Gramophone killed the Video

October 5th, 2009 | By Kal

I spend too long on trains…

Over the weekend I went to the last gig of a friends band before he moves out to Vietnam, problem was it was a few hundred miles away. That was a problem because me having time to think is dangerous. A lot of the time, it is not constructive at all, I come up with inventions and think “that’s definitely not been done before” without asking myself why it hasn’t! But occasionally, I think about things that are actually interesting – I’ll let you be the judge with this one.

I think it was going to the gig and watching the support act really enjoy themselves on stage that made me think about this. Remember back in the 80s? No, nor do I because I wasn’t alive until 1986, but that is when “the whole MTV thing” took off. Oh wow, how good is this? We can actually see our favourite artists play their songs. This is the future – it’s not just about audio anymore.

But before the 1800s, there was no way of recording music. Before then you had to – wait for it – watch your favourite artists (or musicians). So for less than 100 years of human existence, music was primarily an audio thing.  That’s about 3 or 4 generations of people who may not associate anything visual with music.

The guys at MTV were clever.  They sold us something we already had, but had lost.  OK it was now in your own home, but it was the thing that really brought music back to life. If you think of the biggest artists of the last 25 years, they were all great at making videos.  Perhaps people have it confused for our current celebrity culture – to truly express your music, it’s also about the visual performance.

So from now on, whenever I do anything music related, I’ll be thinking about it as a visual concept and not just audio - look out for Rob and Kal videos for every song!