VIRAL the sick slickness of me-too memes

The idea of a “viral hit” long ago stopped being something that just happened to a song and became, through contrivance and orchestration, a core part of the marketing plot. We can see this today, the air thick with the tang of desperation, as tracks are propelled by endless Musical.ly videos and vloggers shamelessly bankrolling themselves with “promoted content”. Songs are announced as viral hits on launch, semantically bulldozing through what “viral” actually means. (Mannequin challenge, Rae Sremmurd and the meme-powered viral hit)

The quote comes from a good overview, and critique, of the viral video concept by Eamonn Forde:

Posthumous MVs/Aud in MVs: Pantera

New videos are major news items: look at the no. of Likes within 1hr!

This post is about the real-world demand for fresh music videos for 'old', or more accurately, 'archive'/'back catalogue' material. Most of you pick back catalogue tracks to centre your promotional package on, with albums (digipaks) which are either greatest hits or an album reissue with repackaging - and this is not an artificial notion that only takes place in an academic context.
There are endless examples of this from every genre, and I have blogged on several examples.

Read this previous post too!

Here's a fresh one: Pantera's "Vulgar Display of Power"is seen as a landmark metal album (it can be tagged as thrash, power metal etc) now 20 yrs old; the driving musical force behind this, guitarist Dimebag Darell, died some time ago so there won't be any fresh recordings from that band line-up.
A track which wasn't included on the album has now been released as a single, and will be included in a repackaged reissue of the album shortly.
The video for this centres on fans of the band, and is a good example of a growing trend to expressly represent and include fans/the audience in the text itself. You can read more (and see the video) here.
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The Narrows' BandCamp page: note the presence of Twitter/FB clickable icons

Here's another example: http://louderthanwar.com/the-narrows-video-shoot/ (article contains strong language) - perhaps you witnessed this in Manchester on 1st April?!

...at 1pm on 1st April the band and about twenty of their fans met at the Victoria statue in Piccadilly Gardens, worked out a route and marched through town, in single file with masks on, whilst trying not to fall over a bollard or indeed, each other. The march was led from the front by lead vocalist Phil Drinkwater and guitarist Adam Hynes, marching, with masks whilst holding the banner with what has become the bands symbol.

Note too that in both articles/instances, the shooting/release of a music video becomes a major news story for popular online ezines/blogs, which will be picked up on and read by their many 1000s strong readerships.
If you look at The Narrow's use of new/social media, its not quite exemplary (they're as bad at updating their own official site as Swillob/ST/Two Twigs are at updating their Twitter feeds [4 months + counting...]!), but is a useful real-world example. Their use of Twitter and FB is central to what they do, but also what some see as 'the new MySpace', BandCamp - plus SoundCloud: see http://thenarrows.bandcamp.com/ and http://soundcloud.com/thenarrows

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...

Using TV set for live footage: Iron Maiden vid

Another vid picked out by Rob, Iron Maiden's Can I Play With Madness. A few brief comments, perhaps the key being the use of a TV set to bring in live footage rather than simple crosscutting:
I think the key to grasping this vid is the use of teens. Maiden were a mature band with a decade of growing success behind them, but needed to ensure they appealed to teens to continue selling.

Notable too that the teens are both M+F.

From an international perspective, we get a trad cliche of England: rural, castles...

But this was also a band at the peak of their commercial success: the SFX denote a high-budget vid - taking in elements of sci-fi, fantasy, horror (traditionally male genres, matching with the music genre)
The TVs to provide live footage is a nice touch; a postmodern element (Guns n Roses would use this approach in Welcome to the Jungle and other vids too).
[Iron Maiden - Can I Play With Madness]