Video of the week: All I Need
One of my pet hates is music videos with dialogue. What's worse than having a decent song ruined by a musician attempting to flex their acting "muscles" all over the top of it.
Rap artists are especially guilty, but don't forget Britney's Oops I Did It Again, in which a spaceman presents everyone's favourite trailer trash ex-mousekateer with the diamond from Titanic. "But I thought the old lady dropped it into the ocean at the end," Britney exclaims - having learnt to act by watching Andie MacDowell's execrable performance in Four Weddings And A Funeral.
It's woeful and it ruins the song - but Britney was trying to crack Hollywood at the time, so they even included this laughable exchange in the actual record. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
"A-ha!" the more observant amongst you will be thinking, "He's slagging off pop videos with dialogue, but I bet it's all a clever trick to pull the wool over our eyes. There's bound to be one video with loads of speaky bits that's actually really good". Well, your deconstruction of my journalistic technique is quite right, smart arse.
The video is All I Need from Air's 1997 album Moon Safari (every middle class dinner party should have a copy). It's directed by Mike Mills, who went on to make the film Thumbsucker and those weird Gap commercials that looked a bit like West Side Story.
Mills actually directed all of the videos for Moon Safari. For Sexy Boy and All I Need he matched the dreamy, futuristic sounds with equally trippy images of space-travelling gorillas, computer games and slow-motion table tennis.
In All I Need, Mills takes a completely different tack. Returning to the skate parks where he spent his youth (on of his first films, Deformer was a documentary about legendary skateboarder, Ed Templeton) he met a young couple hanging out, and decided to focus the video on their relationship.
"It's a real couple," he told EXPN. "They're both skaters from the Main Street Skatepark in Ventura. He worked there. It's a real documentary, and dialogue goes over the actual video."
In fact, the music is almost incidental - a soundtrack to a short film, if you will. But the young couple's intensity and honesty is mesmerising, and it's very easy to forget you're watching a pop video. "Adolescents are more leaky," said Mills. "They have more to say." Interestingly, the director never revealed the true identity of his stars.
Although All I Need didn't receive much airplay (in the UK, at least) it was to prove massively influential - not least for it's director. "That video definitely was a big turning point for me," he told Kultureflash. "[It] showed me that I can get really emotional, I can get really sincere and actually I really loved the way the audience really reacted to it. I was like I want more of that! I want more people's interior lives and how complicated that is and how sort of endless that is."
Watch and enjoy!
Buy the Air / Mike Mills DVD at Amazon.co.uk
Rap artists are especially guilty, but don't forget Britney's Oops I Did It Again, in which a spaceman presents everyone's favourite trailer trash ex-mousekateer with the diamond from Titanic. "But I thought the old lady dropped it into the ocean at the end," Britney exclaims - having learnt to act by watching Andie MacDowell's execrable performance in Four Weddings And A Funeral. It's woeful and it ruins the song - but Britney was trying to crack Hollywood at the time, so they even included this laughable exchange in the actual record. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
"A-ha!" the more observant amongst you will be thinking, "He's slagging off pop videos with dialogue, but I bet it's all a clever trick to pull the wool over our eyes. There's bound to be one video with loads of speaky bits that's actually really good". Well, your deconstruction of my journalistic technique is quite right, smart arse.
The video is All I Need from Air's 1997 album Moon Safari (every middle class dinner party should have a copy). It's directed by Mike Mills, who went on to make the film Thumbsucker and those weird Gap commercials that looked a bit like West Side Story.
Mills actually directed all of the videos for Moon Safari. For Sexy Boy and All I Need he matched the dreamy, futuristic sounds with equally trippy images of space-travelling gorillas, computer games and slow-motion table tennis.In All I Need, Mills takes a completely different tack. Returning to the skate parks where he spent his youth (on of his first films, Deformer was a documentary about legendary skateboarder, Ed Templeton) he met a young couple hanging out, and decided to focus the video on their relationship.
"It's a real couple," he told EXPN. "They're both skaters from the Main Street Skatepark in Ventura. He worked there. It's a real documentary, and dialogue goes over the actual video."
In fact, the music is almost incidental - a soundtrack to a short film, if you will. But the young couple's intensity and honesty is mesmerising, and it's very easy to forget you're watching a pop video. "Adolescents are more leaky," said Mills. "They have more to say." Interestingly, the director never revealed the true identity of his stars.
Although All I Need didn't receive much airplay (in the UK, at least) it was to prove massively influential - not least for it's director. "That video definitely was a big turning point for me," he told Kultureflash. "[It] showed me that I can get really emotional, I can get really sincere and actually I really loved the way the audience really reacted to it. I was like I want more of that! I want more people's interior lives and how complicated that is and how sort of endless that is."
Watch and enjoy!
posted by mrdiscopop at 11:14 AM
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