2010: Some remarkable videos.

December 23, 2010, 0 comments

Though MTV has absolutely nothing to do with it anymore, 2010 was the year the music video came back. Primarily thanks to Vimeo’s amazing features and capacities, in the twelve months that lie behind us now we were confronted more or less each single day with a stockpile of videos flooding our inbox. The most significant phenomenon about the emergence of this Vimeo culture is how it has changed the face of the music video itself. Today, it’s next to never about showcasing artists, jumping around and singing in artificial surroundings, nor is it principally about telling a story, with a few remarkable exceptions regarding the latter point. Principally, it’s all about capturing the music’s atmosphere, more than ever before. Considering the means to achieve this, archive.org proved to be an inexhaustible source of material for video collages, to an extent that my friend Oskar of No Modest Bear coined the phrase that “archive.org killed the video star”, and there’s a lot of truth in this blunt statement. Another blogger even suggested the need for a new category for this kind of work, as “music video” could not serve as an accurate term for it.

The videos we’ve decided to highlight below generally do not belong to the “archive.org” kind, yet they are trying to (literally) picture the songs’ spirit, sometimes also their deeper, implicit meaning, every single one of them employing amazing techniques, driven by the director’s imagination and outstanding talent. These videos are, and this is the most exciting aspect of the new generation, interpretations of the music in the true sense of the term.

So please enjoy our selection, in no intended order:

Kendal Johansson – Blue Moon (Video by Christian Kian Zubicky & Philippe Tempelman)