It’s that time of year again. Soon, celebrities will be putting on their finest terrible outfits and ridiculous shoes and wobbling into assorted spotlights and parties organized for one of the more anachronistic events on the annual calendar.
Or: MTV’s Video Music Awards turn 29 this year.
I didn’t grow up watching the VMAs. I was either too young or it was too much hassle, or, later, I had opted-out of popular culture and didn’t care about awards shows.
Now that I’ve re-engaged with the world, I think it’s interesting that a channel that no longer regularly plays music videos is still handing out awards for them, and that those awards still mean something to the performers who receive them, largely because they did grow up watching the VMAs.
And as much as the VMAs are something of a hollow spectacle these days, more a contest to see who can be more outrageous than an exercise in recognizing excellence, now I tune in.
Why?
Because I do care about music videos, in the abstract as cultural moments, and in the specific as works of art.
I think music videos are important. They have so many uses: illustrating the song, conveying the band’s attitude and/or artistic sensibilities, telling a story, or just serving as a method of transmission.
What MTV did, when they played videos, was recognized an art form – videos pack a lot into a small amount of time and screen-space – and allowed us, as viewers, to develop a shared visual vocabulary, as well as created shared cultural touchstones.
Arguably you can do the same thing watching videos on the internet, but what you won’t get is the other thing that MTV provided, via the VJs: context and curation.
So what I’m going to do, between now and the end of the month, is what MTV does not do any more: I’m going to post some videos and talk about them.
I’m going to share the old, the new, the interesting, the hilarious (unintentionally and otherwise), the weird, and the wonderful.
Here, to start off, is NIN with Head Like A Hole, from Pretty Hate Machine, from 1989. The video was released in 1990, and I have fond memories of waiting impatiently by the television for it to come up in rotation. It was in the same cycle as Metallica’s One, for a while; I used to mute Metallica while I waited, though eventually did come around to Metallica, too.
I liked it because it was weird and vaguely dangerous and a portal to another world that may as well have been another planet, where furious (and beautiful) dudes howled their defiance, and also because it has that solid industrial beat.
Twenty three years later, Trent Reznor is a married Grammy-winning adult, and I still sing this song in the shower.
