A month and a half ago

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 27 February 2006 11:24:35

I was watching a DVD of music videos.

It was a collection of all the videos made by a certain band, dating from 1976 to 1996, and it was fun to watch the development from simple performance videos in the early days through to mini-films which seemed to be virtually independent of the music.

I can hardly stand watching any of the later ones, and much prefer a straight video of the band playing.

But what really struck me is how absurd the whole notion of a music video is - music is something we listen to, and nothing else. And yet, because television came along, somebody felt the need to broadcast music on television, and so there needed to be some pictures to go along with that. Of course at first they just showed the people playing the music, presumably because somebody thought that the reason people go to see live music is to watch the musicians playing (as opposed to enjoying the experience of hearing *live* music and the communal experience of hearing music together with hundreds of others). Soon people realized how boring that was and decided to show films instead. Is it any wonder that music on television is not as popular as it was? And is it perhaps just a natural consequence of the development of TV that music is now dying out - record shops practically don't exist any more and those that still exist now sell more DVDs than CDs. I wonder if this was all entirely predictable from the development of TV, but simply took a little longer than was expected, because music managed to find a few tricks to delay its decay.

Having also been watching footage from Live8 and T in the park lately, it also struck me how much gigs have started to emulate music videos. Having been told by TV that there's no point just listening to music and that there has to be something good to see as well, bands now have to put on a show, and if they can't do that then they beam their latest video onto a screen behind the stage that dwarfs the band themselves.

And you know what? I think it's all really quite a good thing. Getting music off TV is great because then we can get back to what music's really good for - listening to. And as the big gigs get sillier and more confused, there'll be a market for more modest-sized gigs where the band and audience are completely clear about what they're doing - playing music for people to listen to and enjoy the miracle of music being created live. In fact, I rather suspect this is already happening. You might even say it's been happening since 1976.

Ironically, two days ago I was at just such a small gig which was absolutely fantastic and reminded me why I love live music. The irony is that I had seen the band on TV just a week or two beforehand.