Word: visualizing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...signal inspiration. The vidblitz began before anyone knew the planes were flying in formation. Illustrated songs, little three-or four-minute clips, began to rain down on television and clubs in late 1980. Some of them were concert performances, shot and edited with perfunctory flash; others were like surrealistic visual riffs on the song, head comics for beginners, production numbers soaked in blotter acid. A technological catchall, video quickly became a generic name for these detonations of sight and sound, as those little items played on a phonograph were named for the way they were transcribed or recorded...
...heart of any aging McLuhanist: rock, radio, movies, music, video, new technologies and new marketing tilting the popular culture onto an angle so it can, if so ordained, slip off onto a whole new course. "The musician in me really resents having to interpret my music into something visual," says Billy Joel. "But the thing that outweighs all of that is that video is a form of communication. Why not use every means of communication available?" Joel has communicated extremely well-his videos are among the genre's most elaborate and effective-but his new commitment to the form...
Videomakers loot every resource for visual vocabulary. A random selection of a dozen clips could easily show influences as diverse as René Magritte and Orson Welles, The Road Warrior and The Three Stooges. Videos are often just as frenetic on the screen as on the sound track. Directors scrape and scramble to pack in the imagery, like so many soda jerks trying to push a quart of French vanilla into a pint container. "The problem is compression," says Julian Temple, who has made some 60 videos, including a current dazzler of the Rolling Stones' Undercover of the Night...
...written songs sometimes just thinking about a visual," says Billy Joel. Notes Ellen Foley: "Video is a luxury and a freedom. You're instantly the star of your own movie." David Byrne of Talking Heads, one of the relatively few musicians who also directs, is at work on an album-length video, but offers some words of general guidance and caution. "I tend to like to have relatively few visual links to the lyrics of the song. I feel that you pigeonhole the song that way, that you detract from the lyrics by interpreting them. Images in Burning Down...
Getting serious also means getting down to business and avoiding the abundance of visual bromides that pelt down on most videos like a fine acid rain. There are honorable, even commanding exceptions (see box), but the majority of clips now in circulation are labored ephemera with heavily imitative associations, fully worthy of one executive's dismissive characterization as "this year's satin jackets." Observes Temple: "A lot of videos steal surreal images from places like Zoom magazine and the French Vogue...