So, this is a little cautionary tale from music history.
for music makers venturing into video.
But, it's one also that I think offers some thoughts on how best to proceed as music makers.
How to abandon the phony search for authenticity in music video and make
genuinely artificial visual accompaniments for the music that we make.
Yeah.
Our little streak with excerpts of music turned into GIFs.
Because GIFs do for video exactly what loops do for music.
They expose its shortcomings and realize its potential at the same time.
There's bad mixed with good news in this presentation.
For example, George Michael is dead.
But his hair is perfect.
Look at that. You know what this is right? This is from the video for "Careless Whisper."
This hair. It's abundant. But not unruly.
It's perfectly styled but it doesn't look over-styled.
It has volume, it has highlights.
Most of all though, I don't know why I'm telling you these things, you can see, it's the whole point of video.
It's most important characteristic, I would say, is that it looks like George Michael's hair.
And that, after all, is its job here.
For George Michael's performance to register as real, for video audience,
his hair must likewise be authentic.
That's why, incidentally, the singer canceled the first day of this video shoot.
And walked off the set. Because the hair was not quite right yet.
Was not yet fully him.
Now, this might be a little hard to relate to. You and I don't have this problem, or not exactly.
We style our hair, yes, according to the occasion, we judge the success of our efforts in mirror,
in shop windows and phone screens. But in general, our medium is reality.
So we know whatever we do to our hair, short of covering it with a wig,
it will at least be understood that this is our hair, it is our real hair.
George Michael was working in the early days of a much less forgiving medium: music video,
in which nothing looked real, and unless you went to a great deal of trouble to make it so.
Let me give you another example.
This is an unsurprising statement: women are real. That is a real thing that exists in the world.
But, if you want to show a woman in a music video,
you can't just can't just point a camera at a person who identifies as female and hope that things will work out.
No.
I'm gonna do something I never thought I would. And paraphrase video music pioneers Duran Duran,
and that episode of the Simpsons where a movie producer comes to Springfield,
all at the same time, and say that "Girls don't look like girls on film, you have to use Courtney Cox."
In the 1970s, Bruce Springsteen used to do a thing at his concerts where he invited an ordinary young woman
from the audience to dance with him on stage.
That was just a thing he did. It was spontaneous, charming and most of all, real.
In 1984, after Bruce Springsteen became a big star, and he was made to understood by his manager
Jon Landau that he had better make videos that authentically represented himself.
The director Brian De Palma was hired to make a video for Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark" single.
It was decided that the video would show Springsteen playing a show and he would do thing with the girl,
and the girl would be played by a model/actress named Courtney Cox,
better known today as Monica from Friends.
In the finished product here we see him holding out his hand,
the camera catches this look of surprise and delight dawning on Courtney Cox's face.
But she knows.
And we know that shes knows. She's a model actress doing her job, and the job here
is nothing less than the construction of Bruce Springsteen as a real human being.
This, above all, must be faked before it can register as real.
Jesus.
What is going on here?
To answer this question we have to turn to French philosophers. Only French philosophers can help us here.
Media theorist and philosopher Roland Bart declared in 1966 that
what the bourgeoisie public mostly wants from its entertainment is "signs that do not look like signs."
In other words, we want our stars, those we admire, heroes, to be real
but will be satisfied only when this reality is constructed well enough that we can't see the joints.
I think he's right.
Especially after spending some time, as I did, with the early work of Tori Amos.
Before she was Tori Amos she was in a band called "Y Kant Tori Read", here in L.A.
They worked pretty hard to make it. They made songs and also videos. Oh boy.
This is from one of them. It's called "The Big Picture", came out in 1987. I didn't work.
It failed to make Tori Amos a big star, or rather, failed to make her band famous.
And according to her, it was because it was too artificial. And I kind of see what she means.
Fake car, fake hair, fake ladder, fake guy, fake street, fake piano.
She went back to the drawing board and resolved to be herself next time.
This is the 1992 version of Tori Amos, seen in the video for "Silent All These Years."
In this she seemed far more realistic to herself, to her management
and to the many many people who liked and bought her records
and requested this song on MTV.
Did that mean that there was no artifice involved? Or less artifice involved in making this thing.
I'd go out on a limb here and say, no.
I think that when you rent a street or a photographers studio, or whether you decide to hire a car or a box,
these are all aesthetic choices made by somebody somewhere.
I think it just means that the artifice, which in this case means a plain white set,
wood tones, dyed slip-dress, and natural-look make-up, had worked, had registered as real
with people who like to think they know the difference, who want real art by real artists. Don't we all.
I think Sinéad O’Connor kind of started this reality revolt in music video.
This is "Nothing compares to you," at the end of the 80s this seemed very important
for an artist to appear so unadorned, so direct.
It makes me think of Walt Whitman when he was talking about style. He said, I have no style.
I put no curtain between what I want to express and what you receive. There's no decoration.
It comes directly from me to you. That's what this video is all about really.
It's a revolt against the style decade and "haircut bands", more about that later.
But did it have less style...
than videos by Duran Duran or Mötley Crüe? Is a shaved head...
no hair style, or a no-hair style?
There was a time when pop artists didn't have to think about this stuff quite so much.
And that time can be dated pretty precisely to before the advent of MTV in the early 80s.
This is kind of amazing, and it would be an exaggeration to say that
before MTV music was heard and not seen. But it certainly wasn't seen as much
and not in quite the same way.
I was surprised when I learned this, but back in the 70s, serious artists, especially rock artists,
were discouraged from appearing on television
and even pop acts had their TV appearances carefully rationed out by their managers and agents.
So as not to overexpose the artist, and most of these appearance were seen once, or twice if fans were lucky.
The media theorist Lawrence Grossberg has argued that in these pre-MTV times, audiences went looking
for proof of the artist's realness, only in sound. And certain key pockets of music culture
regarded the visual realm with suspicion, if not outright contempt. For example,
around here, in this part of the world in the 1970s,
the Laurel Canyon cognoscenti, just like Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell and members of the Eagles used the phase
"the costume people" as a verbal shorthand for everything they believed to be wrong with rock music.
Just get up there and play... sorry... And I quote from a guy who used to be in the Eagles:
"Just get up there in your jeans, they said, and play your music." Sounds awful.
10 years later, two new shorthand put-downs into the rock lexicon, tellingly.
"Hair-metal" was a catch-all term for party bands that rules L.A. during the 1980s:
Mötley Crüe, Rat, Warrant, Poison. "Haircut bands" referred mostly to English synth-pop groups
from earlier in the decade like Duran Duran and the Human League, and Wham!
the act that launched George Michael's career, not coincidentally.
These phrases simply didn't imply that the groups had remarkable hair, although they truly did.
They were a way of saying that the groups owed their success mostly, if not solely,
to their remarkable hair, and this in turn spoke of something truly rotten in the state of music.
It gave notice of what Lawrence Grossberg would later describe as
"a changing ratio of site to sound in popular music in the 1980s.
After "Thriller", the release of a song more or less necessitated that a video be made
and the artist must appear in the video, must represent themselves." A brand new face,
as George Michael would later sing for the boys at MTV. And we still live his nightmare now.
A brand new face for the boys at MTV was not as easy as it seemed.
Some people are great at music but can't do their hair or dance or strike a convincing pose to save their lives.
But in the new cultural economy of the 80s, one we still live with,
it was precisely these things that mattered most since videos broke songs.
The costume people, it seemed, had had their revenge, and the former members of the Eagles
would just have to suck it up, get their hair and make-up done and do videos, which to be fair, they did pretty well.
Thank you.