shots 159: M is for Music Videos

1991

Andy Morahan makes the greatest guitar solo in a video by mistake

In 1990, when the first issue of shots appeared, the music business was bigger and richer than it had ever been. It was the heyday of the MTV Generation and the biggest rock band on the planet were Guns N’ Roses. Their debut album Appetite For Destruction had been a multi-million seller; the full-length follow-up, Use Your Illusion Pts 1 and 2, would surely do the same, so the music video for Pt 1’s epic centrepiece, the nine-minute November Rain, had to be something special.

The band turned to British director Andy Morahan to film it. He had already made a couple of their videos and was familiar with the band’s notoriously unpredictable behaviour. The video combines live concert footage with a doomed romance melodrama featuring Axl Rose and his then-girlfriend, supermodel Stephanie Seymour, inspired by a story by Rose’s friend, the author Del James. But Slash, GnR’s lead guitarist, was determined to have his moment, leading to perhaps the most iconic guitar performance in a music video, bar none. But in some respects, this was an accident.

On the shoot in New Mexico, Morahan covered Slash’s solo outside a white wooden clapboard church with a Steadicam, two dollies, and (for good measure) a helicopter. Just before the shoot Morahan bumped into his old friend [director and photographer] Anton Corbijn, staying at the same hotel on a magazine shoot. “Anton asked if he could spend a couple of hours with us while we filmed Slash,” Morahan remembered some years later. “Anton came out and saw us and said ‘This is amazing, is this the entire video?’ I said ‘No, it’s about 27 seconds.’”

But Morahan also revealed the original reason for the extravagant coverage of Slash’s guitar solo was ultimately lost in translation. “Slash is quite a canny fellow,” Morahan mused some years later. “It was supposed to be a slightly ironic twist on the whole ‘air guitar, posturing rock god’ thing. Unfortunately, most people took it seriously!” Instead of a joke, it became the definitive rock video of its era – which was about to come to an end, superceded by the grunge of Nirvana and others, and its US$1.7m budget would be exceeded by numerous other videos in the 90s. In many ways November Rain marks the end of an era, the true end of the 1980s…

1993

Björk watches Michel Gondry’s showreel

In 1993, when Björk, having departed Icelandic indie rock band The Sugarcubes, was planning a video for her debut solo single Human Behaviour, she discovered a French director called Michel Gondry – thereby changing the course of music video history.

It wasn’t the low-budget videos for several early 90s British indie bands on his showreel that caught her attention, but the ones he’d made for Oui Oui – Gondry’s own band, formed at art school some years earlier. They were an upbeat reaction to the pervading trend of gothic gloom and doom. “Björk identified with that,” Gondry told music video industry mag PROMO a few months later. “She also shares my interest in Eastern European animation.”

By this point, Gondry had made some promising videos for other French artists, honing his uniquely inventive visual sensibility. But as he approached the age of 30, the real breakthrough had yet to happen. This first collaboration with Björk would change all that – a tour de force combining live action, puppetry, rear-screen projections and post-FX. Björk is placed in a fairytale dream/nightmare, a Goldilocks terrorised by a giant teddy bear in a forest, swallowed whole, then leaving the planet entirely in her own imagination. Gondry created it in a studio outside Paris, itself situated in a forest, and he later said the journey to the studio every day through the trees inspired many aspects of the £60k video.

Human Behaviour was the launchpad for the careers of both musician and director. For a long time Björk was Gondry’s primary muse and they made many great videos together. According to Gondry, “When we work together, Björk has 60 per cent of the ideas. I’d be mad not to use them.”

Even more importantly, Human Behaviour opened the door to a different way of making videos. Georges Bermann, who signed Gondry to Partizan in 1990, and has been producing his work ever since, told PROMO in 2006: “Human Behaviour didn’t simply have a great impact on Michel’s career, it also totally swung the perspective on music videos, which were totally dominated at the time by photographers like Mondino, or at least by directors who were heavily inspired by photographers. Michel showed the world of music video directors that there is life beyond just the look and the style.”

1997

Chris Cunningham makes Come To Daddy and becomes a director/artist

Chris Cunningham’s singular talent emerged with his video for Warp Records artist Autecre’s Second Bad Vilbel in the mid-90s – a mix of buzzing white noise and flashing screens clear to reveal breathtaking sci-fi models built by Cunningham for Stanley Kubrick’s unrealised version of the film AI.

The austere techno of Autecre seemed to match Cunningham’s sensibilities; subsequent videos for more mainstream indie bands failed to match the creative heights of his debut. That early promise seemed in danger of fizzling out.

So when Cunningham’s video for Aphex Twin’s Come To Daddy was released in late 1997, it created a sensation. Shot on the Thamesmead Estate (where Kubrick shot A Clockwork Orange), it stars an evil spirit with the grinning visage of Richard D James (aka Aphex Twin) coming alive in a dumped TV, recruiting rampaging kids (all with the same evil face) and then emerging, a uniquely skeletal figure, to launch a piercing death scream into the face of a terrified old lady.

Watching Come To Daddy was an extraordinary experience, a brilliantly realised sensory assault, achieved on a paltry budget of £20k. Cunningham brilliantly achieved the fusion of sound and vision as one, perfectly matching his visceral visuals with Aphex Twin’s equally ferocious music.

The director had a certain advantage in that respect because, as he said at the time, he was listening to pretty much nothing else but the experimental techno of Aphex Twin and Warp labelmate Squarepusher. “I’m very limited in what music I like,” Cunningham told PROMO magazine shortly after the video was released. “With a lot of tracks I find it very difficult to come up with ideas. For this one, I couldn’t write them down quickly enough.”

Perhaps the most chilling aspect of the video was the gang of kids with their identical Richard D James faces. Many who watched the video assumed this was achieved in post production. Not so. The little ones (played by a combination of real kids and small adults) wore silicone masks made from a live cast of James’s head.

After a couple of views, Come To Daddy reveals its black humour. “I may have been subconsciously thinking about Village Of The Damned, with the creepy kids,” Cunningham told PROMO. “But I was basically trying to capture the flavour of those early 80s horror movies I watched when I was a kid. It’s a bit of a piss-take because I think the track is a bit of a piss-take for Richard.”

Come To Daddy eventually transcended its role as mere promotional item for the music. Soon, VHS copies were flying off the shelves. Cunningham was credited on-screen at the end of the video, which was unusual but entirely justified, and this equal billing gave him a visibility unknown to virtually any other music video director.

Cunningham went on to work with Madonna and Björk, and make the award-winning Windowlicker for Aphex Twin, in a short but prolific period of high achievement. He has also made video art – showing at London’s Royal Academy – experimental short films, and a few commercials, and has also tried his hand at music production. Despite this eclectic activity, Cunningham has been relatively quiet on the music video scene since 2000, which just adds to his aura of mystery.

1994

Spike Jonze refuses to make Beastie Boys’ Sabotage promo the way the production company want to make it

In 1994 Spike Jonze was fast finding his feet in the music video game. Not long before he’d been a writer/photographer for California skate magazines such as Freestylin’, and had infiltrated the music video world with his skate-themed work on videos for Sonic Youth and The Breeders’ indie classic Cannonball (the latter co-directed with Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon). This got him signed to big LA production company Satellite, home to Mark Romanek and Peter Care, leading to a few videos as solo director for US indie bands, with proper budgets.

Then Jonze started talking to the Beastie Boys about making a video for Sabotage, the standout track from their new album Ill Communication. Satellite produced a budget appropriate for a band as popular as the Beastie Boys – but both the director and the band protested, determined to make the video in a rough-and-ready, on-the-fly, guerrilla style. They got their way.

As Jonze said later on the notes accompanying his DVD in the Directors Label series, the important thing about the Sabotage video was “to steal it” – shoot around LA without permits – “otherwise it would’ve cost ten times more and it wouldn’t have the same feel.”

In fact, it was not quite as low budget as planned. Jonze took lots of risks and there was serious collateral damage to some expensive camera equipment as a result. For example, a camera was bolted to the hood of a car flying through the streets of LA when the camera mag flew off and was totalled.

Whatever the final cost, the result was a game-changing video – an original spoof of 70s cop shows that was also a hard-edged satire on police violence.

2002

Mark Romanek films Johnny Cash, adds old footage, creates a masterpiece

By 2002 Mark Romanek had established himself as one of the best music video directors of his generation, with his exquisitely crafted and photographed videos for the likes of Nine Inch Nails, Madonna, Lenny Kravitz, Beck and others. But Romanek’s most impactful work of all stands in stark contrast to everything that came before it.

Romanek had long wanted to make a video for Johnny Cash, and regularly pestered Rick Rubin, the celebrated producer who worked with Cash from the mid-90s onwards. When, shortly after completing his first feature film, One Hour Photo, he heard Cash’s version of Nine Inch Nails’ Hurt, Romanek later confided that he “almost threatened” Rubin in order to get the job of making a promo for the song.

Rubin finally agreed to let him do it, permitting Romanek and a small crew to shoot Cash performing the song at his home in Nashville – and also to visit The House Of Cash, the singer’s museum, that had been closed for some time. Romanek was shocked by the dilapidated state of the museum when he arrived, but he also found riches there – cans of film featuring Cash in his prime, performing on TV and in various acting roles.

Romanek filmed Cash and his wife, June. This was a last-minute decision taken after seeing her expression while watching her husband perform. Then the director went back to LA and worked through the old footage for several weeks.

The resulting work, featuring Cash past and present, was more than a music video. Simply through the quality of the editing, incorporating archive footage with live performance, Romanek created an artistic document on the life of a giant of American music, transcending the traditional music video medium. Both intimate and historic, the film revealed Cash’s personal journey – from the charismatic, hell-raising Man In Black of his prime, to wise old man, still giving everything to his art.

Romanek had, to a large degree, stripped away several of the elements that were regarded as crucial in making a great video – namely, a killer concept, exceptional cinematography and art direction – and had nonetheless made a masterpiece. Trent Reznor, the writer of the song, later revealed that, although he’d been fairly unmoved listening to Cash’s version of Hurt, he’d been reduced to stunned, awed silence by the video. “It was a beautiful piece of art,” he said.

Hurt had already had a huge impact by the time Johnny Cash died, less than a year after it was made (and a few months after his wife June also passed away). Romanek has since expressed his distaste at the idea that the video was in some way a premature obituary for the great man – and Cash was apparently full of energy and cracking jokes on the shoot.

But there’s little doubt that, after Cash’s death, for many the Hurt video has become the greatest possible testimonial to a remarkable life.

2006

OK Go hire some treadmills and create the first hit music video on YouTube

OK Go discovered the power of the viral video even before YouTube existed. As a just-formed indie rock band in the late 90s, they created elaborate spoof dance routines for a public access TV show in Chicago that was too low budget to record bands playing live. VHS tapes of these routines became collector’s items locally and by 2005 the routines had became a regular feature of the band’s live shows. But when they decided to create a routine for their song A Million Ways, they also decided to film it, as one unedited take, on a domestic camera. They distributed the tape to friends and it found its way onto iFilm – a precursor to YouTube – soon racking up over 130,000 hits.

“A Million Ways wasn’t supposed to be a video, it was a dance routine we came up with to do on stage,” OK Go frontman Damian Kulash explained to shots in 2011. But the reaction to the leaked tape suggested that they were onto something, and were reaching a new audience. “The number of hits was equivalent to the number of records we’d sold in five years.”  

Trish Sie, Kulash’s sister, OK Go’s sometime choreographer and co-director of the A Million Ways tape, then came up with an idea for the follow-up – inspired by watching people at her local gym – using treadmills. The routine was filmed after days of rehearsals in the same method as before: completely no-frills shooting; a single unedited take. In the end, after numerous attempts at a perfect performance, the band opted to go with the least error-strewn take, where Kulash slips but manages to recover.

OK Go’s label then sat on the Here It Goes Again promo for months, finally releasing it in mid-2006 on stupidvideos.com. It was a few months after the launch of YouTube, and the video soon migrated to the new platform, where its impact was immediate. “We’d never heard of YouTube. It was a case of ‘This looks like as good a site as any.’” Kulash told shots. The promo got a then-astonishing two million views in 10 days. 

Here It Goes Again was YouTube’s first viral music video, even becoming national news. The band were pulled off the road in the middle of a tour to perform the dance at the 2006 MTV Video Music Awards. Subsequently, it was the most favourited video on YouTube for several years. And the video heralded a new, more democratic and immediate era of music video creativity.

2012

Gangnam Style reaches one billion views on YouTube

In July 2012, Psy, a Korean pop singer, released his 18th single, the lead-off track from his sixth studio album. Just four months later, the video for that song became the most watched video in the short history of YouTube. A month after that, on 21 December 2012, Psy’s Gangnam Style became the first video to reach the landmark of one billion views on YouTube.

This tribute to the chi-chi Gangnam district of Seoul was the first introduction for many in the Western world to K-pop, South Korea’s vibrant pop music scene. It prompted an international dance craze, a social media frenzy and numerous parodies. It also became a surprising focus for political activism – one of the first parodies of Gangnam Style came from the North Korean government mocking South Korean president-elect Park Geun-hye. This was quickly followed by dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei dancing to Gangnam Style in handcuffs, a symbol of his arrest by Chinese authorities.

Though Psy’s irresistible performance, witty direction (by experienced Korean video director Cho Soo-hyun), fine production values and, of course, a wickedly catchy pop song, all contributed to the surprising success of a track performed in Korean, the phenomenon also shows the abiding power of the pop video in the YouTube age. It also highlighted the new realities of the global music business. The immense popularity of the video led to Gangnam Style becoming a number one hit in numerous countries, including the UK. The video itself also earned millions for Psy and his label, both through advertising revenues and royalties for YouTube plays – and continues to do so.

Since 2012, the importance of income from video streaming to the global music industry, on services like Spotify or YouTube, has continued to grow, with revenue paying back production costs – and then some. Music videos, once promotional and largely ephemeral, are now potential income generators and permanent – always available to view on the internet, all the time.

More pop videos have passed through the magic one billion views barrier on YouTube, and the pop world’s real superstars – the likes of Katy Perry, Rihanna, Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj and Taylor Swift – are now making music video blockbusters expected to rack up hundreds of millions of views. 

Meanwhile, Gangnam Style may not have triggered a global takeover by K-pop, but many people still watch the video (and its follow-up, Gentleman) in their droves every day, and the video is by far the most viewed in YouTube history. It’s now on 2.4 billion views, and counting.