Musings on Music Videos

Musings on Music Videos by Roxanne McDonald

Watching music videos for the first time in years was a stimulating experience—even without the weed.

I haven’t really watched more than one or two isolated music videos since the days when a bunch of made our own—before personal cams, before YouTube, and before, well, MTV, when a bunch of us would smoke up, turn on Wizard of Oz, turn off the sound, and play a Pink Floyd LP.

The days of discovering Dorothy would dance to “Money” and “Us and Them” have of course long since been replaced by the discovery of every TV medium music video programming format from MTV to Free Muse to SKYPE to Vh1.

Anyway.

I had the stimulating pleasure of catching some late

night/early morning Vh1 music performances on either “Fresh” or Nocturnal State” or one of those contemporary programs showing not yet oldies, not yet classics, but certainly prestigious pieces.

Mika doing “Grace Kelly” reminded me of Drop Dead Fred for some reason…maybe for Handa’s playful, bratty tone, body movements, and facial expressions.

Amy Whitehouse performing “You Know I’m no Good” sounds a little like Peggy Lee (vocally, not thematically) but looks alot like Tommy Lee.

Paolo Nutrini’s “New Shoes” was a happy, jaunty deal. And oh, my, God, is he ever gorgeous. That video could have been shot just three inches from his lips and I would have been equally riveted.

And Fiona Apple still has that heroin chic look going on? Or is that anemia? Or is the video with the interesting storyline– Fiona with a blue-collar boyfriend– just really old (of the skinny and sick-looking Fiona days??
Most moving vote goes, hands down to the music video by a band that every time I hear I again ask my friend, “Who’s this?” and he replies, “Nickelback.” Oh, yeah. I looooove this band, despite my inability to remember shit.

Nickelback does this brilliant piece, “If Everyone Cared,” sitting in a studio that has the style and grace of a concert hall. As they sing, “If everyone cared and nobody cried/If everyone loved and nobody lied/If everyone shared and swallowed their pride/Then we’d see the day when nobody died…,” the camera is on them, images of politically

responsible individuals (Betty Williams, Irish organizer and Nobel Prize winner; Bob Geldof, first to organize a worldwide charity concert [LiveAid]; Peter Benenson, brainfather of Amnesty International), and/or text that informs of the social/political victims that inspired the protests and charitable responses–like the Portuguese students imprisoned for toasting to freedom; the man who as a boy dreamed of freedom and then spent 27 years in shackles for fighting Aparteid, Nelson Mandela….
Of all the music videos I have seen over the decades, I would surmise that “If Everyone Cared” is by far the best in overall composition–lyrically, visually, and thematically….

And on a simpler but just as pleasant note, Mat Kearney’s “Nothing Left to Lose,” with his Bruce Springsteen looks, his driving around in a Cutlass looking for his love, and his use of back-and foreground images of mill towns and lumber trucks made me remember my life as a teen a small New England town, life when it was both harder and easier, life with good weed, good friends, and really good music…visuals or not.

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