Music videos once changed the music industry, for worse and for better. But their time has passed for good, says Michael Stipe.
""It is what it is, and I think anyone who refutes that is an idiot in 2008," he told the Associated Press. "We can all agree as a medium music videos really found their place inpop culture in the 1990s, [but they've been] replaced by the Internet inthe 21st century."
The revelation is an odd one, considering that Stipe made his case after his band paid the Canadian advertising company Crush, Inc. to create visuals for its latest single, "Man-Sized Wreath," portions of which were premiered recently at R.E.M.'s Madison Square Garden performance Thursday night. That followed on the heels of two videos from the rock legend's latest, loudest effort Accelerate, including "Supernatural Superserious" and "Hollow Man," both of which are viewable on R.E.M.'s YouTube channel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADFJGENj92E And then there are the notoriously inaccessible vids R.E.M. made before they metamorphosed from underground upstarts to mainstream superstars. My preferred favorite track and vid is "Harborcoat," at right, but you can check out the poignant "Driver 8," the low-budget "Wolves, Lower" or the maddening "It's the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)" for examples of what the band turned out before the videos for "Losing My Religion" and "Everybody Hurts" set the production bar far too high for the medium to recover.
To be fair, R.E.M.'s new videos have been sliced, diced and outsourced to net surfers, an interactive wrinkle that did not exist before the age of Google and YouTube. Today, fans can download clips and outtakes from the "Supernatural Superserious" supersite and concoct their own visuals, albeit using more or less the same materials. The next step in music promotion's evolution has yet to emerge, Stipe explains.
"That's the itch that we're trying to scratch," he told the AP, "or the question we're trying to answer."
That itch is easily scratched: Let fans make whatever videos they want, whenever they want, and post them wherever they want, whenever they want. What difference does it make? If music videos are dead, then it is hard to believe that any band, much less progressives like R.E.M., would have problems with fans (and it usually is fans, not haters) putting music they like to visuals they like, rather than ones provided for them by officialdom. After all, money-hungry dork Ben Stein just did it to John Lennon's "Imagine" for a so-called documentary on so-called intelligent design, and flattened protestations from Yoko, Sean and more in court.
Music videos aren't dead, they're just dying, and they're dying because of bloated videos like "Everybody Hurts." When fans can use their favorite songs to make their amateur films without fear of losing their comparatively miniscule cookie jars, then the new age of promotional video will be here at last.
And it will stay for good.
Photo: R.E.M.
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