Lets face the facts. Music videos being broadcast on television is a thing of the past. MTV, which was once the home to one of the most exciting new things to come out of modern entertainment, is now a dinosaur that specializes in shows about sixteen year old girls who throw million-dollar birthday parties. All of the other brethren, like VH1 and CMT are similar in the fact that they show little to no music videos, all while being music video channels. VH1 shows movies for God’s sake!

Photo: Sean Cumiskey

CMT, the country music video channel, has programming like ‘My Big Fat Redneck Wedding’ and ‘Trick My Truck’; shows that are intended to reach a rising demographic of ‘Self-Aware Rednecks’. You may be asking what happened to the music video. Well, with the rise of high-speed internet, all of the videos from your favorite performers are at your fingertips, ready to be viewed when you see fit, not when a television station decides to actually play them. This was the final nail in the coffin of a dying artform. The fact of the matter is, internet or not, Music videos are over twenty-five years old now. They are older than most of the few people who actually still watch them. Lets take a moment of silence and bow our heads to the fallen VJ’s….Ok that’s plenty.

Photo: J.u.p

Music videos could have held on to a shred of relevance in this day and age had it not been for the fact that most music videos are formulaic and bring nothing new to the table. You’ll see the entertainer singing their song in different locales, wearing different outfits, with backup dancers cavorting behind them. Often, if it is a slow song, you’ll see the lead singer walking down a sidewalk or beach as the camera keeps its eye trained on him or her as they keep walking towards it. This sort of thing gets old after twenty-five seconds, much less twenty-five years!

There have been some brilliant and astonishing music videos throughout the years. Even at the berth of this medium, there were already brilliant videos, like A-Ha’s “Take On Me”, or Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”. Sadly, too few artists took chances, and the ones that did usually ended up with self-indulgent, overproduced tripe instead of a video that meant anything to anyone. Still, though, there are artists and music video directors to this day that bravely keep their chin up as they continue to make interesting, exciting, and new videos to a dwindling audience.

Photo: svanes

The White Stripes are one of the few recent bands that actually gained popularity through their videos. The video for their song, ‘Fell in Love With a Girl”, featured the band as Lego characters in a Lego world, and it was a decidedly different experience than anything else that was being played. They followed suit with more and more interesting and trippy videos, like one where they climb out of TV’s, or clone themselves repeatedly. Believe me, it looks a lot cooler than what I’m futily trying to describe.

OK GO is another recent success story, and one of a very few. They get bonus points for using the internet as well as TV to promote their extremely interesting videos. Check out their video for Here it Goes Again. Instead of some big budget, computer generated nonsense that we have all been inundated with in every form of media for the past ten years, this group simply recorded themselves playing on some treadmills. The entire video is a continuous shot of them doing a very organized and very entertaining series of moves on rolling treadmills. As a matter of fact, check out their whole catalog just to prove to yourself that there are still people out there who know how to make an entertaining and original music video, no matter how few people are paying attention.

Photo: Josh Self

The case of the band known as Gorillaz is even more interesting. Gorillaz makes some very entertaining videos, and this is a feat since none of the members of the band actually exist. They are all cartoon characters, but boy are they some showmen. These fictional fab four were created by Damon Albarn, the guy who used to be in Blur, and a cartoonist named Jamie Hewlett. But whether these bandmates exist or not is not the issue. The simple fact is that Gorillaz makes some damn fine and dynamic music videos in a era when most people only expect to see a rapper pouring a 40 onto the street. Granted, Gorillaz has a built in advantage, since they are able to go anywhere and do anything in their fictional world, but a good music video can’t exist without good music, and Gorillaz delivers on that too. As a matter of fact, their debut album sold seven million copies, making them the record holder in The Guinness Book of World Records as the most successful band that doesn’t actually exist. The strong album sales were thanks to the video “Clint Eastwood”, the debut video by these hand-drawn heartthrobs.

Music Videos as an artform isn’t dead. It is simply on life support and in a coma. It probably will die eventually, but it is thanks to bold artists like these and others who actually take pride in creating something new, different, and fascinating.