Along with images of the New York musicians performing another of their taut, speedy, mumbly rock tunes, the montage includes French-kissing female models, guy hipsters going at it in a bathroom stall and a posh senior scrubbing a floor with champagne while a dog (and comedian David Cross) look on. MTV reacted to this provocation by refusing to air the video without extensive edits. In a rant on his website, Palmieri vented his disgust at what he perceived to be MTV’s double standard, pointing out that the network has never censored the sight of Christina Aguilera shaking “her booty with a gaffer-taped thong two inches from the camera for three minutes.
” His vision desecrated, Palmieri took his name off the video. The fracas attracted attention in the blogosphere and among the Strokes’ (dwindling) circle of fans, but it didn’t make a hit out of , as a controversial video might have done in the past. It did, however, generate major publicity for Palmieri.
While music videos have declined in value as promotional tools, they have fuelled the profiles of a new school of short-form auteurs, to the point where their works can now be savoured in a more rarefied context than in the frenetic flow on music channels. Since 2003, Palm Pictures’ prestigious Directors Label DVD series has compiled videos and ads by celebrated music-video directors like Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze and Jonathan Glazer, many of whom have made the transition to feature filmmaking. (A new set of compilations, for Glazer, Mark Romanek, Stephane Sedanoui and Anton Corbijn, was released in Canada in December.
) The idea that discerning music fans would spend money on a collection of pop-music promos would’ve amused Frank Zappa, who once described MTV as the first network to play commercials 24 hours a day. Now people are those commercials, or at least seeking them out online. Though everyone from the Beatles to Nancy Sinatra to David Bowie made short-form promos before MTV, the video age as we know it was launched in August of 1981, when the network aired its first cut, the Buggles’ Video Killed the Radio Star Due to a scarcity of videos for MTV to play, artists who were savvy about the possibilities of the new medium gained prominence very rapidly; Duran Duran, Culture Club and Billy Idol were among the first to capitalize.
Such was the hunger for videos that Devo and yes, even Frank Zappa scored on MTV. Madonna became the quintessential star of the video age by soft-selling sex along with her perky dance tunes. Before he became really scary: The video for Michael Jackson's Thriller, directed by John Landis.
Throughout the video’s golden age, directors attracted little attention. The medium’s biggest innovators like Kevin Godley and Lol Crème, two musicians who’d been in the British pop band 10cc and shot groundbreaking clips for Duran Duran’s Girls on Film and Herbie Hancock’s were seldom given credit for their clients’ success. Along with images of the New York musicians performing another of their taut, speedy, mumbly rock tunes, the montage includes French-kissing female models, guy hipsters going at it in a bathroom stall and a posh senior scrubbing a floor with champagne while a dog (and comedian David Cross) look on.
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