky.
Jay-Z is global, gazillion grossing, gobsmackingly successful and geared for business, he never gets stuck in one auto-tune world, he always moves on to the next one.
Azealia Banks is now also gobsmacking her way to mainstream fame but when she was in the 212 eating her way into our hearts she did it with a very clever 3 minutes 26 seconds of slut sensual slushy, her Cockaleekie was not soup by the Blue Bayou, no, she was on her way to ruin people.
So while we are film noiring our way around these little ditties what should we be drinking? Well I think Ninja has already answered that for us, its Gangsta Beer or as its normally ordered from your local Safeway "Moet & Chandon" non vintage champagne, drunk like a 40, by hand, because as much as you would like, you actually can't afford the Cristal..not yet, not until your own Vid goes platinum.
