Tapehead Music Video Column

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Lucian Busse – Visual Memory and Identity of Berlin Music Scenes

(First published on [email protected], January 9, 2015)

Lucian Busse, who documented the vibrant Chinese punk rock scene as cinematographer (BEIJING BUBBLES) and director (THE JOYSIDE OF EUROPE), is also involved in the visualization of alternative music in his hometown of Berlin. Busse’s documentary BERLINIZED is a personal remembrance of a underground music, club and art scene based in Mitte which emerged in the Temporary Autonomous Zones after the Fall of the Berlin Wall. A large part of the film consists of previously unreleased footage that Busse, who was active in the scene, himself shot in the 90s.

BERLINIZED is now available on realeyz.tv as well as a special edition DVD with copious bonus material.

Check out these three videos Busse created for local bands Lucyhoneychurch, who is featured in BERLINIZED, and Die Türen.

Bonus points if you recognize the classic music video this clip is parodying or paying homage to. The first one to send the answer to [email protected] wins a free monthly subscription. 

Prenzlauer Berg set protest mockumentary, or is it an artistic intervention?

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Tapehead’s Music Clip Column

(First published on [email protected] October 10, 2010)

Welcome to the first installment of a recurring column about music videos. We will present clips that are worth watching and discussing – focusing on ‘flawed’ videos that are fascinating because of their shortcomings (and the artistic, music industry or socio cultural reasons for them). Also, Tapehead is curious about your suggestions for videos to blog about. Drop a line at [email protected].

To start off with, here’s Papa Don’t Preach by Madonna.

Before you collectively groan, please keep in mind that she has worked with the genre’s most significant directors: Mark Romanek, Mary Lambert, Steve Barron (although his clip for Burning Up was pretty lame), Jean-Baptiste Mondino (her first dalliance with transgressive sexuality, not just unashamed display of femininity in Open Your Heart), Chris Cunningham, Jonas Akerlund and David Fincher. In fact, Fincher’s four popular and acclaimed videos for Madonna (Express Yourself, Oh Father, Vogue, Bad Girl) certainly helped to pave the way for his feature career. Thanks, Maddy, for ‘The Social Network’.

Unfortunately, back in 1986, even though Madonna was already a megastar, she hadn’t yet established her track record of consistently in your face videos. So for every Material Girl there’s a slew of uninspired film soundtrack tie-ins and an ambitious misfire like Papa Don’t Preach. James Foley’s clip (the video is alternately credited to Foley’s pseudonym Peter Percher) illustrates and interprets the lyrics: a late teen’s internal conflict over how to deal with an unplanned pregnancy. It features Danny Aiello, soon to become a star, as Madonna’s concerned papa. Okay, then 27 year old Madonna playing someone nearly a decade younger is stretching things, but her acting and that of the supporting players is uniformly good. Script, editing and camerawork (by Michael Ballhaus) are tight. An emotionally engaging mini-movie. That is, until the first of many intrusive shots featuring an older Madonna, dancing, gyrating and lip-synching the lyrics, interrupts the story flow. Is the narrative this whirling dervish’s flashback? Seems more likely that Madonna’s label Sire/Warner Brothers didn’t have the nerve to let the narrative play out and insisted on adding a ‘packshot’ of the star. This was not uncommon practice in major label videos until well in the 1990s. Today, fortunately, videos for stars no longer heed such genre conventions and often even delight in flaunting them. (Certainly also to attract and hold music fans’ attention in the age of diminishing sales.) And starting with Mary Lambert’s controversial Like A Prayer, the aforementioned clips by Fincher and the intermittently banned on MTV Justify My Love (all the better for VHS video single sales) up to the Iraq-war statement American Life she herself pulled, Madonna has consistently used music clips to address sexual and political taboos.

BTW, the Papa Don’t Preach video also got flak for supposedly sending an irresponsible message to young girls facing unwanted pregnancies and playing into the hands of pro-lifers. To counter this criticism, the visuals on the tour that came soon after Papa Don’t Preach was released, positioned Madonna more in the pro-choice camp.

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End of the Decade, Part 1

(First published on [email protected] December 23, 2010) Happy Holidays! And here’s something to do if you end up booting the computer: online clip viewing suggestions for those who are tired of YouTube (and in some countries, can’t even watch videos on it because the labels or royalty collection agencies have blocked them) and find the sheer amount on Dailymotion or Vimeo daunting.

Tape.tv

Note: tape.tv sadly went offline in 2016, likely because YouTube and collection agency GEMA came to an agreement allowing music videos to be shown in Germany again, rendering tape.tv somewhat obsolete. The YouTube channel is still online where you can watch tape.tv's in-house produced live formats.

Berlin-based start up and leading German commercial online clip channel. Financed by (unobtrusive) advertising and currently available in Germany only. Tape.tv’s secret? Good image quality, large (though not comprehensive) selection, and nice personalising features inspired by Last.fm – you can love and ban videos, select genres and moods. The killer app, though, is the mixtape function – create a playlist of up to 10 clips and share it with your friends via Facebook, Twitter, Email and unique URLs. The clip library is somewhat skewered in favor of narrative clips by white male alt.rock acts, because lots of clips by electronic artists using abstract animation are not in Tape.tv’s catalogue. Michel Gondry’s work for The White Stripes and his latest for Björk are also strangely absent.

Blank TV

Ok, they use an embedded YouTube player, but Blank TV offers a comprehensive selection of punk videos old and new. Also video interviews, blog and comics.

Pitchfork

The leading online music mag’s staff compiled a list of 100 awesome videos that gives a crash course in the artform’s history. Pitchfork also features noteworthy new clips in a variety of genres.

De:Bug

Note: De:Bug was an early casualty in the demise of music print media. folding in 2014. The former editor-in-chief, Sascha Kösch, has kept some articles available online.

The forward-thinking Berlin-based “magazine for electronic life aspects” not only covers electronic music (sounds and the gadgets that produce them), cinema, games and the social, political and technical ramifications of online and digital developments. It also has a very informative music clip blog that features latest videos and also exclusive material by mostly electronica, but also avant rock, hip hop, jazz and indie artists that embody the magazine’s aesthetic and philosophy.

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End of the Decade, Part 2

(First published on [email protected], December 24, 2010)

The first decade of the new millennium ends on December 31(or in one year, depending on if you count 2000 as the first year of the 2000s or last year of the 90s.) The music clip has weathered a momentous decade and despite reports of its demise, is going strong. Thanks to cheaper video equipment and the internet, there are more clips than ever. So even if music TV as we know it is dead, the internet (as well as the DVD, smartphones, tablet computers and even art galleries) provides ample presentation outlets that are bi-directional and less filtered. This results in uncontrolled glut (too many CD cover stills or bad slide shows set to music) but also YouTube success stories like Chicago indie pop band OK Go’s 2006 low budget and high precision video for “Here It Goes Again” (directed by Trish Hie)- which was viewed over 50 million times on YouTube alone and made them international recording stars.

In the 2000s, the clip also transcended the boundaries of the rectangular TV screen. The image became smaller but also portable and accessible 24/7 on the web and mobile devices. Or it was blown up and even multiplied for crossover with installation art and VJing, coming almost full circle to past immersive forms of music-vision-synthesis like Expanded Cinema, 60s psychedelic light shows or the Prague’s Laterna Magika.

Speaking of immersion, Missy Elliot (with her regular clip director Dave Meyers) presented the first 3D music video in 2008, for Ching-a-Ling/Shake Your PomPoms. Even without glasses, it’s amusing to watch how Miss E’s choreography constantly reaches out from the screen to the viewer. Doubtful Comfort’s clip for “Blue Roses” achieves a 3D effect without necessity of glasses. With acts as diverse as U2 and Hannah Montana aka Miley Cyrus announcing production of 3D music films, this looks like a trend that will continue.

After being reached out to, literally, the viewer might want to reach back. So Iggy Pop, Arcade Fire (created by interactive and VR/AR pioneer Chris Milk) and Broken Bells all laid claim to the first interactive music video. Depends on how you define interactive – a Flash game set to music, a new opportunity for product placement,  painting lines along with the music with your mouse, an application that allows you to assemble sequences differently with each viewing or change the pace and angle by drag and drop? (Click here for even more examples of interactive work.)  Do the Pet Shop Boys qualify with their use of QR (quick codes) that enable cellphone users to receive supplemental information (while also offering ambiguous critique of surveillance)? So ‘2007′, but also a forerunner of the Augmented Reality that we’ll be seeing more of in the coming decade.

One thing’s for sure: no matter what technologies are used or in how many dimensions the clips unfold, setting music to images will be with us as long as people can see and/or hear. (Stay tuned for Tapehead’s post about music videos for music fans whose auditive senses are impaired.)

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From Clip to Blip

(Expanded/edited version of post first published on [email protected] January 24, 2011)

Douglas Rushkoff cited in his seminal 1994 book Media Virus that in comparison, the average length of shots in Hollywood narrative films had become markedly shorter in the wake of the music clip and its popularization through MTV. Some saw this as proof of diminishing attention spans. But a faster editing frequency doesn’t necessarily equal a shorter attention span, though, it’s just a different, denser way of organizing visual information. The late 80s and early 90s actually saw more overlong mainstream films, with running times of 130 minutes and more not unusual. It would be another cultural paradigmatic shift that would actually affect attention spans.

With the advent of the world wide web The internet equivalent of zapping – surfing and clicking on hypertext links (although less arbitrary, more interactive than zapping and demanding more coginitive effort) – and the proliferation of YouTube supposedly shorten attention spans even more. Until 2010, video uploads on YouTube couldn’t exceed ten minutes, which meant chopping up sitcom episodes into three, feature films into seven to ten installments. Concurrently, content created especially for web (and even smartphone) viewing clocked at an ideal length of one to two minutes. So where does that leave the four minute music video? Still a staple of all video sharing sites, of course, both in its official/professional promo clip and fan video modes. But bands and labels are also exploring shorter forms as well. The Los Angeles based visual content production collective Blip Boutique is creating one minute length films with strong graphics, concise stories and punchlines (and packshot at the end) to promote new songs and albums. Some especially noteworthy “blips” (as the shorties are known) are for Radiohead, Elvis Costello, Robyn and Beastie Boys. Beastie Boys’ animated tour of NYC’s five boroughs could be an inspiration for something similar about Berlin’s “Kieze” (’hoods). It will be interesting to watch whether blips catch on as promo tools and how they impact our way of experiencing music and moving images.

Blips do have antecedents, in TV commercials for albums. They range from the conventional (The Rolling Stones’ Goat’s Head Soup from 1973, voiced by legendary radio DJ Wolfman Jack) to the sublimely absurd, like the advert below for Captain Beefheart’s 1970 album Lick My Decals Off, Baby. The latter has found its way into MoMA's permanent collection of music videos. Short, sweet, to the point and at their best, perfectly formed artistic miniatures.

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L’Oeuf Raide – Electro from Lyon Made in Berlin-Neukölln

(Originally posted on [email protected] February 8, 2011)

The influx of international musicians to Berlin is reaching new heights. It currently rivals the David Bowie/Iggy Pop sojourn in 70s Schöneberg. Or the 80s, when half of the Melbourne postpunk scene (Nick Cave, Jim “Foetus” Thirlwell et al.) hung and strung out in the Wall City, or when Martin Gore of synthpoppers Depeche Mode (Cave’s and Einstürzende Neubauten’s labelmates on Mute Records) imbued the band’s heretofore cheery electronic tunes with a darker, industrial, kinkier and socially aware vibe. Did Berlin have anything to do with it? Or what about the post-Wall 90s pilgrimage of techno musicians like Jeff Mills from Detroit, Richie Hawtin from the Candian-US border region and many others. Not to forget the turn of the millennium Canadian invasion spearheaded by Peaches and (the now Chilly) Gonzales, with Taylor Savvy and Feist soon joining the ranks. In the second decade of the 21st century, so many international acts have moved here, it’s hard to keep track: from dubstepper Shackleton to postpunk-dub-industrial pioneer Mark Stewart (who divides his time among Berlin, Vienna and England’s southwest coast); from Australian lo fi singer-songwriter Kat Frankie to Manchester-born House and drum & bass musician/producer Gerald Simpson, who first made his mark in 1988 with 808 State and the acid house dancefloor filler “Voodoo Ray”, gaining further acclaim in the 90s as A Guy Called Gerald.

Another recent addition to the growing international (musical) community is L’Oeuf Raide (translatable as “stoned egg”). The moniker is the nom de synth of electro producer-musician-DJ Fred from Lyon. His latest album is fittingly called “Berlin Eggsile” and here’s a making of-cum-music clip.

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Street Art in Motion

(First published on [email protected] March 21, 2011)

Street art is no two dimensional matter. Even if the works have been sprayed, drawn, scribbled, painted, taped or glued onto a flat surface, they are conceived as part of three dimensional urban space. Maybe that explains the proliferation of short films in which street art is not just documented but in which the moving image adds another layer to or is even an integral part of the works. Street art staged specifically for the camera.

Thanks to the Interfilm Berlin International Short Film Festival for their program “Shorts Attack – Reclaim the Streets”. Half of the films mentioned in this post are part of this collection.

Morphing Artist: Blu

Elusive Italian street artist Blu created this piece on an abadoned hangar in Gdansk harbor. The city of Gdansk (Danzig) has a turbulent history – ruled by various Polish kingdoms, Prussia, Imperial Germany, two interludes as a free state (1807 to 1814 and 1918 to 1939), occupation and annexation by Nazi Germany and since 1945, again Poland (in its socialist and capitalist incarnations). Gdansk also saw the origins of the free labor movement that would become Solidarnosc. Blu’s piece reflects this historical legacy in his use of symbols and time lapse photography.

Nokturno Dir: Marek Berger

Czech animator-director Berger’s surreal animated short explores the true power unleashed by graffiti writers.

COLLOSIAEUS URBANUS POYPHAGUS Dir: Doris Freigofas

A street art figure come to life wreaks havoc on Berlin.

Berlin spricht Dir: Markus Muthig, music: Emus Primus

Ok, it’s a slideshow set to music, but the slides are of some of the funniest and most provocative street art in Berlin. The promotional copy’s “diashow with flow” does the clip justice. And the framing narrative of how the photos got into the camera and then the computer is well done.

Überlin Dir: Sam Taylor-Wood, music: REM

Video for the lead-off single of REM’s final album. Aaron Johnson interacting with street art in London’s Shoreditch neighborhood.

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Depiction of HIV/AIDS in Music Clips

(First published on [email protected], May 29, 2011)

Reading an obituary about Gil Scott-Heron’s untimely death at age 62 on Friday, May 27, greatly saddened me. Scott-Heron’s witty and incisive social commentary had been a great source of inspiration, call to action and solace for almost three decades.He continued to grow artistically, embracing dubstep sounds on his acclaimed comeback album I’m New Here (2010). I had really hoped that this album marked a third spring for him and his career (Scott-Heron was dropped by his record label in 1985 after over 15 years and enjoyed a renaissance in the mid-1990’s, when the audiences of conscious and tough political hiphop sought out the man and music who were often namechecked by rappers). Unfortunately, I’m New Here was his swansong.

I figured years of cocaine and crack addiction took their toll. But then, the German leftist daily die tageszeitung mentioned, almost en passant, that Scott-Heron had disclosed he was HIV positive in 2008. So he was yet another casualty to the immune system deficiency that was discovered in summer 1981 and first named as a singular disease (or complex of symptoms and ailments) 30 years ago this coming December 1 (a day commemorated internationally as World AIDS Day by benefit events and awareness campaigns).

This bleak detail of news that was distressing enough as it is prompted to me finally compile this small selection of music clips that deal with the HIV/AIDS crisis – from its first media exposure as the “gay plague” to the worldwide pandemic it still remains, especially (but not only) in sub-Saharan Africa – currently over 75% of all reported cases – and to a lesser degree in Eastern Asia and Eastern Europe.

Currently, over 33 million people worldwide are living with HIV/AIDS; about 2.6 million people infect themselves each year and almost as many – 1.8 million die annually. The total casualty toll lies at over 25 million. Infection rates have dramatically sunk in the regions where HIV/AIDS was first reported, North America and Western Europe, thanks to retroviral medication, safe sex awareness campaigns and societal shifts away from stigmatisation of those groups with the highest numbers of HIV/AIDS patients. This positive trend needs to be reinforced and resources allocated to Africa and Asia, if there is any hope to even dent the pandemic’s deadly progress.

Coil – Tainted Love (1985)

By 1985, the impact of HIV/AIDS was fully felt especially on the gay community (the first societal group reported to be hit) with most governments still very slow to react. The body count rose and rose, also of celebrities such as glam singer Jobriath, German operatic New Wave countertenor Klaus Nomi (both died within weeks of each other in August 1983) and, most shockingly for mainstream America, screen legend Rock Hudson, among many, many others.

The British industrial band Coil  was very likely the first music act to explicitly address the HIV/AIDS crisis with the double A-sided single Panic/Tainted Love. Tainted Love (the accompanying video was directed by the band’s Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, an alumnus of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV) was a funereal cover of the Gloria Jones song which was an early 80’s megahit in the version by Soft Cell. (Marc Almond, that band’s singer, makes a cameo appearance in the Coil video.) Christopherson’s imagery of ‘unclean’ bodily fluids and gradual decay gives “Tainted” a highly literal meaning. The profits of the song were donated to the Terence Higgerson Foundation, a charity supporting information and counseling about HIV/AIDS.

k.d. lang – So In Love (1990)

This highly controversial clip (by German-American director Percy Adlon) was a contribution to the Red Hot and Blue album and TV special. Red Hot and Blue (featuring covers of semi-closeted gay icon, 1940s musical composer and songwriter Cole Porter) was a charity and awareness project featuring the cream of the rock and pop scene around 1990. To this day, the Red Hot organisation is active, having released countless genre compilations coupled with educational projects featuring Brazilian music, country, grunge, jazz, hiphop, the work of Fela Kuti (who died of AIDS in 1997) and much more.

The So In Love video, with its portrayal of plague-like infection – lang mournfully sings to her presumably hospitalised or maybe even deceased lover while wearing rubber gloves and boiling her infected clothes in an apartment that glows in a toxic green – was criticised for reinforcing rather than reducing the stigma surrounding HIV/AIDS.

Spearhead – Positive (1994)

Here are a song and video (from the Red Hot jazz project) which take the imagery of HIV/AIDS out of the “gay ghetto” into the heterosexual mainstream. By the early 1990’s, people were slowly becoming aware that the disease was also hitting drug addicts (through shared needles), but also disproportionate numbers of lower income people, especially people of color. 1994 was also the year of Jonathan Demme’s hit film Philadelphia (with an Oscar winning performance by all-American Tom Hanks as a gay, HIV positive lawyer) and a concerned, but not tragic reference to an AIDS test by a main female and straight character in Ben Stiller’s Generation X romantic comedy Reality Bites – the chain of Silence=Death was finally being broken.

The Positive video (credited to Alan Smithee, the common director’s pseudonym; Spearhead frontman Michael Franti might have directed himself) is almost a remake of Agnès Varda’s nouvelle vague classic Cléo de 5 à 7, except that Franti is not waiting for the result of a cancer examination, but his AIDS test. During the agonizing moments before the verdict arrives, he reviews his sexual encounters and practice of safe sex, concluding that any responsibility is his own. The video ends on a cliffhanger.

Moodphase 5ive feat. Godessa – Got To Give, South Africa (2001)

This clip was produced under the auspices of Steps for the Future, a project based in South Africa that trains young filmmakers in Southern Africa to produce work on social issues. One film package was devoted to HIV/AIDS, especially important considering the stigma, misinformation and policy ignorance that often impeded necessary action.

Got To Give (directed by Eddie Edwards) is kind of a companion piece to Positive, from a female point of view. Cool, sweet Tiger is hoping to score with his lady friend Stargirl. Unfortunately, he loses his condoms, and responsible Stargirl is just not down for unsafe sex…

South Africa (see above) is another clip with an AIDS awareness message.

Elton John - The Last Song (From a Father to a Son)

Roger Spottiswoode’s Emmy Award winning HBO docudrama of Randy Shilts’s book And the Band Played On (1993) charted the diligent medical detective work which lead to HIV’s discovery as well as the vanity and petty rivalry which nearly thwarted any medical breakthrough. The film features a self-contained, music clip-like closing sequence set to Elton John’s The Last Song (From A Father to a Son). The clip pays tributes to prominent AIDS casualties like Rock Hudson, Freddie Mercury, Liberace, Keith Haring, Michel Foucault and many others while showing footage of the Names Quilt, which commemorates the names and life dates of AIDS victims in quilt patches.

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Mario Mentrup and Volker Sattel Direct New Video for Tarwater

(First published on [email protected] September 11, 2011)

Mario Mentrup and Volker Sattel, co-directors of CITY OF LIGHT, I DO ADORE and THE EAGLE IS GONE, have helmed the music clip for “Do the Oz”, the lead-off single of Berlin-based electronica/post rock duo Tarwater’s latest album, Inside the Ships.

The stark black and white video presents essentially a one-woman show featuring singer Soffy O (with a blink and you’ll miss it Hitchcockian cameo by Mentrup). Soffy O’s evocative facial expressions carry the clip – the dialogue she silently mouths is besides the point, the real action lies in her batting an eye or minutely pursing her lips. The video’s imagery is a variation of THE EAGLE IS GONE, which also featured Soffy O, the Alexanderplatz location and a score by Tarwater.

“Do the Oz” is a cover of a 1971 John Lennon track recorded in support of the British underground magazine Oz which was then on trial for obscenity – one issue featured the head of children’s comic book character Rupert Bear grafted onto the body of a figure drawn by “X-rated” cartoonist Robert Crumb. Why Tarwater chose to cover this little-known Lennon track is somewhat mysterious. Were they inspired by the original’s urgent, minimalist psychedelia (complete with dance step instructions)? Is the Tarwater version some very oblique comment on freedom of expression today? Or is Inside the Ships a concept album of sorts paying submerged homage to musical icons?

Inside the Ships by Tarwater

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HeartWork – a short film inspired by Trentemøller

(Expanded version of post first published on [email protected], December 12, 2011)

“Moan”, the brooding 2009 club smash by Danish electronica musician and producer Trentemøller (who also contributed to the soundtrack of the documentary COMPLAINTS CHOIR), served as the inspiration by Nils Strüven’s award-winning short film HEARTWORK. Beautifully acted by an ensemble cast featuring Sarah Gerstner, Klaas Malorny, Axel Hartwig, Philine Proft and Georg Lehmann, HEARTWORK is a tale of a young woman’s unsentimental exploration of her sexuality imbued with moments of romantic surrealism.

Watch the film here:

The official video for "Moan" is a heartwrenching re-telling of the martyrdom of Laika, first dog in space.

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Clipped Diction - The Music Videos of Amos Poe

(Edited version of post first published on [email protected], April 20, 2012)

It’s almost a platitude to say that No Wave director Amos Poe rocks with his camera like musicians do with their axes. His filmography includes not only neo-noir featuring the likes of Deborah Harry (pictured above in The Foreigner) and John Lurie, experimental films with stellar soundtracks and music docs like “Blank Generation”, “Night Lunch” and “Steve Earle: Just an American Boy”, but also music clips. In the 80s, Poe directed videos for “Obsession” by Animotion (1985), Run DMC’s “You Talk Too Much” (1985) and “Madhouse” by Anthrax (1986).

Run DMC - "You Talk Too Much" (excerpt)

https://fb.watch/pkHlju9lYo/

In 2010 and 2011 Poe created a series poetic short films set to songs like Jeff Buckley’s "You & I", New Order’s “Age Of Consent”, Charlotte Gainsbourg covering Dylan’s “Just Like A Woman” and the master's own recent “Love Sick”. The series marks a return to Poe’s signature lofi Super 8 look after comparatively glitzy, MTV-friendly works.

Jeff Buckley (no embed due to Tumblr limit of five videos per post):

https://youtu.be/DNcYYwnojxo

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Down Under Berlin - Taika Waititi Tribute

(Edited version of post first published on [email protected] on September 13, 2012)

The second Down Under Berlin Film Festival of Australian and New Zealand Cinema opens tonight. Until Sunday, DUB (great acronym) presents a broad spectrum of contemporary filmmaking from the seventh continent. Not only are the films largely been screened for the first time ever in Germany or at least in Berlin, offering many discoveries.

Down Under Berlin pays homage to renowned indigenous New Zealand filmmaker Taika Waititi by screening his Oscar-nominated short “Two Cars, One Night” and his acclaimed feature debut “Eagle vs. Shark”. In 2007 “Boy”, Waititi’s second feature, became the top-grossing film ever in New Zealand. Waititi featured Patea Māori Club’s classic 80s song “Poi E” in on the film’s soundtrack and remixed the video as part of a campaign to help the Maori anthem make number one a second time – upon the song’s release, it topped the charts four weeks and was 1984’s bestselling record. For white New Zealand, “Poi E” was a huge hit, but for young Maoris, the song had deeper meaning – a celebration of their language (the first Maori-sung tune to chart that high) and the then burgeoning hiphop-inspired Maori youth culture. (Street dancing figures prominently in both the original music video and Waititi’s remix, to which he added footage from “Boy”). Upon re-release, “Poi E” reached number three on the New Zealand charts.

Watch Waititi’s clip below:

And here’s the original 1984 video:

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Music Clips: Redefining Listening

Photo (c) Wolfgang Müller (First published: [email protected] December 23, 2012) Music videos for the deaf – in the early 1980’s the concept might have been the premise of a particularly irreverent Saturday Night Live sketch. The idea is also reminiscent of a not-so politically correct jab at the art world in John Waters’ film “Pecker” in which a blind photographer is hyped as the newest rage. “Pecker” is cited in an essay by the late music critic Martin Büsser about “Music in Sign Language” (1998) by West Berlin avantgardists Die Tödliche Doris. The project is just what the title says – a rendition of the group’s 1981 debut album in German sign language. But it was more than the latest in a series of playful conceptual gestures Die Tödliche Doris had become famous for. The piece was created together with deaf artists and working sign language interpreters and really redefined what “music”, “listening” and the inclusion of non-hearing and hearing people in cultural production and reception can be. Büsser’s text and “Music In Sign Language” are currently part of the exhibition and accompanying catalogue “Gesture Sign Art -Deaf Culture/Hearing Culture” which explore sign language as communication, culture and art. Other featured artists and contributors include visual artists Roman Signer and Ming Wong, American Sign Language (ASL) poet Peter Cook, composer John Cage, performance and multimedia artist Christine Kim Sun, choreographer-artist Valeska Gert, performance artist-activist Gunter Trube (pictured above) and Die Tödliche Doris co-founder Wolfgang Müller (who co-curated the exhibition with Belgian art critic/educator An Paenhuysen). I was amused, inspired and touched by all the works, but naturally one exhibit in particular excited me – three totally inclusive music clips by Finnish rappers Signmark. The band consists of Signmark, the moniker of Marko Vuoriheimo, a deaf MC and Brandon, a hearing rapper. Using low frequencies which can be “felt” as well as “heard”, Signmark perform their texts in English and in American Sign Language for a truly multi-lingual and inclusive experience. This approach is further underlined in their videos, which make expert use of spoken and written text, sign language, music, movement in the frame and by the camera, editing and imagery – inclusive in the use of all elements the music clip has to offer as well as being accessible for the deaf and hearing alike. Here are the three clips presented in the exhibition:

Smells Like Victory

Speakerbox (feat. Osmo Ikonen)

Our Life (Deaf Rap)

Some parting words from Andreas Costrau, founder of the sign language service agency and educational institution Gebaerdenservice: “In the past people used to say ‘non-hearing culture’; nowadays it’s mainly ‘deaf culture’. I’d like to think that in the future we’ll be talking in terms of ‘visual culture'”. The music clip is one artform that can promote this idea.

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Michel Gondry: The Pleasure of the Unknown

(First published: [email protected] December 31, 2012)

Along with David Fincher, Michel Gondry is arguably the most acclaimed of the music-clip-whizkids turned movie directors. This elite club also includes Anton Corbijn, Antoine Fuqua, Floria Sigismondi, Mark Romanek, Tamra Davis and Spike Jonze (part of a loose collective of kindred spirits with screenwriter-director Charlie Kaufman, a frequent collaborator with both Jonze and Gondry). Jonze’s Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Where the Wild Things Are catapulted him onto the Hollywood A-List. Yet the latter film was made in 2009. Since then, Jonze has focused on music-centered projects like “Scenes from the Suburbs”, a short accompanying Arcade Fire’s Suburbs album, the Absolut Vodka sponsored “I’m Here” (music by Sleigh Bells) or cinematography for the LCD Soundsystem documentary Shut Up and Play the Hits. Her, a love story between man and operating system starring Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson and Rooney Mara, is due in 2013.

While Jonze momentarily seems to be pursuing a strategy of concentration, Gondry is diversifying. His first features – Human Nature (2001), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Science of Sleep (2006) and Be Kind Rewind (2008) – were natural extensions of concepts and working methods first developed in his clips: cinematographic techniques used to investigate and challenge perception (physiological and philosophical), ingenious and demonstratively handmade special effects, a childlike yet knowing sense of humor.

Between Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (for which Gondry, Kaufman and Pierre Bismuth won a Best Original Screenplay Oscar) and Science of Sleep Gondry was approached by comedian Dave Chappelle to direct a documentary about a free concert Chappelle was staging in the Clinton neighborhood of Brooklyn. (Gondry now resides in that borough.) The lineup featured hiphop and neo-soul artists like Dead Prez, Talib Kweli, The Roots, Mos Def, Jill Scott and Erykah Badu – none of which Gondry had previously worked with as a clip director. (Hiphop is the one genre the otherwise eclectic Gondry had rarely engaged with.) Gondry was unsure at first about taking on the project, but perhaps it was precisely the resulting curiosity and open-mindedness that made Dave Chappelle’s Block Party such a success, touted as a music documentary milestone. Mos Def later starred in Be Kind Rewind. Gondry’s next documentary, A Thorn in the Heart (2009), was another departure: Gondry returned to his native France and uncovered some surprising family history. The Green Hornet (2011) was Gondry’s stab at a superhero flick (and potential franchise kickoff), shot in 3D. The We and the I (2012) shows Bronx kids traveling by bus after their last day of school. The film is the product of an afterschool workshop Gondry conducted with the teenagers. While Gondry’s most recent work has evolved in different directions from his earlier clips and narrative features, a consistent thread is his desire to experiment.

Gondry’s proclivity to try new things is visible in these lesser known, not-so iconic music clips that are worth revisiting.

Oui Oui – Les cailloux (1989)

Gondry was also Oui Oui’s drummer. This clip is not really rare and unseen, but worth sharing here because this is where it all began. The story goes that Björk saw Oui Oui’s videos – the start of a long and fruitful collaboration.

Thomas Dolby – Close But No Cigar (1992)

Dolby was a renowned clip director in his own right (most notably of the video for his own 1983 smash hit “She Blinded Me With Science”). “Close But No Cigar” marks a passing of the torch. Recurring themes of Gondry’s work like multiple levels of reality are already in evidence here.

The Rolling Stones – Gimme Shelter (1998)

Companion piece to Gondry’s more famous clip for the Stones’ long overdue “Like A Rolling Stone” cover version. “Gimme Shelter” blends bleached out Larry Clark style suburban malaise with Gondry’s characteristic surrealism. Featuring the late Brad Renfro.

The We and the I opens the 2013 edition of Unknown Pleasures: American Independent Film Festival Berlin.

[tapeheadmusicvid]

Wizards of Oz

(Amended/expanded version of a post first published: [email protected] September 4, 2013)

From September 12 to 15, the third Down Under Berlin Australian and New Zealand Film Festival will present over 50 features, documentaries and shorts from the Sixth Continent. This year’s music savvy program inspired Tapehead to revisit an adolescent passion.

https://youtu.be/l5I2vEcVC_I

In the 80s, Tapehead developed a major fixation on music from Down Under. Australia, as a former British colony, seemed both familiar and exotic, and this was reflected in the music. Faves included the inevitable Men at Work (often compared to Tapehead’s then favorite group – gasp! -The Police) who were catchy and cute and made the definitive video about the end of the world, “It’s A Mistake”.

Tapehead then graduated from the new wave lite (or New Music, the US blanket term for any sounds created by musicians sans long hair and long instrumental solos) of Men at Work to punk and post-punk by the likes of the Saints, the Go-Betweens (fan Robert Bramkamp included a song by co-lead singer Robert Forster in his film TESTSTAND 7, a riff on Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow”), Hunters and Collectors, Midnight Oil, Hoodoo Gurus, the Church and the Birthday Party. Thankfully, Down Under Berlin is screening the Sydney punk history lesson “Distorted” and “Autoluminiscent: Rowland S. Howard” (now available as VOD on Vimeo), Richard Lowenstein’s (director of music clips for INXS, another guilty Aussie pleasure) and Lynn Mareen Milburn’s documentary about the late, lamented guitarist of Birthday Party and Crime and the City Solution, to name just a fraction of Howard’s musical legacy. Watch the film and discover it for yourself. Here’s the clip for Birthday Party’s “Nick the Stripper”, featuring a very young Nick Cave (Femen take note). Howard is the one in the striped shirt.

Another aspect of Australian music that fascinated Tapehead was how it expressed indigenous peoples’ struggle for equality. In addition to protest songs by non-Aboriginal groups such as Midnight Oil, “blackfellas” (colloquial, non-pejorative term for Aborigines) had created a vibrant music scene. No Fixed Address was a tight reggae-rock group who were featured with another band, US Mob, in the docudrama “Wrong Side of the Road” which combined performance footage with scenes of everyday discrimination. Screened at the Berlinale Forum back in the day and worth rediscovering (maybe at Down Under Berlin 2014?). The video for “We Have Survived the White Man”  is a powerful social critique that’s still relevant today.

Before punk, there were “The Sapphires”, a Motownesque girl group of young Aboriginal women who performed in clubs and army bases, eventually entertaining U.S. troops in Vietnam. The Berlin premiere of the somewhat fictionalized biopic is Down Under’s closing film. While the foregrounding of a white character, the group’s manager (played by Chris O’Dowd of “Bridesmaids” fame) evoked criticism, the scene below evokes a kinship between indigenous Australians and another oppressed minority, African Americans as represented by the G.I.s watching the show.

In terms of straight music video, there is exactly one screening in the otherwise narrative short-dominated New Talents section, but this one is a winner. Nikki Pallaras from the University of South Australia in Adelaide directed the clip for Oh Land’s song “White Nights” with style and accomplishment. “White Nights” is sophisticated eye candy – in a very good way. Pallaras is a talent to watch.

A short film in the Aussie Appetisers section, DIRT AND DESIRE by Diane Busuttil, is not a music clip but relates to music through Busuttil’s background as a choreographer and her on-going exploration of movement, rhythm and sexuality on and through film. DIRT AND DESIRE and other shorts by Busuttil are available here.

Not screening at Down Under Berlin and not exactly an undiscovered gem, but too good not to include, as it, like Men at Work and their videos did 30 years ago, humorously encapsulates Aussie clichés and socio-cultural touchstones as well as how the Australians view themselves: Rap News #20, featuring Julian Assange in a wicked John Farnham impersonation.

https://youtu.be/QWU6tVxzO1I

[tapeheadmusicvid]

Claude Lelouch, Music Video Pioneer

(First published: [email protected] March 9, 2014)

Music has always been a key ingredient of Golden Palm winner and Oscar nominated French director Claude Lelouch’s stylish, often somewhat unconventional love stories. The “chabadabada” theme from “A Man and a Woman” (1966), composed by longtime collaborator Francis Lai, has become an easy listening earworm. EDITH ET MARCEL (1983) tells the tragic love story between legendary chanson singer Édith Piaf and middleweight boxing champion Marcel Cerdan. Singers starred in Lelouch’s films, notably Jacques Dutronc opposite Catherine Deneuve in A NOUS DEUX (1979).

Lelouch’s knack for combining music and image can surely be attributed to his beginnings as a director and producer of over 100 Scopitones, song-based short 16 mm films viewable on audiovisual jukeboxes in restaurants, nightclubs, cruise ships and other places of amusement. Scopitones are direct forerunners of the music clip as we know it today.

Visual jukeboxes were first introduced in 1939; the Panoram played a stream of black and white music shorts (“soundies”) mostly by jazz artists such as Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway and many others. In the late 1950s, French engineers devised the Scopitone jukebox based upon the Panoram, but with color films and improved magnetic sound. And it was possible to select individual clips, a business decision which allowed for increased revenue. Scopitones were widespread throughout France, the U.K. and West Germany. (Italy used similar but competing systems, Cinebox/Colorama and Color-Sonics.)

In 1964, businessmen brought the Scopitone to the U.S. (Francis Ford Coppola invested some of his scriptwriting fees in the technology.) Top artists such as Neil Sedaka, Debbie Reynolds and Nancy Sinatra released Scopitones to accompany their hits. The popularity of Scopitones fizzled out by the late 1960s as young audiences gravitated away from two minute slices of artificial-seeming music clips to the more immersive rock concert experience with 100+ db sound, light shows, and elaborate stage sets. The older crowd who still liked Debbie Reynolds and Neil Sedaka didn’t go out much anymore and tended to watch the idols of their youth on TV variety shows. The last of an estimated over 2,000 Scopitones was released in 1978. Claude Lelouch, working for the Paris-based company Cameca, was responsible for over 100 Scopitones as director or producer. Here is a selection of some of his most noteworthy clips:

Francoise Hardy - Tous les garcons et les filles (1963)

Johnny Hallyday - C’est le Mashed Potatoes (1962)

Tornados - Robot (1963)

Dalida - Je n’ai jamais pu t’oublier (1964)

The Scopitone for Dalida, with the singer mourning her lover who perished in a car racing accident, foreshadows the plot of “A Man and A Woman” – a beautiful, elegant widow (Anouk Aimée) is reluctant to become involved with a dashing racecar driver (Jean-Louis Trintignant) because her late husband had the same profession and died on the racetrack.

After the Scopitones’ demise, Lelouch continued to engage with audiovisual pop music between feature films. In 1987 he directed a music video for Nana Mouskouri’s song Serons-nous spectateurs as a charity clip for the children’s aid organization SOS Enfants.

[tapeheadmusicvid]

R.I.P. Bob Casale, DEVO Guitarist and Keyboardist

(First published [email protected]: February 19, 2014)

Sad news: DEVO’s guitarist and keyboard player Bob Casale has passed away at age 61.

DEVO was a band that captured Tapehead’s imagination at an early age. Founded in the anger and desperation ensuing from the National Guard massacre (sorry, can’t find a less loaded word) of Vietnam war protesters on the campus of Kent State University Ohio in 1970, DEVO pioneered post-punk in a then still proto-punk world. With their choppy guitar licks – later menacing but tuneful synth textures – and catchy deconstructions of pop and consumer culture (such as their wicked cover of “Satisfaction”), DEVO ascended to the new wave pantheon (a development they probably found equally satisfying and ironic). Plus, the band came with a wacky yet creepily prescient social theory (“de-evolution“).

After near-mainstream success with 1981’s ”Whip It”, the band lost steam by the mid-1980s as they not so much devolved as stagnated, while other postmodern and discourse-friendly synthpop acts (Heaven 17, ABC, Wall of Voodoo and many, many others) built upon DEVO’s innovations and took them to a new level.

DEVO reformed in 2007 and toured regularly. Even though the enterprise had a whiff of nostalgia, they managed to comment on contemporary states of affairs, such as with the (seemingly) facetious single “Don’t Roof Rack Me, Bro (Seamus Unleashed)“, dedicated to 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s put upon dog.

For all their futurist posturing, DEVO were indeed “New Traditionalists“ (title of their 1981 album) in a way – at the band’s core were two pairs of brothers: Bob (Bob 2) and Gerald Casale and Mark and Bob (Bob 1) Mothersbaugh. Interestingly, the non-Bob members were both especially instrumental in DEVO’s e-volution from new wave music combo to full-fledged audiovisual conceptualists. Gerald (often together with Chuck Statler) directed DEVO’s pathbreaking music clips which both demonstrated the artform’s potential for social critique and introduced some tropes which lesser directors copied and, erm, devolved into cliché.

Here are two clips from DEVO’s peak:

And here’s “That’s Good”, a clip that already showcased some of new wave’s worst visual excesses AND was MTV’s first case of censorship (doughnuts and French Fries – never the twain shall meet…).

Frontman and main songwriter Mark Mothersbaugh also significantly shaped the DEVO aesthetic through his song lyrics. After scoring the Neil Young anti-nuke film “Human Highway” (in which DEVO appeared as “nuclear garbagepersons” and sung “Worried Man”), Mothersbaugh went on to a highly successful career as a composer of film, TV and video game soundtracks, including “Welcome to Collinwood”, Wes Anderson’s “Bottle Rocket”, “Rushmore”, “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou”, the “Rugrats” cartoon series and the “Sims 2” game.

Mothersbaugh was supported in his soundtrack work by Bob Casale, who had become an accomplished studio engineer and producer post-DEVO. Bob 2, we miss you.