clapclap.org is serially monomaniacal

Thursday, March 6, 2008

Butchered, Again

Via a Metafilter commenter, the definitive version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah."

Labels: hallelujah, videos

Thursday, February 28, 2008

That Said, The Traditional Video Form Can Still Work Well

Cutting between multiple locations is OK as long as those locations all include Kenneth from 30 Rock.

Labels: videos

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

"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

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

The Genius of the System

Maura's suggestion that a future Britney video involve dolphins, along with the impressive crappiness of the "Gimme More" video, leads me to a modest proposal. If producers can seize upon Britney's image to make brilliant songs (as, critics tell us, they are doing), then why can't directors?

Therefore, I suggest we get Richard Kelly to make a kind of sequel to GnR's Use Your Illusion video trilogy, but with Britney's Blackout. A brief outline:

1) "Gimme More" - Britney, pale and glassy-eyed, lies on a blanket in the desert, wearing a binkini. As she rises, we see that all around her lie corpses rotting in the blazing sun.

Quick cut to Britney in an SUV, driving down Sunset at night. A man lies in the backseat, be-stubbled, who could pass for either Justin or K-Fed; an empty baggie sticks to his fingers. He rouses himself and leans over the frontseat. When Britney looks in the rearview mirror, he appears to have fangs. And a cape. And some sort of medallion.

Cut to a dance sequence, filmed inside the TWA terminal at JFK. Britney and a group of nearly identical-looking dancers all wear Donna Reed outfits (poofy dresses, pearls, heels, etc.). The choreography is a mix between tae-bo and a hoedown. This is intercut with Britney and Justin/K-Fed speeding toward a fault that's opened in the middle of LA. Justin/K-Fed tries to warn Britney, and gets increasinly desperate, screaming in her ear and grabbing her arm. At the same time, we see from above that an airplane has lost control and is tearing toward the exact spot where Britney is about to go into the bowels of the earth. The dancers all kick off the high-heeled shoe on their right foot directly at the camera, which swooshes down the line. Phantasmagoric toddlers float across Britney's field of vision. In the airplane, the pilots are eating Tofutti Cuties, seemingly unaware of their impending doom. The dancers fall to their knees, throw their heads back, and stick out their chests. Britney's car sails off the cliff and is hit by the nose of the plane. In slo-mo, we see the pilots waving jauntily to Britney. At the last possible moment, she and Justin/K-Fed launch out of the sunroof, with Britney growing wings and fluttering up into the now-peaceful night. As water floods the TWA terminal and the dancers form into something that looks like a cake in the overhead shots, Britney releases Justin/K-Fed, and he is caught by two cherubic angels, who ferry him gently to earth. Britney lands in the Hollywood Hills, where a tractor is on fire, for some reason. The dancers light sparklers. Maya Rudolph gives a thumbs-up.

2) "Piece of Me" - The video opens, sans music, with a shot of the Vegas Strip. As the song begins, all the lights blink on and off in unison with the beat of the song; when the lights are off, the people disappear. Britney walks into shot from behind the camera, wearing a wedding dress and carrying a bunch of roses in her swinging right arm. She walks confidently straight down the middle of the road as the camera cranes up. Now the lights are only on for one beat out of four, but when they are, the people are noticing Britney, pointing and taking pictures. The camera settles to a stop at a high angle and we can see that at the end of the strip, visible only when the rest of the lights are off but illuminated a brilliant neon white, is a small chapel. The camera crash-zooms in, and standing in front with his hands clasped piously is Rupert Murdoch, in a priest's outfit. Seeing Britney, he smiles a toothy smile. His teeth are buttons from a touch-tone telephone.

The dance sequence begins, taking place inside the main newsroom of the new New York Times building. The coed dancers are dressed in His Girl Friday outfits; if possible, actual New York Times writers and editors are used. Up front and center, Britney pretends like she's operating a hand computer like in Minority Report while, in the background, the dancers execute an acrobatic routine between the two levels of the newsroom, bouncing off trampolines that have been put in the cubicles, vaulting over the handrails on the upper level, and swiveling in and out of the conference rooms. When Britney turns, we see she has "KISS SLUT GIRL" written on her bare back in sharpie.

In the chapel, Britney walks agressively toward the altar but is spun around by something running past her and snatching the roses from her hand. She looks on with confusion as a leprecheun runs in slow motion out the chapel doors; Rupert Murdoch maintains his beatific smile, and once the leprechaun is past, he raises his right hand and gives Britney a fluttery wave. He is joined by all the nightly news anchors (except Jim Lehrer), who are also wearing religious clothes, and they perform a sort of Vaudeville kickline. Britney stomps her heel on the floor and the chapel rumbles. The anchors slink out, chagrined, and Rupert takes his place at the altar, adjusting his collar and regaining his composure.

This begins to be intercut with two different sets of images. In one, Britney is dressed in her Mickey Mouse Club outfit, which is torn and dirty, and slumps in an alley as rain falls. In the other, Britney lies in a fancy kitchen in the middle of the night as lights flash outside, blood running down her throat. We see a pair of male hands shaking. The dancers all gather on the main floor and form a flying V, with some dancing on the cubicle walls and others perched on the bannisters. Britney is joined at the altar by a fat, ugly man wearing a pinstriped suit and a monacle. She looks at him with horror, but Rupert performs the ceremony, and with a grand gesture, opens the back wall of the chapel to reveal a concert stage and a screaming mob of fans. He holds out a headset mic and we watch from Britney's POV as she puts it on. From the crowd's perspective, we see that she's now wearing the bikini we saw at the beginning of the first video. The lights rise to a whiteout and we cut to the house, where the camera turns to reveal that the person standing over Britney is a giant baby, with manhands. Justin/K-Fed bursts through the door in his Dracula outift and does an absurdly exaggerated double-take.

3) "Get Naked (I Got a Plan)" - Britney, dressed in Flashdance regalia, stands alone on the deck of a whaling ship. She tries to do a dance to the music but keeps missing her steps and falling over herself when she's not ambling listlessly across the floor. In the clouds, Ally Sheedy appears and shakes her head sadly. A siren flashes and the deck opens up, plunging Britney into a giant cube of petroleum jelly. She falls through it and lands on the darkened streets of a Japanese city. No one recognizes her. She gestures desperately to the passers-by, but when she does, they go wide-eyed and seem to have seizures. The seizures resolve themselves into something like dance moves. As she proceeds down the street, the people who start dancing get more and more out-of-control until they finally clutch their eyes and scream in pain as their skin tears off, and they fall to the ground, smoking. The camera cuts to an overhead shot and zooms out to reveal that the people who started dancing caused the people near them to start dancing, who then infect the people near them, and from a shot above the buildings it appears as concentric circles of smoking bodies, with Britney's brilliant blonde hair as the center. She turns desperately, trying to deny the horror of what she's inadvertantly done. She closes her eyes, shakes her head, and sprouts wings again. She ascends into the sky, trailing the bodies of those she's killed like a flock of birds. As they cross the Pacific, she can see below her dolphins having really dirty sex. They smile and wave to her with their fins. A long shot shows Britney at the point of this cloud of corpses.

She reaches Los Angeles and flies over the whole city, now in ruins and cracked down the middle. Its denizens dance madly in the street until they, too, fall skinless to the ground. Their bodies float gently upwards to join the cloud. Britney stops at the edge of a desert, face-to-face with another winged Britney. Other-Britney gestures and the corpses fall to the ground, scattering themselves around the dry, cracked earth. They both look down to see Britney in a binkini from the first video. The two winged Britneys nod at each other and hold out their hands as if they were controlling puppets. All the corpses and bikini-Britney rise jerkily to their feet. In a shot of binkini-Brit, we see next to her the corpses of two small children. From above, we watch as winged Britneys choreograph a grand dance routine. As the song ends, we see a closeup of binkini-Brit, still glassy-eyed and pale, grinning a hideous grin.

Labels: blackout, britney, richard kelly, videos

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Videos featuring high school gyms

Film your video at a high school gym and you're doing something very particular--you're trying to emphasize the teenage-ness of the music, whether ironically or sincerely, successfully or un. Here are some attempts, all linked by gyms, even if the music doesn't suggest any link at all.

Wheatus - "Teenage Dirtbag"