Spotify was playing ’90s Road Trip’ – a 14 hour 21 minutes ‘ultimate mix of songs from the 1990s to insure (sic) a good time while on the road’. As I approached a traffic signal with a bus belching 80s style smoke, on came Soundgarden‘s glorious 1994 track, ‘Black Hole Sun’. The sound from the phone on the dashboard was tinny, the truck in front of me with Union Jack mudflaps was unsure where it wanted to move. But the sudden rush of joy upon hearing Chris Cornell‘s cavernous voice and Kim Thayil’s siren-like guitar covered me in a protective sheath, away from the slowburn of 15 km/hr.
The song, and the ones that followed without any particular algorithm’n’blues logic bar their time period – Santana featuring Rob Thomas’ ‘Smooth’, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ ‘Learning to Fly’, The Cranberries’ ‘Dreams’… – also lurched me back to when I had heard/watched all these songs in their videos. Apart from the nostalgia, though, a question popped up in my head: Where are all the music videos?
Now, I am no Golden Ageist. I saw the demise of vinyls, the rise and complete destruction of cassettes, the domination of CDs and their economics-aided death, the advent of mp3-sharing entities like Napster, the hegemony of YouTube, the return of vinyls, and the streaming tap of Spotify. The music-delivering platforms kept changing with technology and time, but the music-listening experience remained. But where did watching the music go?
To be fair, it’s still there – on YouTube and Vevo. But like a Google search or a ChatGPT prompt, watching music videos, vintage or new, is like shopping for something you already know you want to shop – you choose a video of a song you already know about. With MTV and Channel V, you actually discovered music videos – and for the benefit of the new artist and her or his music company, new music to procure.
It was in 1984 in a pre-Grammy Awards programme on Doordarshan that I first stumbled across the B&W video of The Police’s ‘Every Breath You Take’ – the ashtray with cigarette smoke curling up and morphing into a drum skin being hit by a stick. It’s a cinematic moment stubbed in me forever.
As a format, the music video predates MTV – Music Television – especially here in India where each song sequence in a film is, per se, a music video. But unlike filmi song clips, the golden age of music videos of the 80s-90s popularised specially made 4-minute-odd films made with big record company budgets to promote an artist’s song. The video itself took on a separate, palpable, exciting life of its own from the music. To be sure, musicians still put out music videos. But apart from them mostly having a DIY flavour, they lack an on-tap outlet. Much of this has to do with most visual content, especially song-sized ones, being overwhelmingly consumed on phones these days. The phone’s multitasking function is not the best place to have music videos ‘on an open tab,’ where like a TV left on you can tend to other things until you’re suddenly struck by a particularly arresting music video/song. And unlike music, which you can listen to while, say, writing a Sunday column or driving, a music video needs full ocular attention.
But the music video is not dead the way technologically defunct CDs and cassettes are. With this generation’s in-built ADD and penchant for everything ‘made visual’ for them, the music video just needs to be taken out of its cryogenically frozen tank for more channelised consumption. What it needs, I realised as Duran Duran started ‘Ordinary World’ the moment I dodged a man on his phone crossing our lane, is its very own version of Spotify, or ‘video radio’.
