I'm not sure it's possible to describe as much of the technology, digital culture and design of 1999 as well as this song and video did. I had long forgotten about it and many of the references it makes, thanks for reminding me!
The henchman carrying the ladder in the background stopping for 1 sec to go "aaah" is the best part. The next best part is whatever that dance move is called when the James Bond guy turns around from the wall and starts shaking his hand in time to the music.
Holly poops that was cool. If there truly was no editing after the fact, the lip-syncing on the flipbooks is impressive as hell, along with all of the effects going on in time with the beat. These guys are great.
Land of Confusion by Genesis. Made with super weird puppets of celebrities borrowed from a British TV show, timeless lyrics about how the world keeps getting dragged down by the people in it.
I like a video that turns the camera around and features real people, and these were extra-special in the time before stuff like easy video production and streaming.
But I especially like what the band Cake did with Short Skirt/Long Jacket, where they went around letting people preview the song and give their reactions on camera. And the reactions were... actually pretty mixed.
Weezer - Pork and Beans is a really interesting snapshot of YouTube in the late 2000s; you see all the big people of the day doing trends of the day while singing with the members of Weezer. If that doesn't sound awesome, I don't know what is. Plus Hero by the same band is a really interesting pandemic video that is one of the few "artist tries to relate to normal people during lockdown" things which actually work.
Catchy and fun pop, but honestly, the video seems a bit average? It might just be that I prefer fun catchy pop that makes me think just a tiny bit - like I did with Kyari Pamyu Pamyu when I first saw her. The thought being: "What just happened?"
Admittedly I only got into them because of Eurovision, but man I have been listening to so much Lord of the Lost. Somehow hadn't thought to look at any of their videos though! This was...eye opening 😆
Much of the music I happen to listen to is instrumental and/or comes from video games, with the occasional vocal song here and there, and if I had to share a music video it would be the finale song called Answers designed for the old release of Final Fantasy 14. Other things I'd share exist though.
I remember for a time I've listened to an internet radio station called RPGamers that specializes in game soundtracks, which most people listen to because the instrumentals make it easy to concentrate, and, perhaps because I needed a mood lightener, I'd spam requests for the Deckard Cain Rap, a silly rap song that plays as an Easter Egg in Diablo, to the eventually-discovered chagrin of listeners who without a doubt consider me a troll for it because the song for a while would get an overwhelming amount of dislikes/downvotes when it played. And just that tempts me to share that as well.
Imagine this. It's 1993. 3d computer images are extremely expensive to make and rare, and 3d animations are so time consuming that even the biggest budget movies only use tiny amounts of it. Even 2D computer generated stuff is rare.
The music videos are all just people with greenscreens set against backgrounds of hand-cut film with hand-drawn effects and special lighting and physical effects like smoke-machines. Songs are played with physical instruments, with maybe some electrical processing. And they're about love and tell stories, or they focus on the melodies and combinations of instruments.
And then one day you see this, without warning on saturday morning TV, in between those other music videos:
The dire straits video was definitely one of the big "whoa i have never seen this before" moments for animation, but I only saw it long after the release, so i unfortunately did not get to experience the novelty properly. Bless the Quantel Paintbox and the creative possibilities it unlocked though. Era-defining stuff.
Ok thats interesting and true. Maybe Music is not supposed to be only audio, but invoke a reaction by the listener. How a lot of videos contribute to that is beyong my understanding though. But there the music is most often also crap.