Tegan Tuesday: The Music Video Effect

Part of the fun of graduate level training is the introduction to existing questions in your field. One of the topics presented for debate in my Masters was the phonograph effect. A short description of this debate is: does knowing there are preserved, repeatable versions of a performance change how we write, perform, and listen to music? Of course it does. Technology changes cultures and music is no exception to this. (The debate then becomes what specifically is the phonograph effect versus changing tastes.) But now, 150 years after Edison’s invention, I think we are experiencing a second shift: the music video effect.

While videos of musicians and songs existed in the 1960s and 1970s, these mostly don’t resemble the current understanding of a music video. A modern music video is a separate work of art that uses a piece of music as the predominant soundtrack for storytelling. This isn’t that they can’t be more than that — Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and Beyonce’s “Lemonade” album come to mind — but they usually stick close to the recorded sound. Sia’s “Chandelier” is an example of modern visual storytelling that uses the song as the primary audio.

Early music videos, rather than being a separate art form, were often recordings of live TV performances, or weren’t far off from that format. Here’s The Monkees’s “Daydream Believer” as an example of the fake concert format.

These early videos weren’t much beyond advertising for tickets to live concerts and for album sales. Notable exceptions to this were long-form videos like Elvis’s “Jailhouse Rock” and The Beatles’s “A Hard Day’s Night.”

Compressing two decades of music video history, it’s enough to say that the biggest change to the value of music videos came in August 1981 when MTV first went on the air. The story I had always been told by my dad was that the first video played was The Buggles’s “Video Killed the Radio Star.” It is a story so pat, I doubted it, but a quick glance at wikipedia — your friend and mine! — suggests that it’s true. Now, because of the impact of MTV on young people, if an artist wanted to reach that market, they needed an arresting video in addition to a catchy radio hit. The forty years since then have only increased the emphasis placed on music videos, and even prioritized them over the development of albums. According to my friend’s own MA research (unpublished thesis entitled How TikTok is Changing the Music Industry), it is more cost efficient in the Spotify and TikTok world to have a handful of well-made and highly-produced singles with music videos than to build the narrative of an album that would have three-quarters of its tracks commercial non-starters. Most pop music consumers today are only looking for individual tracks anyway. The TikTok connection to videos is obvious, as it’s a visual medium, but even Spotify will often show music videos while streaming if the app is up on the phone or computer. That a streaming audio service is attempting to capitalize on the music video phenomenon is indicative of how prevalent this format is in the modern music industry.

Where the music video effect gets really interesting — to me — is the relationship between music videos and non-current popular music. Today, we have access to 150 years of recorded sound and each era has modern fans. One of my favorite digital archives and preservation projects is the UCSB Cylinder Audio Archives, with a close second being the Library of Congress National Jukebox. These platforms allow modern music lovers to hear everything from the latest vaudeville hit of 1899 (“Hello My Baby” anyone?) to home recordings of unidentified children singing folk songs. While I’m sure that there are early sound fans creating videos for some of these recordings, the majority of early sound fans on YouTube prioritize the physical medium. Their videos are often simply a turn table or phonograph playing the music, sharing the early album with you, the viewer. I suspect that these earliest recordings are less susceptible to the music video effect simply because they are niche markets with dedicated fans of the aesthetic. The goal of a digital rendition is not to bring modern aesthetics to the era, but to introduce modern music lovers to the aesthetics of a previous era.

There is, however, a pre-MTV era of music that is still commercially viable and widely popular: the classic rock of the 1960s and 1970s. Not all of the hits from the early music video days had videos made because it was an expensive extra. More than that, hindsight can tell us what tracks have stood the test of time. “Purple Haze”, for example, was considered a flop upon release, and now it’s one of Jimi Hendrix’s most well-known tracks. Why waste the money on a video if you weren’t even sure the song would be popular? Classic rock is thus the only genre that both has a large, active fanbase, and doesn’t currently have in-period music videos to bring into the digital, visual world. They also are still all under copyright. Because of this visual gap, in the past 5-10 years, many record companies have started producing officially licensed music videos to bring these beloved hits to a new market. There are three main categories for how to structure these videos: listening community, artistic community, and retrospective.

The first category is the celebration of the listening community. The first song that I noticed having had a modern music video made fits this category: Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer.”

The music video is simple and doesn’t even include the singer, but it instead highlights the listener. “Tiny Dancer” has been a part of people’s listening experience since it’s release in 1971 and has been loved for all of those fifty years (although it technically wasn’t a commercial success as it never topped the charts). The newly crafted music video shows the viewer snapshots of the lives of the many people who listen to Elton John, and invites us to link our experience with theirs. Rather than highlighting a new work or an artist, this video celebrates the long-lasting cultural power of a hit song. The artist is important, the song is important, but the listening community built around it is where its current value lies.

The second category is also a variant on community. “Artistic community” specifically refers to the community that the artist has built. An example of this I saw recently (it’s what prompted this article!) is George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord.”

The music video for this song is a fun romp telling the story of a secret spy organization, and has nothing to do with the song content. For this star-studded video, it is clear that the artist — who is posthumously present in the film — had had all of his friends asked if they wanted to make a film. This video is just a goofy and entertaining introduction for viewers who might be unfamiliar with the song. The non-topical video also in no way impedes the enjoyment of a long-time fan.

The final type of new video for an old tune is the nostalgic retrospective. An example of this is the new video for The Beatles’s “Here Comes the Sun.”

It’s a beautiful video that references the source material, but it primarily highlights old footage from the band’s heyday. A viewer of this type of video is most likely already familiar with the source material and the context for the nostalgia. This style is the hardest video for a newcomer to appreciate, but perhaps the easiest for a long-time fan. This style also feels closest to a fan video with an actual budget, so the only novelty here is the official sponsorship from the record label.

The thing that all three of my examples have in common is that they are mega-hits. It is a low-risk financial investment for a recording company to make a video for one of these tried-and-true songs. The Lovin’ Spoonful or Lulu aren’t likely to be eligible for officially licensed videos any time soon, no matter how popular they may have been in their own time. Personally, I hope that more videos are made in the first two categories, as I find both of them significantly more fun than simply being sad about times gone by. Feel free to share any examples of the music video effect that you’ve seen in your own corner of the internet — I’m always looking for more fun videos to watch!

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Having a social life interferes with blogging

Socializing with Tegan’s colleagues, so today you get a discussion of animals that abuse the rules of Physics.

“Animals are the NPCs, plants are the boss.”

– Kayleigh

Edit: Met some cool people, including an Uillean piper who was at the table we ended up sitting at, and joined us to chat about the joys of playing double-reed instruments and gig musicianship.

Tegan Tuesday: Art, Disability, and “Real Jobs”

One of the most common themes of this blog is an unending rage against the way our society devalues humanity. Usually, this is focused on the fairly direct destruction of life for profit. Unfortunately, that’s not where it ends. Both Abe and I have been involved in education for a long time, and we’ve both been frustrated by the way the education system — and by extension, society — treats art as a luxury. As frustrating as that is, it gets worse when you enter the workforce. Art, in all its forms, has always been vitally important to every human society we have ever known about. Those societies we remember best and know the most about, tend to be the ones that invested some of their excess, when they had it, into art and culture. But just as human life must be sacrificed for profit, so to must human enjoyment, because funding art for its own sake will not make anyone rich. Artists must either already have money, or scrabble to find the time and energy to do that work, on top of doing work for the benefit of others to make ends meet.

I am an artist. Therefore, I have had a lot of jobs. I have worked in sit-down restaurants, in commercial food prep, at farmer’s markets, in fast food and ice cream scooping; I have worked in translation and real estate; I have worked in gas stations, and theatres, and schools K-12 through graduate programs; I have answered phones and scrubbed toilets; I have worked in clients’ homes, in my home, in basements, in parks, and in churches. I have been working constantly for the past 18 years, and there are very few areas of employment that I have not had some experience. I work and work and have almost always been poor, because I have never lived in places that were cheap while working a job that paid enough to build savings. Amusingly, I also made too much to merit assistance, as Abe and I found out when we initially became a single-income household — in one of the most expensive cities in the US — and we were eligible for $15 of food stamps per month. In all of these jobs, my problems with it were rarely my coworkers, and even-more-rarely the clients. I’m an extreme extrovert with ADHD — I like how a customer-facing role is wildly different from day to day and even the most bizarre (non-violent) encounter with the general public just makes for a great story, and doesn’t actually impact my life significantly. No, usually my problems lie squarely with my bosses or the company higher ups.

I’ve had a boss who drunktexted my coworkers and installed spyware on our computers. I’ve had multiple bosses who would watch the security feeds and call to ask questions about what they were watching. I’ve had bosses who preferred to hire 16-year-olds because unexperienced workers don’t notice the many, many, labor violations employees are required to perform. I’ve been fired by text and I’ve been replaced by someone I trained without the notice of being demoted or fired. On one memorable occasion, I had an argument with a boss about simple arithmetic. With all of these shining beacons of industry as my leaders, small wonder that some of my favorite employment has been self-employed.

This goes beyond simple preference, as well. If one person is drained enough by their work that they can’t make themselves do extra on the side, another may have problems – like neurological disorders or physical disability, that mean they hit that point where they can’t work more faster, depending on working conditions. For a non-insignificant portion of the population, self-employment has often been the only employment. Writer Siobhan Ball recently headed a twitter thread discussing the intersection of “real jobs” and disabled lives.

The discussion is filled with artists and freelancers of all types: writers, musicians, visual artists, sex workers. Many of the “real jobs” come with requirements that are physically, mentally, or legally not possible for large swathes of the population. I think back to one of my theatre jobs, which was impossible for someone with mobility issues. Even if I was able to get into the theatre next door to make one of their employees run the service lift for me for every shift, I still would not have been able to use the bathroom, as there were two steps from the floor up into the stall. Many jobs also have high mental strain. Anyone who has ever worked retail or even observed the astounding lack of humanity that shoppers unleash upon the staff can picture how those types of service jobs have an emotional (and often physical) toll upon the employees. Call center employees are worse-off still than retail for a mental and emotional load. The legal restrictions on disabled folks is even shittier. I know in the US there are caps on the amount that someone on disability can have in savings (and it’s small, it’s something like $1000) and restrictions on how many hours they are allowed to work or how much money they can make in those hours. This video by Jessica Kellgren-Fozard, a disability activist, does a decent overview of some of those issues. But running an Etsy merch shop, or doing cam work, or writing and editing freelance are all jobs that have less oversight, work around a person’s schedule and needs, and are just flexible in all the ways that life can require.

We need people to do these jobs! There’s no question that they provide great value to all of our lives. As discussed at the beginning, art is an important part of what we are. When we had to cope with isolation during lockdowns, we turned to art. We read more, we watched more movies, we listened to more music, we watched more YouTube, and yes, more people joined OnlyFans too. Art gives us connection with other people, and that was at a premium during the past few years of pandemic. But even is it uses the work of artists, of freelancers, of those casually employed in non-“real” jobs, society as a whole hasn’t bothered to appreciate this work anymore than it has what was recently called “essential” work. If we as a society don’t value artists, and don’t value disabled people, how much worse is the disabled artist?

I’m just as guilty as the next person — I see post after post on social media of people who are disabled, or neurodivergent, or queer, or just poor, and who are raising funds by selling art and I have a gut reaction to wonder why they can’t just “get a real job”. I am not sure if there’s the possibility to change our acceptance of this labor as valid without also decoupling a person’s worth in our society from their ability to work. It seems like a massive undertaking, but it’s a task that needs doing. For now, it’s a good day to remind ourselves: each person has value just by being themselves and deserves to live their life without “earning” that value through an approved from of labor.

Abe here – f you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into this. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Video: Post-Satire Capitalism

I don’t know if satire is dead, but a lot of this video gets at how I’ve been feeling for a while now. Life has a sort of surreal quality, with the cheerleaders of capitalism becoming ever more cartoonish in their praises for murderous profiteers. How is it that these people have so much power? How is this supposed to be the best the world can be?

How can this possibly last?

It can’t.

If you like this content, consider giving to Leon’s patreon.

An Educational Series: It’s Black History Month and We Whites Are All Going to STFU and Listen

One of the most important lessons I learned growing up was the importance of listening to people whose experience is different from my own. It’s not a lesson I can remember learning one day, nor is it one I learned particularly quickly. I like to think I’ve gotten the hang of it now, but I have no doubt I’ve still got a long way to go.

Either way, it’s helpful to be reminded to listen, from time to time, and to have people who take the time to make it easier to do so. My fellow blogger Iris Vander Pluym, of Death to Squirrels is one such person, and I’d like to draw your attention to the series she has been working on this month: It’s Black History Month and We Whites Are All Going to STFU and Listen.

The series touches on black history and activism, and while a lot of it is focused on the United States, it also touches on global issues. I particularly appreciated this talk by Mallence Bart-Williams

[…]

Of course the West needs Africa’s resources, most desperately, to power airplanes, cell phones, computers and engines. And the gold and diamonds of course: a status symbol, to determine their powers by decor, and to give value to their currencies. One thing that keeps me puzzled, despite having studied finance and economics at the world’s best universities, the following question remains unanswered:

Why is it that 5,000 units of our currency is worth one unit of your currency, when we are the ones with the actual gold reserves?

It’s quite evident that the aid is in fact not coming from the West to Africa, but from Africa to the Western world. The Western world depends on Africa in every possible way, since alternative resources are scarce out here.

So how does the West ensure that the free aid keeps coming?

By systematically destabilizing the wealthiest African nations and their systems, and all that backed by huge PR campaigns, leaving the entire world under the impression that Africa is poor and dying, and merely surviving on the mercy of the West.

Well done, Oxfam, UNICEF, Red Cross, Life Aid, and all the other organizations that continuously run multimillion-dollar advertisement campaigns depicting charity porn, to sustain that image of Africa, globally. Ad campaigns paid for by innocent people under the impression to help with their donations. While one hand gives under the flashing lights of cameras, the other takes, in the shadows. We all know the dollar is worthless, while the euro is merely charged with German intellect and technology, and maybe some Italian pasta. How can one expect donations from nations that have so little?

It’s super sweet of you to come with your colored paper in exchange for our gold and diamonds.

But instead, you should come empty-handed, filled with integrity and honor. We want to share with you our wealth and invite you to share with us.

The perception is that a healthy and striving Africa would not disperse its resources as freely and cheaply, which is logical. Of course. It would instead sell its resources at world market prices, which in turn would destabilize and weaken Western economies, established on the post-colonial free-meal system. Last year, the IMF reports that six out of ten of the world’s fastest growing economies are in Africa, measured by their GDP growth. The French treasury, for example, is receiving about 500 billion dollars, year in, year out, in foreign exchange reserves from African countries based on colonial debt they forced them to pay. Former French president Jacques Chirac stated in an interview recently that we have to be honest and acknowledge that a big part of the money in our banks comes precisely from the exploitation of the African continent.

In 2008, he stated that without Africa, France will slide down in the rank of a Third World power.

[…]

I’ve mentioned before how war, espionage, assassination, and debt are all used to maintain the so-called poverty of Africa, while enriching the “former” colonial powers. Those of us in wealthy nations who do talk about this stuff naturally focus on the crimes being committed by our nations. It’s an important aspect of what’s going on, particularly because I feel it’s our duty to do what we can at our end to stop these injustices from which we benefit.

Bart-Williams describes Sierra Leone as the richest country on Earth, and she makes a powerful case to support this claim, and ties it directly to the people of Sierra Leone, and to the artists she has worked with. Understanding is a prerequisite for real justice, and as Iris says, that often means we need to STFU and listen. Check out the video at the link above, or if you prefer a transcript with images, Iris has provided that as well.

This series has one post for each day through February, and each has links to those that came before. That means that in addition to checking out everything else Iris has posted this month, you should also revisit Death to Squirrels for the rest of this month to make sure you’ve seen the whole series.

 

Tegan Tuesday: The National Black Doll Museum needs your help!

“The National Black Doll Museum has a three-fold mission: to nurture self-esteem, to promote cultural diversity, and to preserve the history of black dolls by educating the public on their significance.” – Mission statement of The National Black Doll Museum of History and Culture

I only recently learned about this interesting museum, The National Black Doll Museum, that used to be housed in Mansfield, MA. For all I lived in Massachusetts for 12 years, I rarely explored the many small and unusual museums in the area. The NBDMHC has a collection of over 7000 Black dolls, and the oldest dolls are from the late 18th century. This isn’t just about the past, however, as these dolls are equally loved and displayed with Black Panther action figures. Although many doll museums include Black dolls in their collections, prior to 2020, this museum was the only physical museum in the US dedicated to Black dolls specifically.

The museum got its start from the personal collection of the founder, Debra Britt, who used to take her private doll collection on tours to women’s shelters or community centers to share the history and communal heritage as the Doll E Daze Project. The museum, which is a 501(c) 3 non-profit, still supports this community outreach as well as a number of workshops and educational resources. The workshop on the Power of Play looks at the impact of Black dolls on the self-pride and explores the stories of Black activists post-Reconstruction through today; The workshop on African wrap dolls works to preserve this important cultural handcraft; and the museum offers support and assistance for geneology research as well. For a project focused around children’s toys, the staff involved have found ways to connect with many aspects of the Black community at all stages of life.

But, unfortunately for the project, 2020 was a difficult year for them, like so many others. With the lack of school engagements, workshops, or in-person celebrations, the museum lost their space in Mansfield due to lack of funding. However, all is not lost! Attleboro, MA has set aside land for cultural development and is interested in working with the National Black Doll Museum to relocate to the new area. But they need funding to do so. The current phase of fundraising has a goal of $100,000 and a deadline at the end of the month — February is Black History Month after all! So I hope that you, much like myself, find the concept exciting and the project worthwhile, and will help to make the new location a reality. Let’s let this understudied aspect of history have a chance to shine again!

Spirit photography and cults

Hey, didja know that this blog is part of a larger blogging network? I know! It’s true! Unfortunately, I’ve been a less-than-exemplary community member over the last couple years. International moves seem to use up a lot of my energy, so I just kinda turned into a hermit. In the name of doing better about that, I’ll be cross-posting more stuff from my fellow Freethought Bloggers, starting with this:

There is a very strong desire among some segments of the population to make contact with dead people. This desire has been exploited by charlatans, people who claim that (for a fee, of course) they can channel your loved ones. The methods used have varied over time. In the US, the rise in interest in communicating with the dead coincided with the Civil War that saw massive numbers of dead people that left their families devastated and seeking some form of comfort.

I’ve found the occult fascinating for years, both as a social and psychological phenomenon, and because I enjoy the aesthetics. I think that the phenomena behind both occult fads and cults are related, and that’s something we’d do well to consider as we continue into this century of high technology and climate chaos. At times it’s hard not to feel like the world is ending, and with the predicted rise in death and destruction, I think a lot of people are going to end up turning to strange places for help. I also think that with traditional Christianity being so closely tied to political leadership in the United States, a lot of younger people are going to prefer things that don’t remind them of the folks who seem to be screwing everything up. Reading Mano’s post made me think of this Tumblr thread Tegan came across a little while back:

 

https://ruimtetijd.tumblr.com/post/675903941497765888/my-hypothesis-is-that-in-like-10-years-gen-z-is

Check out Mano’s post (there’s a neat video there!), and maybe spread this post (or the Tumblr post) around, because I’m pretty sure this is going to be one of those aspects of history we’d do well to learn from.