i will sing the requiemmmmmmmmmmm: music videos

I write today with a few notes of sadness, but also some of joy. I want to honor those music videos that have come before us and ponder why exactly music videos are now extremely terrible. MTV came to us like a bat out of hell and introduced us to The Buggles who while kicking off the video era lamented the fall of the radio star. For years MTV cultivated new personalities and made stars skyrocket on the small screen. Some musicians went straight for the easy money and got pretty girls to prance around, some went for chuckles, and some went for a cinematic feel. I can remember watching TRL in its infancy with that dreamboat Carson Daly counting down the hits and hoping my song (at one time “Good Riddance,” at one time “Baby, One More Time”- I’m not gonna act like I wasn’t an adolescent boy) would hit #1. Videos made up a big part of a cd release (remember cds?) and care was taken to craft an appropriate video. MTV even had a show called Making The Video, which I definitely watched more than I’d care to admit.

Then something happened, I honestly don’t know what. Partially I’m sure that MTV’s switch to reality programming by and large killed the video, but videos just fell. It’s to the point where calling it MTV anymore seems silly. And the actual quality has been fading for a long time. Remember great videos like “Peaches” by POTUSA:
THAT is a great video.

And on the other spectrum was the heart wrenching Johnny Cash video for his “Hurt” cover:
So we have all these older videos which are epic. Nowadays, there is little avenue for videos on tv except for FUSE and some similar smaller channels, certainly nothing as mainstream as MTV and VH1.

I’ve gotten nostalgic for these videos after watching one from one of my favorite bands that was released this week, Blitzen Trapper’s “Black River Killer,” which is a narrative song and the video plays it out (I am certainly a sucker for this type of video, because when I hear songs like this one I visualize the video as such), here it is:
HOW FREAKING EPIC is that? So classy.

So maybe the video’s not dead, maybe it’s just moved from our small screens to our smaller screens.

Am I alone in thinking these videos are dying or does the Blitzen Trapper video give you hope for their future on YouTube and the like?

Gotta favorite video that I missed?

BONUS POINTS: Name the song and band where the lyric in my title comes from.