smoe.org mailing lists
ivan@stellysee.de
| From | "Sager, Greg" <greg.sager@bankofamerica.com> |
| Subject | Re: Favorite All-Time Videos |
| Date | Tue, 13 May 2003 10:49:48 -0500 |
[Part 1 text/plain iso-8859-1 (5.2 kilobytes)]
(View Text in a separate window)
> Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 15:57:32 -0400
> From: Stewart Mason <flamingo@theworld.com>
> To: audities@smoe.org, <audities@smoe.org>
> Subject: Re: Favorite All-Time Videos
> Message-ID: <3.0.5.32.20030512155732.00cbc5a0@pop.theworld.com>
>
> At 03:46 PM 5/12/2003 -0400, josh chasin wrote:
> >> > What are the fave videos of other Auditeers?
> >
> >Todd Rundgren, "Time Heals."
> >
> >I can't think of any other videos I like. To paraphrase Frank Zappa,
> Making
> >a video of a song is like painting about architecture.
> >
> >Favorite videos 2 through a thousand would be the videos that play in my
> >head when I close my eyes and hear certain songs.
>
> During the heyday of MTV when people kept making the "videos ruin songs
> because when I hear the song I only think of the video" argument, my
> response was always along the lines of "So *that's* what it's like to have
> absolutely no imagination and a dearth of original thought. Huh."
>
What an arrogant statement.
And an incorrect one, at that. Disliking videos because they can
compromise the viewer's inner personal response to the song is hardly a
symptom of "absolutely no imagination and a dearth of original thought."
Josh's observation simply stems from the fact that the outer world of
reality is much stronger and more compelling than the inner world of one's
own imagination in most people. Quick quiz: How many people have read a
novel and in the process mentally cast a movie based upon it, only to be
disappointed when the actual movie comes out and the casting (if not other
aspects of the movie) doesn't equal what was in your head when you were
reading the novel? If you're one of those people, welcome to the "Absolutely
No Imagination" Club.
One of the reasons why music is such a powerful art form is because
it evokes such personal and idiosyncratic responses in listeners,
particularly in the way that music is tied to memory. Witness the recent
Audities thread about "rainy day music." While a song may evoke thoughts of
an old flame in one listener, that same song may remind another listener of
his or her grandparents' farm -- and a third listener might recall a
long-forgotten grade school acquaintance if the acquaintance's first name is
mentioned in the song. Having such identifications drowned out by the
mentally-homogenizing images of a video for that song simply demonstrates
the fragility of memory and the capacity of the human mind to prioritize
what it sees above what it creates on its own --- especially if what it sees
itself becomes a shared memory among many people (i.e., a music video played
ad nauseam on MTV or VH1).
I don't fully identify with Josh's problem with videos, but I do
understand it. While I used to watch videos back in the eighties (more the
MV3 that Kelly mentioned than MTV), and I enjoyed the more whimsical ones
such as David Lee Roth's, Peter Gabriel's, and Talking Heads's, I felt the
same pang of annoyance on occasion with the concept of videos as did Josh.
My own imagination is quite vigorous, thank you, but I'm quite happy that I
heard the Police's "Every Breath You Take" on the radio before I saw the
video on TV. Because the occasion in which I first heard the song was a
significant one in my life -- it was premiered on a Rockford radio station
during the car ride home from an end-of-senior-year camping trip that I took
with my college buddies to Apple River Canyon State Park in NW Illinois --
it has remained the mental image evoked every time that I hear the song,
rather than a b&w video of an ashtray and of Sting playing a double bass.
Had I seen the video first, there's every chance that the image evoked upon
each subsequent hearing of "Every Breath You Take" would've been the one
chosen by Sting and his associates rather than the one that sprang from the
circumstances of my own life. If I didn't like "Every Breath You Take" so
much -- in other words, if it was on a par with David Lee Roth's "Just a
Gigolo" in my personal rating scale of songs -- the predominant mental image
evoked by the song probably wouldn't have mattered either way to me.
Having outward reality shape one's perceptions more strongly than
does one's inner life isn't a sign of having "absolutely no imagination."
It's a sign of mental health.
Lastly, I've been reading Josh Chasin's Audities posts for several
years now, and I've seen zero evidence that he suffers from "absolutely no
imagination and a dearth of original thought."
> When you get right down to it, videos are commercials. On the other hand,
> I *like* commercials (there's quite often more technical innovation and
> wit
> in one 30-second commercial than in an entire episode of some overhyped
> pile of warthog excrement like Buffy or Six Feet Under), so I've never
> bought the similar "videos are too commercial, maaaaaaaaaan, we like to
> maintain our street cred" either. Don't tell me that when the
> Replacements
> were making the video for "Bastards of Young," they didn't know full well
> that it was going to be a video that people were going to be talking
> about,
> or that it would further their whole calculated "anti-star" reputation.
>
Calculated? More likely, they were drunk when they decided what to
do in the video.
Gregory Sager
For assistance, please contact
the smoe.org administrators.