It’s too bad the Age Of Blogging didn’t overlap the Age Of Music Video. The world could have wasted so much time writing about them. I'm reminded of this after watching the glorified podcast that is the remains of Muchmusic. They have a show called Retro Lunch, which defines "retro" as 70's, 80's and 90's, and "lunch" as 1-3 pm.
I had plenty of opinions on videos: black & white is over used, concert videos are a cop-out, ironically cheap videos never work, opening credits just look pretentious. But there is one truth above all: movie soundtrack videos always suck.
Okay, there are a few examples that work, but that's usually because they break out of the usual format of scenes of the band playing interspersed with random clips from the movie.
At the time, I recognized that this didn’t work, since it's just forgettable images of the band without even the energy of the concert videos, combined with movie scenes so brief that they don't really tell any story. The weakness of music videos was that they often devolved into random images, and movie videos were the worst example of this.
And it got worse if the song ended up being much more popular than the movie. A band does a song for a Julia Roberts vehicle, they use scenes from the movie in the video, then the movie tanks. Everyone forgets the movie, so they won't recognize where the clips come from. So now future generations will wonder how the band got Julia Roberts to be in one of their videos, and why they just had her appear in a few disjointed scenes.
This problem was bad enough when it was just a few years after the movie. But now it’s just surreal to see a song you remember, by a musician who’s a legend, with scenes of a movie you don’t remember. You can’t even figure out what the movie is about from the short clips, and you’re trying to remember the name of that guy in the movie who was in that other thing with whatsisname.
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