Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Music videos - not so literal


While the songs of the day were coming from the Women Rock play list, one of the songs I considered using was Pink's "Please Don't Leave Me". I decided against it because of the video.

I like the song -- which covers fairly normal dysfunctional relationship issues -- a lot. The video is a little garish for me, so I hesitated to put it out there, but I probably still would have if the video represented the song better. The relationship in the video is abnormally dysfunctional, and seems to have pulled a lot of its inspiration from the movie Misery.

It's not intended to be taken seriously, but on the off chance that someone new to Pink was going to click on it, I went "Who Knew", which is not only a softer introduction, but also fits the mood of the song better.


Yesterday I wrote about how perfectly the video for "Della May" works for the song, but that does not mean that it is the only possible vision that could have worked. A good song has room for a lot of inspiration, and not taking the most obvious path can free you. There is an ache for a girl in "Take On Me", but nothing that automatically says that ache will pull the girl from out of a cafe and into a comic book.

I remember reading in the forum for "Dancing With The Stars" in its very first season. Someone was complaining because one couple had been criticized for trying to follow this story in their routine, and another couple was praised for the story behind theirs. The poster felt like it was a double standard, but even without looking at the two numbers it was so obvious what the judges meant.

Telling a story with a beginning, middle, and ending is one thing, and it is very common in books and movies and short fiction. With poetry and music the emotion is more important than a plot. If the song has a normal structure, with multiple verses separated by a chorus, it may be impossible for the images to fit the music and tell a strictly linear story. It doesn't mean that there's not a story, and having a story doesn't mean that you see all of it.

There's some freedom in realizing that. It can take you interesting places. Looking at My Chemical Romance, and the videos off of Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge, each one works perfectly in its own way. "Helena" is the most literal, where setting it at a funeral totally makes sense. The song "I'm Not Okay" is feels like it's more about a specific romantic relationship than alienation at school, but it works so well for alienation at school. The video for "The Ghost of You" is the furthest from what you would think hearing the song, but it's poignant, and the sense of loss is there.


I'm going to be referring to My Chemical Romance a lot in this series, but I am also going to be referring more than you might expect to Reggie and the Full Effect. I learned a lot from watching this:


"Get Well Soon" is off of Songs Not To Get Married To, the album inspired by James Dewees' divorce. Divorce is a downer of a subject, and I hear a lot of raw pain just listening to the song.

In the video, though, it's the Loch Ness Monster. That may relieve some emotional pressure just by being unexpected, but it doesn't remove it. Nessie is devastated and losing it. The excessive drinking, the aimless stumbling around, and the tears are all things that people do, but that it would be very uncomfortable to watch a person do, and it would be very hard to get the acting right. Having it be something not human allows us to understand the extent of the suffering without bearing the full brunt, and having it be an iconic monster like Nessie means that when he loses the lake, that means something to us.

Pretty good for a puppet.

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