[OT] If I see one more music video with..

[formatk]

I make music videos, and i think that's pretty insane as they pay fuck all, and take up way too much time. Don't slate music video directors as we don't make them to earn a living, a lot of hard work and sleepless nights are put into them. Seriously though, I do think there are much better ways to promote artists than the regular music video, I'm currently working on a series of virals that do try and step away from the crappy hipster aesthetic you dislike. We're trying, but end of the day it's usually the artist/musician that asks for the crap that you don't like in the video. The directors' more interested in producing a slick nice piece of work to get them commercial work at the end of the day.

[Machinesworking]

that was pretty cool.

The 80's were the best time for music technology, it was a decade that provided the basis of everything we are using now - MIDI, digital recording, sampling, FM (available commercially at least), Wavetable/PCM and Additive synthesis, ....................The 80's were a much maligned time, but looking back, even the worst dross of that era doesn't seem so bad now, looking through my bitter, distorted rose tinted 2009 glasses.

Yeah, the thing is about the 60's 70's and 80's is music technology went through the roof. Actually the cheap availability of soft synths and DAWs is the big change in the 2000's, but so far the music isn't fully different than what came before... that's probably my lack of good references in the 90's and 80's though, now a group comes out and I can name their major influences, so I'm not sure anymore whether music isn't evolving at the pace it was in the 70's 80's, or if I just know too much at this point to hear the evolution?

[Nick the Zombie]

that was pretty cool.

The 80's were the best time for music technology, it was a decade that provided the basis of everything we are using now - MIDI, digital recording, sampling, FM (available commercially at least), Wavetable/PCM and Additive synthesis, powersynths such as the Jupiter 8, Prophet 10 and VS, Korg M1, ROland D50, Yamaha DX7, The Fairlight CMI, Synclavier and the PPG wave, drum machines that sounded a little bit like drums (and increasingly so, from the Linn at the beginning of the decade through to the Roland R8 with it's cool human rhythm features and add on ROM cards), and not just short noise bursts, multitrack recording, digital FX units, etc. and the birth of music video and MTV (oh well, you can't win them all ... ) In terms of music, we got so much variation in a way never repeated since. Nowadays the top 20 songs are almost all Hip Hop, RNB, or schmaltzy pop versions flavoured with hip hop and RNB, punctuated only by releases of big selling dinosaur bands like U2. The club scene hasn't moved on for the best part of 10 years, the same old crap in the mainstream clubs and mainstream club charts as was happening 10 years ago.

If you know you're history, it's enough to make your heart go .... boooooom. The 80's were a much maligned time, but looking back, even the worst dross of that era doesn't seem so bad now, looking through my bitter, distorted rose tinted 2009 glasses.

I co-sign this entire post.

[djshiva]

My guess is it will be Durran Durran style new romantic bullshit soon. They'll mine the same three decades, but with different focus. For a long time it's been Lipps Inc. techno pop inspired BS, so soon everybody will be doing songs that sound like Hungry Like a Wolf, and Too Shy.

color me completely ok with that. except for the fact that it was done best back then.

[Machinesworking]

My guess is it will be Durran Durran style new romantic bullshit soon. They'll mine the same three decades, but with different focus. For a long time it's been Lipps Inc. techno pop inspired BS, so soon everybody will be doing songs that sound like Hungry Like a Wolf, and Too Shy.

color me completely ok with that. except for the fact that it was done best back then.

Not me. I was listening to Dead Kennedys, Fear, Black Flag, and Discharge etc. also discovered throbbing Gristle, Kraftwerk, and the Residents in electronic music at that point. Couldn't and still cannot stand the over produced glam stuff. For that I'd rather listen to Bowie.
For old school synth pop I prefer OMD, Ultravox and Gary Numan every time.

[sdmiddleton]

If I see one more music video with a topless skinny twenty-something either painting his body or wearing beads and feathers and crap like that, or with a mask on, or a fat line of make-up over his eyes....

Or if I see another music video set in a forest, with fire, oil, smoke, pseudo religion, daft costumes or someone wearing funny contact lenses...

or another music video with stop motion animation, or early 90s video effects, or a dude with a drum strapped on...

I'm gonna fooking KILL SOMEONE.

I think you're gonna love the Empire of the sun - walking on a dream video.

[ground_control]

If I see one more music video with a topless skinny twenty-something either painting his body or wearing beads and feathers and crap like that, or with a mask on, or a fat line of make-up over his eyes....

Or if I see another music video set in a forest, with fire, oil, smoke, pseudo religion, daft costumes or someone wearing funny contact lenses...

or another music video with stop motion animation, or early 90s video effects, or a dude with a drum strapped on...

I'm gonna do absolutely nothing except post on an internet forum.

edited for honesty. quit bitching; it's unbecoming.

[condra]

By the way, let it be known -
I love a lot of this new music, and I also loved a lot of the stuff in the 80s. I just don't like the current trend in video-making by numbers.

"What will we do for the video?"
"Um, a guy in a forest with a drum and lots of make-up.. and fire"
"Sounds good - let's put in some cyber-monks too"
"What's a cyber-monk"
"I don't know but it will look so 2009"
"Yeah lets do it. NME will lap it up"

At the same time, I'd rather this hipster bullshit than the glitzy slutty ibiza club thing that (as already mentioned) hasn't changed in 10 years.
I guess this new stuff is just so over the top, that it can start feeling tired very quickly.

I think you're gonna love the Empire of the sun - walking on a dream video.

That's exactly the kind of faddy cynical formulaic bandwagon crap I was talking about! Yes, I hate it.

quit bitching; it's unbecoming.

Aww, I was hoping to impress you.

[Angstrom]

anyway 2010 should be interesting to see, since no one is gonna dare bring 2000 back

sadly wrong.

I lived through a whole 90's worth of the evolution of 'dance' music and then in 1999 when it just got stuck in a ditch I thought "well that's that one over and done with". But no, every 'big time DJ' is rocking tunes that do not in any way seem different from those of 1998. So, would anyone even notice if there was a 2000 revival?

TBH I quite like the actual revival versions of stuff. They tend to be better in some ways. Probably because revivalists only reference is the media selected snapshots of the period, stylish images, greatest hits packages. In the same way that photos of your holiday in Bali only feature glorious empty beaches and deep blue skies and they completely omit the next-door sewage works and the steaming corpses at the leper colony.
Revivalists build utopias out of an edited idea of the past. They have a head start on the original creators.

The revivalist version of the 1980s is like a big-budget Hollywood interpretation, everyone has amazing hair, fantastic fashions and lashings of money. Everyone has infinite sounds at their fingertips, it never goes out of tune and it sounds like a record
I was actually hanging out in shit nightclubs in the 1980s and frankly it was pretty dire.

Give me the "fake" version any day!