Mobile saves the music video's star

sarah nicole prickett

From Thursday's Globe and Mail

Published Wednesday, Mar. 21, 2012 6:24PM EDT

Last updated Wednesday, Mar. 21, 2012 6:30PM EDT

I never wanted to be in the movies. I wanted to be in music videos. To this day, I secret-dream of Mariah Carey as Heartbreaker (1999) in liquid denim, throwing popcorn and throwing shade in the movie theatre. Everyone has her preferred teenage fantasy, and there was Lauryn Hill, there was TLC, there was Britney, but mostly, for me, there was Mariah.

Heartbreaker, the song, is still kind of great, but it doesnt exist without the image. Later I would pretend the image didnt matterand stopped watching music videos on television (ew, TELEVISION) and only when everyone else stopped too I guess in 2008, when MTVs Total Request Live (TRL) was cancelled and reality shows killed the video star did I realize we had been idiots.

By now, anyone whos been to an unofficial after-party with a YouTube DJ knows that the death of the music video was widely misreported. What we lost was a far-away projected fantasy, whether it was Careys heartbreakingly blingy good life or the Bunuel-ish night trip of Bjorks Bachelorette.

What we gained with the multiplication of iProducts and cheap means of production was a fantasy that slipped between our eyes and our fingertips and our pockets, was spliced with reality in deceptively simple ways, seemed suddenly more art than film. The Internet has rebirthed the art and practice of music-video making, rendering it as fragmentary and easy and weird as the Internet itself. Video art has its stars, or its YIBAs (Young Internet-Based Artists), from museum-approved Ryan Trecartin to rapidly emerging Petra Cortright. Mostly, though, its virtual power has yet to be converted to hard cash. Music videos are selling the music, not the video, and so theyre more viable, thriving and alive than ever.

Look at the new video directed ! by Emily Kai Bock for the single Oblivion by the Montreal bizarro pop star Grimes (a.k.a. Claire Boucher). In five days, the manic pixie masterpiece garnered some 346,000 YouTube views. If those views equalled record sales, itd be triple-platinum. She now plans to make a video for every song on her new 12-track album. What would have been unthinkable and frankly stupid only five years ago is now, thanks to the accessibility, cheapness and ease of the technology, probably brilliant.

Toronto director Jose Lourenco made last years Juno-winning video for the band the Rural Alberta Advantage for $2,100. In October, some band called the Turnback claimed to have shot the first music video ever entirely on the iPhone 4S. And if I had a dollar for every time Ive watched Gregg Arakis sublimely ridiculous, song-redeeming video for Rihannas We Found Love, I could probably make it myself.

The point of todays most compelling music videos, in which both the means of production and the platforms for viewing are multi-screen technology, isnt to replicate big-budget fantasy. Its to reveal an actuality in which anything is possible. The distinctions between what we see and what we believe have collapsed so far, anyway, that M83s magicky video for Midnight City, in which children find themselves with convenient supernatural powers, seems practically realist.

Same for Youth Lagoons July video: Everything is daydreamy and suburban and fine, until you realize its also the apocalypse. If there is knock on wood or something that looks like wood another U.S. terrorist attack, most of us will see it first through an Instagram of a tweet on CNN, and we will have no idea whether its real. Or rather, well have many ideas, and not know which to trust.