Deadlines/Brief

Music videos are so 80s/90s, right? They belong with the era when MTV screened wall-to-wall vids instead of 'reality' TV? Try telling that to the millions who bought Gangnam Style; were they really simply loving the music? 1.6bn (and still climbing) have viewed the video on YT, not to mention the many re-makes (school eg, eg2), viral ads + celeb link-ups (even political protest in Seoul) - and it doesn't matter how legit it is, this nightmare for daydream Beliebers is making a lot of money, even from the parodies + dislikes. All this for a simple dance track that wouldn't have sounded out of place in 1990 ... but had a fun vid. This meme itself was soon displaced by the Harlem Shake. Music vids even cause diseases it seems!
This blog explores every aspect of this most postmodern of media formats, including other print-based promo tools used by the industry, its fast-changing nature, + how fans/audiences create/interact. Posts are primarily written with Media students/educators in mind. Please acknowledge the blog author if using any resources from this blog - Mr Dave Burrowes

Sunday, 6 November 2011

PoMo+MVid IN TV/FILM CULTURE

Its not just MVids that steal from (or intertextually reference if you prefer!) film/TV; it works the other way round too. One of the early signs of MTV moving away from a daily diet of MVids was the show Beavis and Butt-head, here enjoying the 'cymbalism' in Nirvana's iconic Smells Like Teen Spirit...

If you're unfamiliar with this show, try http://ultimateclassicrock.com/top-beavis-and-butthead-classic-rock-song-commentaries/ for 10 egs!
This rather mean portrayal of the rock fan as empty-headed moron would also find its way into film, with Wayne's World featuring a pair of yokels fronting their own no-budget cable TV review show; here they review Nirvana's gloriously surreal Heart Shaped Box...

They would also create parodies of videos, such as this one of REM's classic Everybody Hurts...


When talking about TV/film in 2011, it makes sense to consider the web as part of this picture, and fan-vids are part of this postmodern mash-up process; here's a fan-vid of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit where the audio is a fan's band and the footage is B+B edited as if performing...

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