Does anyone else remember video jukeboxes?
Back in 1983 or 1984 we used to go to a pub at the top of Friars Street in Stirling, feed our money into this new-fangled machine and spend our nights not speaking to each other, too busy watching the video for This Mortal Coil's Kangaroo or Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart, so starved were we of pop visuals (no-one we knew had MTV then). I also recall every customer in Virgin's old Union Street store in Glasgow coming to a drooling stop as Duran Duran's frankly very rude video for Girls on Film got a screening round about then.
Nowadays pop video's invisibility comes for the opposite reason. It's so ubiquitous – only ever a mouse click away – that we don't even think about them any more. Unless one of the tabloids has noticed that someone – Rihanna usually, or Lily Cole in the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs video – is appearing in a state of undress in one of course. What is it with some people and sex?
And yet pop has always been as much a visual as a sonic medium. Bowie makes the most sense when you see sound and vision. Lady Gaga, arguably, makes a lot more sense when you see her videos (because the music is frankly not enough on its own).
Is there an art to it? Some would say the pop video is too wrapped up in the arcane world of promotion for that to be the case, but there's an exhibition in Liverpool at the moment that is trying to suggest otherwise. It encompasses everything from Michael Jackson's Thriller to the videos of such pop auteurs as Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze. My own favourite – Chris Cunningham's video for Bjork's All is Full of Love is in there too, I believe. What's that? It's an android doppelganger snogfest? Oh, I'd never noticed.
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