As time progresses, human memory fades, meanwhile music videos of the past will get clearer as they are re-uploaded to the internet in 4K, and then in 8K's, then maybe one day INFINITY-K's. Like watching children grow, it'll be joyous to one day see these fave music vid babies be shared with human people's grown babies in the future. This only has chance to occur if the sanctity of music videos are kept safe. Unfortunately, right now they're in danger, and the most dangerous part is how few people seem to notice.
Music vid sanctity being in danger is nothing new. Throughout music video history there's been times public access flourished and times of scarcity. The main factor in this is typically determined by the platform presenting the music videos. For example, As many of us know, MTV began with “Video Killed The Radio Star” by The Buggles as their first music video ever played, the song’s title signifying the changing mediums. Then just a little later over a decade the same channel that dedicated itself to music video programming would create a show called The Real World and birth an era of Reality TV that would spread like cancer throughout the programming of most television channels. These cheaply produced, deceptively manufactured dramas were pushing music videos out of prime TV times and obscured into the late night hours. Thus, Reality TV killed the video star.
For music video lovers this was an error spanning the era of the mid 1990's to 2003. 2003 when Palm Pictures flourishes their Director's Label Series DVD's, providing limitless rewatch access to some favest music vids ever created with deep insights into the creative processes of these favest music vid classic's creators whom have gone on to also create instant classic feature films. Deep dives into the earliest works of autures like Spike Jones, Michel Gondry, Jonathan Glazer, and Mark Romanek, but then they stopped creating them.
Then the most glorious abundance of public access to music videos was gifted to the world with the arrival of the World Wide Web. Web sites like Youtube, Vimeo, and even MTV.com provided the public with every music video ever made, in its entirety, and for a time this happened commercial free. But then MTV.com took away its catalogue of music videos and focused it's website on the promotion of their odd assortment of not music related programming. Vimeo has remained solid by shifting it's income stream so creators pay to be on the platform. But the big one, Youtube, has taken a strange turn that has simultaneously increased access to virtually every music video ever made, and is also fucking up the experience of watching every music video ever made by interrupting the video's endings.
Those who have paid attention to Youtube throughout the years have seen its devolution from free speech proponent, to censor. We've witnessed Youtube being primarily ad free, to becoming ad full. Both of these changes are inspired by making money and controlling messages, which if not ideal, are at least understandable. What Youtube is doing to the end of many videos and why they are doing it, is a bit more baffling.
Youtube, or The Youtubes, as some call it, is unfortunately, and quite tragically, ruining the ending of many videos with it's end-of-video, next-video-to-watch, pop-ups that occupy the screen before the video currently being watched has ended. For example, here's a few incredible music video endings Youtube is currently, needlessly ruining.
Childish Gambino - “This Is America”
Dir: Hiro Murai
As Childish runs for his life from an angry mob, this chilling metaphor for existing within the landmass and corporate entity known as America doesn't get to properly sink in when you got the next video options poppin' on the screen. This is especially true in this instance where there's two Childish Gambino faces on screen. There's the Gambino from the video making a face of fear for his life, and there's Gambino's non-chalant, artist profile/avatar pic, and looking at them side by side is pretty funny, which doesn't seem like the effect it's creators were going for.
Actually, this pop up may be a perfect metaphor for living in America. We can't fully heal from the scary stuff behind us, because too busy thinking about what video to watch next.
How about this suggestion of what to watch next.
Johnny Cash - “Hurt”
Dir: Mark Romanek
Johnny Cash would graduate from this life shortly after this vid's release, June Cash even shorter. His final moments in his final music video are interrupted with options to watch other Johnny and June Cash content.
And perhaps the biggest travesty of them all….
David Bowie & Mick Jagger - “Dancing In The Street”
Dir: David Mallet
This vid ends with the two good buddy love bugs doing a synchronized butt wiggle, but what's on the screen in front of those butts is but the next video watching options. Sure, you can click on it, but it won't give you what you want, which is to see David Bowie and Mick Jagger's butts wiggling at the same butt wigglin' time and the same butt wigglin' rate.
But the real tragedy or travesty amongst all tragedies and travesties and whatever the difference between the two is, is these pop ups don't go away even when you pay YouTube money, they still affect the premium members. You can't pay Youtube enough money to make these things go away.
Another odd thing about this situation is it seems difficult to determine who gets any benefit out of this. Is money made on this somehow. If so, how? Most of the popups are suggesting to subscribe to that creator's channel, an option easily selected by scrolling slightly downward. So the pop ups are messing up the content on the creators channel in order to lure you to subscribe to the creator's channel. It would be like if The Louvre art museum put an advertisement for itself on the Mona Lisa.
Another odd thing is these pop-ups typically suggest only two other watching options, neither of which seem to be easily found in the hundreds of suggested video options in the side bar, much less the pop-ups that pop up when the vid actually ends. This seems like a disservice to the two pop-up watching options advertised during the video. If this pop-up content is important enough to interrupt the current content, why is it not important enough to mention after the content? This forces people that happen to be interested in that pop up content to leave the video they are currently enjoying, to corroborate with music video ending desecration.
It seems to me the only entity benefiting from this is the rare person that has just spent 5 minutes watching a video and for one reason or another can't wait another 5 seconds to get the next one going, and just so happens to be satisfied with the minimal, limited time options being presented.
Final example of Youtube fucking it up is Iggy Azeala's “Fuck it up”.
Iggy Azeala - "Fuck It Up"
Dir: Colin Tilley
The next-to-watch video options covering up Iggy's end-of-video message that appears in text, turning this vid's final moment into an odd game of Wheel Of Fortune. “Confidence is the best o______, Rock it. Own it. Fuck it up.” What's the missing part? We don't know, it's fucked up.
It sounds like it's probably a positive message. It would be nice to know what it is.
But does anyone care that it's fucked up?
Does Youtube care? Does Vevo care? More importantly, does Iggy Azeala care? She made the video. What does she think about “Fuck it Up” getting fucked up? What does Childish Gambino think? What does Mick Jagger think? What do the ghosts of David Bowie and Johnny Cash think? Most importantly, what does the person consuming this art think; you?
This Youtube pop-up situation feels similar to the situation of Netflix making it difficult to watch it's show's ending credits. It feels similarly motivated by fear we might stop watching. As soon as the Netflix show's credits begin to play so does a timer, counting down the way-too-few-seconds before it plays the next episode. This leaves the viewer in a mad-dash stress-search for the remote control to hit the watch-the-credits button before Netflix jumps right into the next episode, thus denying the opportunity to see who created what was just watched, or to enjoy what I typically enjoy credits for, which is having time to vibe out to the end credits music and take a breath and a thought about what was just witnessed in order to assimilate it into our existence. Once we do that, it's possible we might not get back to streaming more content immediately, which is content streamers big fear. Making it all the more ironic that Streaming site's tactics to keep us watching are making the content we are watching less enjoyable to watch.
I'm using this moment right now and this platform as means to ask YouTube, Netflix, and any other streaming service, and more specifically the individuals within these entities that have power to stop these tactics, please stop these tactics. They're whack. Until you do, those who love this art are left with no choice but to seek alternatives.
As far as YouTube goes, music video lovers may protect music video sanctity by blocking these ads with browser extensions, finding alternate sites to view this art, and to obtain and share the digital files so this art may have an existence beyond YouTube or any other particular website. I was hoping to find ways to communicate more directly with YouTube but I'm finding it challenging to find ways to do this, so I'll link to ways to download videos from Youtube, sans pop-ups. Many creators have made their music videos available for download on Vimeo (like the subject of our next class has done (foreshadowing)). If us music video lovers save and share music video files, this art can be preserved in its full form, and our future babies will have opportunity to know the ways Iggy Azeala wants them to fuck up their lives, in a good way.
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