"Flashing Lights" and Stylization

People are properly losing their shit about Kanye's "Flashing Lights" video, in no small part because of the "sudden ending" (or "possibly to be continued ending") that brings up a number of contemporaneous cousins--"Trapped in the Closet," the Sopranos finale, etc. But that's not really the context in which it's placing itself, and the ending--which is pleasing as hell, to be sure, but not particularly novel--isn't the most important part of the video. To understand why this video is so important within its medium, we need to take a ride back through time.

When MTV emerged at the beginning of the 80s, its style was totally new, or at least totally new to the mainstream. The video language that is so easy to mock now was transformative then, and not just to aesthetics. By introducing jump cuts and extreme stylization as not just possible techniques but techniques that people would really respond to, MTV can be blamed for the horrors of newsmagazines, sure, but also for Arrested Development, Kill Bill, and all sorts of things that thoughtlessly get called "postmodern." What gets communicated through style trails substance behind; there might not be all that much to most early MTV videos, but they legitimated an artistic technique that could be used in very substantive ways indeed.

And yet, as I say, it's a style that we now mock--and with good reason. The problem muisc videos have as a medium is that the two basic video structures established in the first 2 years of MTV are the only two that have ever been employed with any regularity. The first, which we'll get to in a second, is the standard-issue music video with lots of jump cuts and performance scenes and sets and outfits and no particular coherency. The other, the "mini-movie" video, starts with "Thriller" in 1983 and doesn't really go anywhere from there--it still pops up every once in a while (an Idolator commenter mentioned JT's "What Goes Around") but it hasn't really changed very much. And that's it. That describes almost all music videos, whatever the genre, whatever the amount of money, whatever the year. (Except for one other strain, which "Flashing Lights" fits into--but that's for later, too.)

So it's easy to say, as has often been said around the clap clap household, that music videos these days suck. And while I don't know if the creators of "Flashing Lights" intended to offer a direct rebuke to that sentiment (presumably video auteur Kanye did not), the video makes a clear break with the past, though this might not be immediately obvious. At a certain level of abstraction, after all, it's just another video: hot girl, hot car, paltry plot, highly stylized. But the fact that it does manage to be so stylized is precisely what sets it apart. The music video as a form had become so calcified in its structure, so chained to its big-money past glories, that it had, in effect, ceased to be stylized. Videos had become too banal to be unreal. But stylization is the defining characteristic of music videos. Three minutes is simply not enough time to engage in any sort of character or narrative development; all it has is image. So what meaning it makes must emerge from the style. Music videos without style--which is to say, almost all music videos currently being made--are nothing at all.

The basic music video style is remarkably robust. After being thoroughly degraded by pop metal bands, 90s "cars and mansions" rap videos, along with grunge's "student art film," granted it a continued viability by placing new image-sets within the existing bounderies. But what are those bounderies? The basic form of a music video is to have a series of sets or locations, with which are paired outfits and/or props, to have the artist in some of these locations, and to cut between them for the duration of the video. You can have some of the locations be, say, barns (or places in Brooklyn) and some of the people in the locations not be band members, but almost all videos--including many mini-movies--stick to this scheme: 4+ disparate locations cut up and rearranged. A standard-issue music video presents numerous constructed images (the locations) and then explores them, as visuals, quickly.

Now look at the "Flashing Lights" video again. You'll notice, I hope, that it does not do this at all. Instead, it presents one image and explores it slowly, and it's able to do that is because the image has depth. It is not just a set on which to dance, but something with multiple levels that reveal themselves over time. What happens over and over in this video is that things are revealed: the landscape reveals a car, the car reveals a woman, the woman takes off her clothes to reveal her underwear, the lighter reveals the fire, the fire reveals the woman's body (which is a very important element of the video, as Brandon Soderberg points out), the trunk is opened to reveal Kanye bound and gagged, the woman reveals the shovel, and when the camera pulls back to deny us exact knowledge of what she does with the shovel, it holds back on the final reveal and thus preserves the tension that all those reveals build up to. What started as an empty stretch of land has become something with characters, a plot, and flash. The cuts, if you will, are internal, are included in the image.

At the same time, it's no Empire. Though there's only one cut in the entire video (and a very effective one that a careful observer could go on about at some length), there's no attempt to present reality here. Quite the opposite. Again, it offers many of the same elements that music videos (and especially rap videos) usually do--hot, half-naked woman, luxury goods, explosions--but it uses them in an entirely new way. It is not just stylized, but hyper-stylized, so unreal that it becomes packed with meaning. Though it represents a repudiation of the traditional video structure, it is still very much in diaglogue with the video as a form. It's not critiquing the music video per se (though, again as Brandon points out, it's arguably critiquing a particular kind of video), but offering an alternate model for how videos could be made. Instead of creating maximalist but two-dimensional sets, create one tightly-packed image that you can then explore, whose levels you can allow to escape one by one.

As I say above, this is not necessarily a new form. Dance music videos, particularly those from the "electronica" boom, often used this basic form of a slowly-evolving single image to mirror the different structure of the music that was being presented. Other videos do something similar--U2's "Lemon," for instance, or perhaps Michel Gondry's iterative video for Bjork's "Bachelorette." But the only one that does almost the exact same thing is Spike Jonze's video for California's "Wax," which consists of a single slow-motion shot, taken from a bus window, of a man running down the street while on fire. And guess who co-directed the "Flashing Lights" video? Yep: Jonze.



Jonze isn't ripping himself off, though. While the "California" video isn't just an image of a guy on fire, given the slow reveal of the scene and the punchline at the end of him hailing a bus, you'd be hard-pressed to say that there was a lot of richness or levels to the video. The basic image, as a whole, has a lot of meaning, but with "Flashing Lights" Jonze has clearly one-upped himself by making a kind of puzzle box that unlocks itself before your eyes. It's not just a fantastic piece of art, but a path for music videos to follow, once they stop pining for an era of huge budgets that is never going to return.

Labels: kanye, spike jonze, style, videos

posted by Mike B. @ 9:36 PM