University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Now our lives are changing fast: music videos, everyday curation & the digital deluge

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Now our lives are changing fast: music videos, everyday curation & the digital deluge

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NOW OUR LIVES ARE CHANGING FAST:

MUSIC VIDEOS, EVERYDAY CURATION & THE DIGITAL DELUGE

by

Rebecca Jeanne Kinskey

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(SPECIALIZED JOURNALISM: THE ARTS)

August 2011

Copyright 2011 Rebecca Jeanne Kinskey

ii
EPIGRAPH

Katieebeear: Why doesnʼt MTV play music videos anymore? I mean the name of the
station is MTV (Music Television). Why canʼt they play music videos all day like they use
to? I mean some of the crap they play is stupid!

Laura: Because the stupid guidos on Jersey Shore are slowly taking over the damn
world!! I hear you though. I feel the same way. If youʼre not going to play music, DONʼT
call in [sic] MUSIC TELEVISON. I want the old MTV back too!

Summer: Because they think no teenager is going to tune in to watch music videos when
they can do it online. And probably not that many artists make really cool music videos
anymore, and if they are all-out explicit. [sic] “Reality” shows are the new thing

ArchAngel: @summer it right, [sic] kids can watch music videos online anytime they
want. But Fuse plays music videos all the time, MTV just wants to make us stupid […]
Then again thatʼs just my opinion

-Yahoo! Answers conversation following Katieebeearʼs question
“Why doesnʼt MTV play music videos anymore,” June 2011

iii
DEDICATION

To Sasha, Michael & Tim – for the opportunity.

To the Kinskeys, Justin & Ani – for the support.

To Alan, Heika & Gabe – for the company.

To Josh, Kate & Ali – for the clarity.

iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Epigraph ii

Dedication iii

Abstract v

Now Our Lives Are Changing Fast: Music Videos, Everyday Curation
& The Digital Deluge 1

Bibliography 52

v
ABSTRACT

This thesis traces how the form and reception of the music video have changed as the
video has migrated from its original mainstream home (television, and specifically MTV)
to the internet. It examines how the evolution of digital life of the U.S. over the last two
decades (give or take) can be traced through these changes – how we have come to
use chunks of media to communicate our own messages, beyond those contained in the
media themselves, and how we are navigating a superfluity of media. Through interviews
and scenes from different corners of the music video industry, as well as historical
context, a bit more of the authorʼs personal experiences than was strictly necessary, and
even a bit of new media theorizing, this thesis offers specialists and generalists alike a
means to view their interactions with music videos as representative of our eraʼs
distinctive techniques of aesthetic, cultural and technological communication.

1
NOW OUR LIVES ARE CHANGING FAST:
MUSIC VIDEOS, EVERYDAY CURATION & THE DIGITAL DELUGE

1.

Me: You showed us a Weezer video on the computer in, like, 1995. Do you
remember that? Do you remember how you got it?

Dad: Beats the hell outta me. Which one was it, the “Buddy Holly” one?

Me: Yeah.

Dad: You know, I think very early on YouTube, I could be wrong, but you could
download those videos, and they shut that off pretty quick.

Me: No, this was before YouTube, Dad. Way before.

Dad: Well then I donʼt know what the hell it was. Wasnʼt somebody into Weezer
at the time? Was it you?

Me: No, I didnʼt get into them until later.

Dad: Then it must have been your older sister that turned me onto it. I donʼt
know.

Me: I donʼt think any of us showed it to you, you had it somehow and wanted to
show us.

Dad: Thatʼs probably why I downloaded it – was Weezer an early adopter of
online videos? I remember the song, but I donʼt remember having the video at all.

Me: I donʼt know that you downloaded it, I think we still had Prodigy then. You
just had it on your computer somehow, and you wanted to show us, like, how
cool that was.

Dad: Could it have been included with the computer when I bought it? I donʼt
know, I donʼt know what year it would be. Iʼve gone through so many iterations of
computers that I donʼt know anymore.

Me: It was ʼ95 or ʼ96. I was 10 or 11, I remember because it was in the basement
of the house on Fuchsia Drive.

2
Dad: ʻ95, ʻ96, the Fuchsia Drive house. Maybe somebody gave it to me on a CD-
ROM. You know, stuff gets passed around out there in Silicon Valley, maybe
somebody gave it to me.
1

I remember exactly the first time I saw a music video on a computer. It was Weezerʼs
“Buddy Holly,” directed by Spike Jonze, and it had been shown to me by my dad, who
called my brother and I to the monolithically huge monitor of our family computer, excited
just for the sake of being excited about a high-quality sound and image emanating from
our machine. A couple things are amazing about the conversation we had when I called
him to track how this chunk of media had made its way into the basement of our home.
One is realizing that two of todayʼs basic techniques of consumption – YouTube and
downloading – have become such natural extensions of how we operate that my dad
retroactively inserted them into his memories of the mid-90s. We had to travel down
three branches of the technological family tree – past YouTube, past downloading, past
even a broadband connection to the web – to shake out a clue for how we could have
seen the video. The second amazing thing is the actual answer to how we had this
miracle screening, an answer to which my dadʼs recollections actually got very close: it
was included on every installation disc of Windows 95.
2

In case youʼve updated your memory with newer things than the appearance of
Windows 95, let me help you: it was a big deal. Bill Gates co-presented the launch with
Jay Leno, who made a Clinton flip-flop joke out of the ease with which a user could

1
Dave Kinskey, phone conversation, April 2, 2011.

2
Stephen Manes, “Personal Computers: What Is Windows 95 Really Like?” New York Times,
August 1, 1995, accessed April 3, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/01/science/personal-
computers-personal-computers-what-is-windows-95-really-like.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

3
switch between two application windows.
3
Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry starred in
a promotional “cyber sitcom”
4
that had them touring the OS with the help of the absent
Bill Gatesʼ brassy secretary (Secretary: “Okay, now letʼs load up the Task Bar, Iʼll show
you what it does.” Aniston: “Task bar? Is that anything like a Snickers bar? Does that
have nougat?” Perry: “What is nougat, does anybody know that?” Cue Seinfeld-y bass
riff). Microsoft convinced the reportedly reluctant Rolling Stones to license “Start Me
Up”
5
for a rollicking minute-long commercial advertising the program,
6
part of a
promotional campaign that The Washington Post estimated cost around $300 million –
thought at the time to be the largest product advertising campaign ever conducted –
including lighting the Empire State building in the Microsoft logoʼs colors and paying for
1.5-million free copies of the Times for Londoners on the British launch date.
7

Microsoftʼs inclusion of “Buddy Holly” on the disc, as well as its decision to enlist
Leno, Aniston, Perry and the Stones, announced the dawning of a media-and-computer-
intertwined culture. “Buddy Holly” had been in heavy rotation on MTV since December of
the previous year, and would go on to win four Moonmen at the Video Music Awards just

3
“Windows 95 Launch on Computer Chronicles” (video), YouTube, accessed April 3, 2011,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeBi2ZxUZiM

4
“Matthew Perry Jennifer Aniston Windows 95 guide Part 1” (video), YouTube, accessed April 3,
2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GWQgb015Lc

5
Michael Gartenburg, “The Story Behind ʻStart Me Upʼ and Windows 95,” Jupiter Research
Analyst Weblogs, August 22, 2006, accessed April 3, 2011 via Internet Archive,
http://web.archive.org/web/20071214054208/http://weblogs.jupiterresearch.com/analysts/gartenb
erg/archives/016913.html

6
“Microsoft Windows 95 Launch Video – Start me Up” (video), YouTube, accessed April 3, 2011,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0AJM6HMYjM

7
David Segal, “With Windows 95ʼs debut, Microsoft Scales Heights of Hype,” Washington Post,
August 24, 1995, accessed April 3, 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/
longterm/microsoft/stories/1995/debut082495.htm

4
one month after the release of Windows 95, including Best Alternative Video, Best
Breakthrough Video, Best Director and Best Editing. Only five months after Weezer and
Spike Jonzeʼs victory at the VMAs, the first major update to Windows 95 was the first
release to include Internet Explorer in-box rather than selling it as a discrete program for
separate purchase.
The sense of awe my family had at watching a video on a computer was not
unique: on the YouTube comment thread for “Buddy Holly,” one user writes, “Windows
95! I still remember being so amazed ʻThe computer can play…videos?!!!!!ʼ”
8
A
commenter on the thread for Edie Brickellʼs “Good Times, Bad Times”, the other video
included on the CD-ROM, writes, “I love this song and video, mostly for the Windows 95
nostalgia it brings. When I first saw this video, it was still an amazing thing to see full-
color, hi-res video playing on a computer.”
9
Another user writing on the same page boils
his entire commentary on Brickellʼs video down to two words: “Windows 95.”
A corner was being turned – from computers as professional tools to computers
as cultural appendages. It makes sense that when Microsoft went searching for a piece
of media that would be both impressive and broadly appealing, they landed on music
videos: music videos were brief yet ambitious, experimental yet familiar, representative
of being on the forefront of culture while at the same time safely ensconced in a time-
tested format. As Microsoft sought to underline the new possibilities of not just its
operating system but computing in the new millennium, itʼs conflation of the TV and the

8
badskroy71, March, 2011, comment on “Weezer – Buddy Holly” (video), YouTube, accessed
April 3, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kemivUKb4f4

9
unclestrug, October, 2010, comment on “Edie Brickell – Good Times, Bad Times” (video),
YouTube, accessed April 3, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSA-CWme3pM

5
PC was a particularly prescient move. In 1981 Robert Pittman, the founding vice-
president of programming at MTV, described his own service, a combination of the
stereo and the TV, with the same aura of streamlined progress: “Weʼre now seeing TV
become a component of the stereo system. Itʼs ridiculous to think that you have two
forms of entertainment – your stereo and your TV – which have nothing to do with one
another. What weʼre doing is marrying those two forms so that they work together in
unison. Weʼre the first channel on cable that pioneers this…MTV is the first attempt to
make TV a new form, other than video games and data channels. Weʼre talking about
creating a new form using existing technologies.”
10

Over time, the computerʼs omnivorous capabilities have become so thorough that
it has come not just to conjoin itself to the TV, but nearly to replace it. In my own home, it
has been two months since we ditched our cable package in favor of a Roku, a box the
size of two side-by-side decks of playing cards that brings us Netflix, Hulu, Vimeo and an
ever-increasing smattering of other digital channels. That is to say, in an atmosphere
without complaint, we have come to own a television set but not necessarily a TV. As
the screen in our living room has grown increasingly dormant except when fed via its Wifi
tube, most of TVʼs forms – the sitcom, the serial drama, the cartoon and the cooking
show – have transitioned to becoming housed in a new box and transferred via ethereal
wires without much challenge to either their structure or cultural significance. In fact,
many of us may actually be more avid TV watchers and fans now that we can happily
access shows during their original broadcasts on their original broadcast networks,
within Hulu and iTunes at our leisure, or in orgies of DVD viewing – often times using all

10
Andrew Goodwin, Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Culture
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1992), 133.

6
three formats to compliment or enable one another, as in the case of a new viewer
coming to a program already several seasons underway.
Even as Tivo, torrenting and internet TVs increasingly help us to turn away from
watching things “on TV,” very few of us prefer programming made exclusively for the
web over network and broadcaster-supported shows. The fact that a show is on TV
somewhere, sometime, is the essential coronation that allows it be considered for
serious viewing. Videos however, especially in the last year, now seem to be floating
away from this need, loosed from the notion that they need to be docked and contained
on the television. This shift is striking, considering that at one point MTVʼs wholesale
revocation of the music video felt as if CNN had stopped playing news segments and
instead built programming around Anderson Cooperʼs dating life and Christine
Amanpourʼs sisterʼs acting career, highlighting the abandonment by once a year
broadcasting a giant special to bestow awards on all the best segments that it hadnʼt
deigned to show. Yet even as we still mouth the words we think we ought to feel – oh,
how many times someone said, “Yeah, why doesnʼt MTV play videos anymore?” when I
told them about this thesis, and oh, how Iʼll probably use exactly that notion in the
eventual title – our actions show that we already know why they donʼt, and that we know
exactly where we can see them instead.
As 2011 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the music videoʼs mainstream
existence, statistics demonstrate that the music video remains one of our favorite things
to watch. In June 2011, comScore, the leading digital ratings service, released numbers
that showed VEVO, a music video channel housed within YouTube as well as at its own
URL, holds the #2 spot in the U.S. for visits to a video site, content views and minutes of

7
video watched. 60.4 million unique viewers visited VEVO in the month of May,
collectively watching 360 million videos and spending an average of 105 minutes over
the course of the month on the site.
11
While Google Sites, driven by YouTube, holds the
top spot by large margins – 147 million unique viewers, 2.2 billion videos and 311
minutes (over 5 hours!) viewed per visitor per month
12
– that VEVO, dedicated
exclusively to music videos, is the next runner-up betrays how hollow and practiced is
our lingering sense of injustice that the video is no longer on TV. Take, for instance, the
sense of offense registered by the Associated Pressʼ Jake Coyle, who characterized the
video as having been “left for dead by MTV.”
13
Coyleʼs language reveals how thoroughly
personal this form, or its lack, feels to us. This is a modern chunk of media, a genre that
has been loosed to sit alongside the novel, the pop single, the feature film, the sitcom
and perhaps the MP3 as the building blocks of the cultural authorship of ourselves.
Now it feels, as it has probably felt for the entire conscious lives of todayʼs fifteen-
year-olds, like MTV and YouTube exist for different functions, and videos simply arenʼt
one of MTVʼs. Even for those of us who might want to hold onto our betrayal, itʼs hard to
stay mad at Music Television when weʼre dating VEVO, Vimeo and Stereogum instead
and they all treat us better than he did anyway. More importantly, if videos were stuck
on the TV, theyʼd be beyond our ability to post them on our walls and tweet them to our
networks. In an era of infinite choice, the baldly curatorial act of saying “I want you to

11
“comScore Releases May 2011 U.S. Online Video Rankings,” comScore Inc, accessed June
28, 2011, http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/6/comScore_Releases
_May_2011_U.S._Online_Video_Rankings

12
Ibid.

13
Jake Coyle, “Left for Dead by MTV, Music Videos Rebound on the Web,” ABC
News/Associated Press, September 9, 2010, accessed March 12, 2011, http://abcnews.go.com/
Entertainment/wireStory?id=11590812

8
watch this” is one of our most cherished everyday behaviors. The changing significance
of the music video shows us how computers and digital devices have allowed us to use
music for more than musicʼs sake – to link, post, tweet and spread songs in deft
expressions of the fleeting moments, alluring currents and durable pop alliances that
make up our lives. And videosʼ new migration patterns – for the most part loose, wild and
chaotic – help reveal our ambivalence over whether such freedom to wander without a
guide through the digital deluge is a liberating gift or a critical lack.

2.
On a Sunday afternoon this past January, with the clear, mild air almost
shimmering with Southern California spring on the verge, the first annual Los Angeles
Music Video Festival quietly took place in a downtown theater. A single gourmet food
truck sat parked in front of the glass-fronted building announcing, along with small
groups intermittently arriving or departing, that something was happening inside the
venue. A small crowd of about forty had assembled by 11 a.m. for the programʼs first
event, a screening of student music videos, and had stayed patient through technical
difficulties. At the end of the screening, no one could find the lights, and the festivalʼs
young founder, Sami Kriegstein, began her official welcome speech as a voice in the
dark. Another couple handfuls of audience turned up for a midday panel of up-and-
coming directors. By afternoon, the small cohort of the public began to be joined by
recognizable faces – directors, editors, and producers from Los Angelesʼ small but tight-
knit music video community.

9
Now, approaching 5 p.m., a crowd of about 150 chatted inside the theater or
milled around the rooftop bar. They had assembled for the MVPA Showcase, an informal
awards ceremony produced by the Music Video Production Association, the industryʼs
dues-paying trade organization. By 5:30 the crowd had shuffled into the theater, making
it the fullest it had been all day. The front half of the audience was almost to capacity,
record label reps rubbing shoulders with established directors and producers in their late
30ʼs to early 40ʼs. Younger directors and their cohorts sat in patches in the back half of
the auditorium, drinking and giggling. The room, at least from my seat towards the rear,
had the distinct atmosphere of a middle school assembly, if the teachers had for some
reason not shown up to work and the student council was excitedly determined to carry
on. Coleen Haynes, the President of the MVPA, began the proceedings.
Haynes looks almost exactly like what you would expect someone who has spent
their career in music videos to look like: blonde hair loose and with a hint of tussle, a light
leather jacket over an olive green tank top, black heeled boots and a gaggle of bracelets
and necklaces. Haynes welcomed the modest crowd, which elicited more of a cheer than
seemed necessary. She thanked two MVPA volunteers, which also elicited a cheer. The
cheers justified themselves as Haynes said how excited she was to see everyone back
in one place again, after two years, and outlined the preceding twenty-four months to
heads nodding around the room.
The music industryʼs financial woes had been compounded, as in all industries,
by the recession. Many smaller video production companies had closed their doors, and
the ones that stayed open struggled to survive. While Haynes, her fellow executive
producers and the label commissioners that made up the MVPA spent their days

10
reworking business models built around million-dollar budgets to subsist on tens-of-
thousand dollar budgets, the MVPA itself depleted its funds, laid off the few full-time
employees it had, and suspended its own awards show. When Kriegstein had sought
out the MVPAʼs presence at the Festival, Haynesʼ initial reaction, despite her position as
the closest thing to a public advocate her industry possessed, had been, “Why do you
want to make a festival for music videos? Thereʼs no money in them anymore.” Two
months later, the purpose of todayʼs gathering was to give out awards not just for the
best videos of 2010, but to retroactively bestow the awards that had never been given in
2009.
A meager five categories were recognized in two rounds. 2009ʼs first award, for
Best Video with a Budget Under $25,000, went to “Heartless,” a hybrid live action and
animation spot for soulful-rock group The Fray. The award was accepted by the videoʼs
director, Hiro Murai, who thanked his rep, production company, family and “everyone
who did all that for no pay, basically.” The directors for 2009ʼs Best Hip Hop, Pop and
Rock videos were not in attendance – Spike Jonze for Kayne Westʼs “We Were Once a
Fairytale,” Francis Lawrence for Lady Gagaʼs “Bad Romance,” and Barney Clay for Yeah
Yeah Yeahʼs “Zero” – so despite Muraiʼs recent speech, when Joseph Kahn won Video
of the Year for Katy Perryʼs “Waking Up in Las Vegas,” he began his own acceptance by
noting, “I feel kind of lame because Iʼm the only director to show up to accept an award.”
The VMAs these were not.
However charmingly low-rent the proceedings may have been, the sense in the
air of a reviving community was more than simply self-congratulatory. When Matthew
Cullen accepted his award for “California Gurls,” 2010ʼs Best Pop video, he surveyed the

11
modest collection of people before him and said, “This room has been distilled to the
most hardcore video lovers. I truly believe that music videos are unlike any other art, are
remarkable for how quickly they can go out and have an effect on pop culture.” At the
time of this writing, the video that won Cullen his award has been viewed 80 million
times on YouTube and VEVO,
14
while the combined view count of its three most-viewed
parody videos is approaching 56 million.
15

But Cullen had more than heartfelt belief and YouTube statistics in his pocket. In
December, two months before the MVPA Awards, Cullen had launched Mirada, a
“creative workshop” described by one of Cullenʼs three partners, Guillermo del Toro (of
“Panʼs Labyrinth” and “Hellboy” fame) as “a storytelling engine in the form of a company
– an imaginarium, where we are free to explore the practical possibilities of transmedia
without compartmentalizing our artistic process.”
16
At just around the time of the MVPAʼs,
Mirada received its first significant commission – to team with Google Creative Labs and
music video director Chris Milk on an “interactive music video experience”
17
for the song
“3 Dreams of Black” by Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi. The project would be built
using WebGL, a web browser-based technology that would allow the team to create a
3D environment that viewers would be able to manipulate at will. Google had released

14
“Katy Perry – California Gurls ft. Snoop Dogg” (video), YouTube, accessed June 28, 2011,
http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=F57P9C4SAW4

15
“Search results for California Gurls,” YouTube, accessed June 28, 2011,
http://www.youtube.com/results ?search_query=california+gurls&aq=f

16
“Guillermo del Toro Launches Mirada, a New Creative Workshop, in Los Angeles,” Mirada,
accessed June 28, 2011, http://www.mirada.com/about/

17
“Case Study – Rome, ʻ3 Dreams of Black,ʼ” Mirada, accessed June 28, 2011,
http://www.mirada.com/rome.php

12
WebGL for its browser, Chrome, only three weeks prior, endowing the video with the
cross-promotional purpose of familiarizing the technologyʼs capabilities to the public.
“3 Dreams of Black” wasnʼt the first outing for Milk and Google. Their previous
partnership, an interactive music video for Arcade Fireʼs “We Used to Wait” that was
itself given the title “The Wilderness Downtown,” had been a multi-industry hit meant to
display the functionalities of HTML5 and Chrome. The music video community was one
of many that sensed the new ground being traversed in “Wilderness,” and in that quiet
downtown theater on that February afternoon, the MVPA crowned the project not only
Best Rock Video of 2010, but Video of the Year. It surely added to the sense of occasion
that “The Suburbs,” the long-player the video advertised, had won Album of the Year at
the Grammyʼs only fourteen days prior.
18

Chris Milk, however, wasnʼt on hand to accept his award. Milk was actually at
Sundance at the time, presenting “Wilderness” as part of the New Frontier project, a
program of “media installations, multimedia performances, transmedia experiences,
panel discussions, feature films, and more.”
19
That it was the American film communityʼs
most significant festival that drew him away speaks volumes for how far the role of music
videos as a highly visible site of experiment at the converging horizons of music,
technology, and digital culture had come since Microsoftʼs use of “Buddy Holly.” Though
the computer-aided visuals of the Weezer/Jonze/Microsoft outing tapped, to some
degree, into the growing digital zeitgeist, Microsoftʼs implication in including the video

18
“Nominees and Winners,” Grammy.com, accessed June 28, 2011,
http://www.grammy.com/nominees

19
“Film and Events > New Frontier,” Sundance.org, accessed June 28, 2011,
http://www.sundance.org/festival/film-events/new-frontier/

13
centered on their operating systemʼs powers for content delivery. With “Wilderness,” the
orientation shifted distinctly from viewers as audience to viewers as users and co-
authors of digital experience.
“Wilderness” is only accessible to viewers after they call up its unique URL
20
and
type in the address of their childhood home (and only within Chrome, naturally). Armed
with the location of a house on the outskirts of Silicon Valley, my personal version of the
video takes place in multiple browser windows that self-populate across the screen.
Some windows display pre-produced footage of a pre-teen in a shadowy hoodie dashing
through suburban streets, while others use the address Iʼve provided to call up wide
shots of my former neighborhood in Street View and Google Earth aerial vistas. A CGI
version of the hooded protagonist comes to rest at my address after a dash through the
surrounding streets, spinning in place in what was once familiar terrain. Against the
heartfelt insistence of Arcade Fireʼs song and next to a window displaying the aerial view
of a home I have not seen since 2004, a new window pops up and tells me to “Write a
postcard of advice to the younger you that lived there then.” “Now our lives are changing
fast,” Win Butler sings as I type a message to my 12-year-old self, her face illuminated
by images of Rivers Cuomo transposed into Happy Days, enrapt before a screen in a
basement in Northern California. Now our lives are changing fast…

3.
Even across Santa Monica Boulevard, through the rain, gloom and traffic, the
music videos playing on the bank of TVs in the lobby of Sony Music are visible. Eight

20
“Arcade Fire, The Wilderness Downtown, An interactive film by Chris Milk, Featuring ʻWe Used
to Wait,ʼ” accessed June 28, 2011, http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/

14
John Legends sing in unison, wailing silently behind the glass doors. The I.M. Pei-
designed building, a travertine monument to corporate power sitting stolidly on the
corner of Santa Monica and Lasky, used to house Creative Artists Agency, one of the
“big four” Hollywood talent agencies. When this was CAA, there were no TVs in the
lobby, nothing so personable as the large grey carpet and couches that dot the floor
across from the television screens. Then, it was just an echoing vaulted atrium, dwarfing
visitors with the suggestion of the power housed within.
CAAʼs three harried but exactingly polished young receptionists have been
replaced with one slightly sleepy young dude at a small desk pushed against the base of
the marble wall. Posters from promotional campaigns a year or two past lean lazily
behind desks in nearby offices. The desk dude sets his iPhone aside and dials up to my
host. No assistant comes to fetch me, no visitor badge is printed to stick onto my jacket.
Bryan Younce, Vice President of Video and Content Production for Columbia Records,
one of the twenty labels held under the Sony umbrella, pads down the stairs in sneakers
and shirt sleeves, crosses past the TVs where The Kings of Leon are now singing in a
dusty barn, and leads me back up to his office.
Younce has officially been in the music video business since 2007, when he was
one of a slew of new hires brought in coincident with the hiring of Rick Rubin, the
legendary producer, co-founder of Def Jam Records, and bringer of hip-hop to
mainstream America. Rubin himself had been hired at Columbia precisely for his path-
finding and boundary-crossing – Lynn Hirschbergʼs 2007 profile of Rubin in The New
York Times Magazine opened with no less a grand statement than that Sony “wanted

15
him to save the company. And just maybe the record business.”
21
At the time, Younce
was deeply but unofficially involved in the video community: a self-described music video
“super fan,” he had re-programmed and revived the music video showcase at the Los
Angeles Film Festival shortly after his graduation from USC, and was regularly curating
another showcase with influential LA music collective dublab. Music videos were just one
aspect of an industry that was in steep decline, and Younceʼs career has tracked with
the unsteady re-assertion of videosʼ place within the cultural landscape.
Music video in the United States has had four distinct eras (more if we include
the pre-MTV forms of Vaudevilleʼs illustrated song, the post-WWII Scopitone, and the
mid-century pre-taped promotional clip, which wonʼt be explained here but make for a
fantastic rabbit hole to be explored). First, for our discussion, was the ʻ80ʼs – which
actually lasted into the early ʻ90ʼs – the era when the form was imported from the UK,
codified, and largely succeeded on the back of the popularity of pop artists, as a kind of
visual radio. This era birthed genre-curated programs like 120 Minutes, perhaps the
best, most assured and meaningful show of its ilk, and which provided a kind of counter-
cultural warm-up to the full-on alternative movement of the ʻ90s, creating the sense of a
groundswell of musical discovery. The ʻ90s, which actually lasted into the early 2000ʼs,
was the era of the auteur, when a slew of young directors – Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze,
Chris Cunningham, David Fincher, Mike Mills, Hype Williams, Anton Corbjin, Mark
Romanek and Jonathan Glazer, among others – brought filmmaking to a place of at least
equal footing with music as the potential draw to music videos. In the straight-up 2000ʼs,
which became almost an anti-era, videos largely stagnated, bordering on parody in their

21
Lynn Hirschberg, “The Music Man,” New York Times, September 2, 2007, accessed April 11,
2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/magazine/02rubin.t.html

16
adherence to genre-convention and meaningless opulence, the McMansions of cable
TV. The formʼs irrelevance was underlined in 2008, when TRL, MTVʼs long-running
countdown vehicle, shuttered its Times Square windows and videos all but dried up from
basic cable (long live BET and CMT).
22
And then there is now, which began sometime in
2007, when the internet conspired, as in so many other media industries, to explode
things through the roof at the same time it imploded them from the inside.
Younce, whose job consists of matching a Columbia artist and track to a director
and concept, plumbing all elements for their philosophical and aesthetic affinities, has an
encyclopedic knowledge of music videos across all of these eras, developed during his
teenage years in the pre-TRL prime of 120 Minutes. Beginning to outline the distinctions
between that era and our own, he said, “If you looked at music videos in 1988 on MTV,
versus the early- to mid-ʻ90ʼs when all these auteurs were making videos, the medium
changed a lot, and its changing again. This time itʼs because the outlet has completely
shifted.” The outlet refers not just to the internet, broadly, but to the countless sites that
make videos an integral part of their draw. YouTube and newcomer VEVO may
constitute the godhead of moving music imagery, but specialty music sites, video
aggregators and any number of personal and corporate blogs traffic in videos, infinite
strands of chaff and wheat, each using videos for a slightly different purpose and
audience.
It is this fundamental shift – the explosion of outlets – that has installed a
miniature Nielsen Company and branding agency into the base of every internet authorʼs

22
Yvonne Villareal, “Fans rocked the vote on MTVʼs ʻTRL,ʼ which wraps Sunday,” Los Angeles
Times, November 15, 2008, accessed February 24, 2011,
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/nov/15/entertainment/et-trl15

17
self-worth, and has rippled through the nature of the music video. “Certainly at itʼs most
basic itʼs a promotional tool, another avenue to get peopleʼs attention,” Younce said. “At
the same time, itʼs also creating an identity for the band. Even if the bandʼs not in it, it
helps further establish their persona in some way. Those are the more boring ends of it,
but in its most essential purpose, itʼs still what theyʼre doing, which is what theyʼve
always done – itʼs just harder to get that attention now.”
The decline in album sales has translated, from an artistʼs standpoint, into more
than just financial loss. A physical album provided multiple opportunities to develop an
artistic ethos, through jacket design, transcribed lyrics, liner notes, and fold-out posters,
even the choice between jewel case or cardboard gate-fold vinyl-style packaging. In an
environment seething with musical personalities a video can be a crucial moment of
expression, and it is crucial that they transgress some standard of normalcy in order to
be seen. “As far as the videos are concerned, I often tell the newer bands the only risk
you can take is not taking a risk,” Younce said. “It will just disappear, people just wonʼt
care. Even if someone watches something and likes it or kind of likes it, theyʼre not going
to tell someone else to watch it, which is what everyoneʼs looking for. We want to make
something that people are gonna say, ʻOh my god, you have to check this out.ʼ”
Which brings us to the slippery notion of virality, that ever-elusive standard of
many a digital livelihood. “Itʼs just something that everyone wants to watch, but its been
appropriated to where I always hear people telling me, ʻWe need to make a viral for
this.ʼ” The corners of Younceʼs mouth turned downward slightly, into something in
between the beginning of laughter and the first quiver of a grimace. “It sounds like
something youʼd be doing in a lab, something nefarious. Oftentimes it means something

18
cheap, that doesnʼt cost much money. But itʼs just meant to be something that appeals to
peopleʼs impulses and curiosities and something that they want to share with everyone,
which is what everyoneʼs trying to make anyway.”
The notion of sharing is an important one, on the web, and central to what seems
to have shifted in music videos. The media scholar Henry Jenkins, formerly of MIT, now
of USC, has been quietly chipping away at the indiscriminate use of the term “viral,”
promoting instead the idea of “spreadability.” Like Clay Shirky, among whose ilk Jenkins
is frequently quoted, Jenkinsʼ fundamental concern, more than just what to call the swath
that “new” or “social” media cuts through our lives, is in charting how digital media is
changing how people interact with each other and with media itself.
In the forthcoming book Spreadable Media, Jenkins and two co-authors outline
how “viral” and “sticky” can distort our understanding of why we feel compelled to link,
post or tweet something, a misunderstanding which undermines our appreciation of the
meaningfulness of both what we are sharing and why. Jenkins concedes that “viral
metaphors capture the speed with which new ideas circulate through the Internet,”
23
but
objects to a usage in which ”the viral is linked to the ʻirrational,ʼ and participants become
unknowing ʻhostsʼ of the information they carry across their social networks.” According
to this rubric, in March 2011 the globe was dotted with people whose brains had been
invaded by Rebecca Black, and witlessly repopulated her video on their Facebook walls,
Twitter accounts and emails.

23
Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning
in a Networked Society, (NYU Press, 2012). As this text is unpublished at the time of this writing,
generously made available for my use as an electronic manuscript, page numbers for this and all
following citations are unavailable.

19
Jenkins and company critique “viral” as a term that “does little to describe
situations where people actively assess a media text and decide who to share it with and
how to pass it along.”
24
Whatever your degree of enjoyment of “Friday”, a slew of
complex decisions went into your interaction with Ms. Blackʼs opus. Speaking for myself,
I had seen the video posted enough on my various online networks that I didnʼt repost it,
but did force two different post-dinner discussions of it. In both my decision not to share
“Friday” digitally and my choice to share it in the real world, I was a living example of
Jenkinsʼ contention that “people increasingly interact through sharing meaningful bits of
media content.”
25
Had I posted the video, even without a comment, Iʼd have been saying
almost as much as what I actually did say while talking in my living room with my friends
– and I wasnʼt the only one talking: Ms. Blackʼs video is ranked as the second most
discussed on YouTube.
26
The appeal of “Friday,” along with countless other “viral”
videos, lies as much in what we want to say about it as in what it says on its own.
As we accrete content onto our pages, blogs, walls, and sundry other accounts,
we build a being that speaks for us when (or where) our living, breathing self canʼt.
Whether you find it depressing, interesting or liberating that we can be measured as the
sum of our interests, viewing habits and musical tastes, that fact is at least appropriate in
acknowledging how downright good we have all become at reading not just the intended
meaning of a song, movie, TV show or video clip, but at investing them with a new layer

24
Ibid.

25
Ibid.

26
“YouTube Charts – Most Discussed Videos, All Time, in All Categories,” YouTube, accessed
April 12, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/charts/videos_comment_count?t=a (Video has since
been removed from YouTube.)

20
of our own intention, as well – Jenkins: “As people listen, read, or view that material, they
think not only – often, not even primarily – about what the producers might have meant
but also what the person who shared it was trying to communicate.”
27

After the practical aim of creating or maintaining an identity for an artist, Younce
ranked this ability for videos to become cultural source code as their chief currency, the
opportunity for, as he put it, “creating something that can be bigger than itself. In the
MTV era of music video, maybe your fans would come to your concert dressed up as a
character from your music video or something, but theyʼre not gonna remix it online and
post a video of them reenacting it – the technology wasnʼt available then. But now you
can make a video and it grows to like a mythic…” Younce trailed off for just a second,
and then settled on the case that would make his point. “I mean, Beyoncéʼs ʻSingle
Ladiesʼ is a phenomenon in that way.”
And what a phenomenon it was. Despite a view count (126,176,179 at the time of
this writing)
28
dwarfed by the likes of Justin Bieber (“Baby” holds the top spot at
575,232,279),
29
Lady Gaga (392,805,571 views of “Bad Romance”),
30
and “Charlie bit
my finger!” (345,437,968),
31
it is hard to think of a video thatʼs had such pervasive trans-
media influence, cropping up in both the most and least likely places. Kurt, the petite gay
choir nerd on “Glee,” uses the confidence he gains from performing the videoʼs

27
Jenkins, et al, 2012.

28
“Beyoncé – Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)” (video), YouTube, accessed June 28, 2011,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m1EFMoRFvY

29
“YouTube Charts – Most Viewed Videos, All Time, in All Categories,” YouTube, accessed June
28, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/charts/videos_views?t=a

30
Ibid.

31
Ibid.

21
aggressively feminine choreography to kick successful field goals for the football team, in
a significant moment of navigating gender roles on prime time TV. The Chipettes are the
only force able to challenge the skyrocketing music careers and high school popularity of
Alvin and the Chipmunks in 2009ʼs Alvin & The Chipmunks 2: The Squeakquel, a
gauntlet the female trio throws down with a performance of “Single Ladies.” Kanye
couldnʼt help himself over the injustice of Beyoncéʼs losing Best Female Video to Taylor
Swift at the 2009 VMAs, famously storming the stage to interrupt the country singerʼs
acceptance speech, an act which Beyoncé was able to disavow later in the evening
when her video picked up Video of the Year. No less than the president was revealed to
have taken careful note of the video, when a videographer accompanying John Legend
captured Obama being chided by his wife into admitting heʼd done the dance for his
daughters.
32
And in a nod to the participatory zeitgeist that had helped boost her songʼs
popularity to such heights, the singer played a selection of the clipʼs YouTube response
videos on a screen above the stage when she performed the song during her “I Am…”
world tour.
33

To be sure, “Single Ladies” soared on the back of a dance craze, perhaps even
approaching entry into the category of “Songs that Lose their Quotation Marks by
Becoming Dances” along with the Hustle, YMCA, and the Macarena. But the craze
benefited from the strength of all truly spreadable videos, an inner harmony that belies

32
Gil Kaufman, “Watch President Obama Do The ʻSingle Ladiesʼ Dance,” MTV.com, January 29,
2009, accessed April 15, 2011, http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1603760/watch-president-
barack-obama-do-single-ladies-dance.jhtml

33
Dan Cairns, “YouTube plays part in Beyoncé Knowlesʼ life,” The Sunday Times, May 10, 2009,
accessed April 15, 2011,
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article6243174.ece

22
any effort to short circuit the alchemical process of artist, expression and reception.
Wrapping up our talk, Younce laid out this singularly important ingredient for a
successfully wildly successful video.
“First and foremost a video has to be true to the band and the song. It has to be
something that isnʼt a fabrication, that is true to their identity or the identity that theyʼre
creating and understand, and that is complimentary to the song. And that really just
means creating an honest work of art, which I think is the loftiest, greatest thing that we
get to do here - thatʼs the true privilege, that we get to be part of this process of
creation.”
The clouds had not parted outside Younceʼs office window, though the rain had
stopped, at least temporarily.
“Itʼs the best part of a business thatʼs capitalizing on art and on something
creative.”

4.
Just north of Melrose Boulevard, at Cahuenga - a few blocks east of Paramount
Studios, the last great hold-out with a lot in Tinseltown proper, and a few blocks west of
where Melrose explodes into head shops and flea markets, the remnants of the weirdo
Hollywood of The Germs and Francesca Lia Blockʼs fever dreams – rests a modest
cinderblock live/work loft development, new enough that it still has its vinyl poster
strapped to its exterior, but old enough that the posterʼs colors have faded some in the
sun. The building replicates itself a few times in a mile-or-so radius from here,
presumably constructed by the same developer like so many video game landscape

23
components, as this area where Hollywood peters out into the vast domestic tundra of
mid-City (so blandly named, so blandly inhabited) attempts to refashion itself into the
“Hollywood Media District.” The moniker is not untrue – the slate of upscale area
restaurants that offer delivery testifies to the quite large and fairly affluent business
community secreted in the neighborhoodʼs converted theaters and storefronts – it just
doesnʼt announce itself without the help of banners hung from streetlamps or freshly
installed on traffic medians on La Brea.
This particular cinderblock building houses, among other anonymous tenants, the
office of a group of young directors, editors and digital effects artists, who cross-pollinate
onto each otherʼs music videos and commercials, a loose collective since their days in
college. The director standing in the doorway of the loft on a bright afternoon in mid-
March is Hiro Murai, the young winner of the MVPAʼs 2009 award for Best Video Under
$25,000. His work since 2009, largely produced in this space, has included videos for
Bloc Party, Lupe Fiasco, Raphael Saadiq, Usher and B.O.B., the last of which (for the
single “Airplanes”) received four VMA nominations in 2010, including Video of the Year.
34

As Murai walks through the unit to the rooftop patio, evidence of restrained all-
nighters abounds. The kitchen sink has dishes, though not many for a space shared by
five to ten young guys in rotation and without a maid or PA. The toilet paper has run out
on the roll in the bathroom, but a small pile of fresh rolls has been tossed under the sink.
A couple mugs rest on the coffee table in the living room, where a shelf has been
installed to display enough magazines to crown the area a waiting room. The loft space

34
“VMAs 2010: Lady Gaga and Eminem Top This Yearʼs Nominees,” MTV Buzzworthy Blog,
August 3, 2010, accessed April 12, 2011, http://buzzworthy.mtv.com/2010/08/03/2010-mtv-vma-
nominee-list-lady-gaga-eminem/

24
above the living room is where the digital magic happens: four computer workstations
are installed in the open area along with a black leather couch. Each station has two flat-
screen monitors side-by-side, and at least one of them has big, prosumer speakers and
a subwoofer. And thatʼs about it.
Murai – who is 28 – is part of todayʼs rising tide of new, young directors that are
hitting a high-water mark of artistry and innovation in videos after the mid-aughtsʼ
considerable creative ebb. Born in Japan, Murai exploited an early aptitude for drawing
and painting as the best way to communicate with his classmates when his family
moved to the US when he was 9. Then, “in high school, I got into making shitty little
movies on my dadʼs camcorder, which is probably a very common story with music video
directors,” he said, lighting the first of what would be a string of cigarettes. High school
experimentations led to film school at USC, where Murai and the group that he still
collaborates with met and began working together under the precocious leadership of
director Ace Norton, who remains one of Muraiʼs closest colleagues and competitors.
Frustrated by the sharply divided job functions and formal process of the
traditional film set promoted at USC, Murai explained, “When I started working with Ace,
it became a lot more tangible. It was five people running around, just shooting whatever
they can, coming up with ideas on the spot. I was shooting, Steve [Drypolcher] was
shooting, BDL [Brandon Luttinger-Driscoll] was editing. We all lived a block away from
each other, so everything was in-house, we got to see everything step-by-step,” a set-up
not remarkably different than the one perpetuated in the rooms below Muraiʼs patio.

25
In 2003, the Directors Label DVD series
35
was released, created by Jonze,
Cunningham and Gondry to showcase their work beyond MTV. The DVDs, heavy with
work that smacked of a DIY ethos, in-camera and computer-aided visual innovation, and
with storytelling and directorial vision at the fore, became mainstays in many a dorm
room collection, Muraiʼs no exception. “It felt like there was more of a voice from the
video side, as opposed to being just promotional material for a band,” he said. “And
obviously thereʼs a lot of the visual gimmickry that specifically my generation of
filmmakers were all fucking around with in high school, just because it was doable with
the resources we had. And using that, and taking it seriously, and applying it to a bigger
project, I think there was something inherently relatable about it.”
Malcolm Gladwell might walk in any minute to explain that, like hockey players
who slap pucks into goals for yearsʼ worth of hours until they are hockey stars, or the
young Bill Gateses who sit in front of a computer until they know them inside and out,
todayʼs rising filmmakers were the nerds who put in endless hours with their stop-motion
animations. “The film kids that I know have always been film geeks and tech geeks,”
Murai said. “Weʼve always wanted to make these films that we watched and admired
growing up, by any means necessary. Whether that meant putting filters on in Final Cut
or After Effects, or buying shitty lens attachments for your soccer mom camcorder, we
were always looking for ways to make it look like we wanted it to look.”
And then, while these nerds were filming explosions in their backyards by day
and crowding around episodes of Jackass at night, film technology caught up with them.

35
“Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham, Michel Gondry & Palm Pictures Present The Directors
Label,” Business Wire, June 12, 2003, accessed June 29, 2011,
http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-2868885/Spike-Jonze-Chris-Cunningham-Michel.html

26
“The industry itself has adapted this lo-fi, not-multi-million-dollar equipment. Thereʼs
definitely a gap thatʼs shrinking between the backyard movie kids, who we are, and the
helicopter-shots-of-Mariah Carey-running-down-the-beach guys.” Murai laughs, possibly
because the world where any pop single big enough was an occasion for helicopters and
cranes seems so far away now. This is part of why Murai and his colleagues – young,
dyed-in-the-wool alternative, and most importantly, digital and flexible – are advancing
so quickly.
“Technology widens the vocabulary of filmmakers,” he said. “Because more
things are available to us – you can get better looking images, you have more finesse of
the visual vocabulary – itʼs branching out in different directions. Iʼve seen a lot of videos
that are low budget but are still very nuanced and cinematic, things that wouldnʼt have
been able to be done with just a camcorder ten years ago.”
The coincidence of the rise of the internet and the rise of digital technology,
which is both not a coincidence at all and deep, cosmic good fortune, meant that at
almost the exact moment that million-dollar videos became untenable – because they no
longer had an outlet and because the internet had destroyed record sales – a new
underground of filmmakers was already working. Budgets fell to the level that twenty-
something directors could afford to take on, YouTube sprang into existence to display
their wares, and filmmakers armed with little more than prosumer video cameras and off-
the-shelf editing software were able to do more than toe the creative line, but push it
forward.
“Even guys like Usher, whoʼs been around a long time – itʼs really interesting to
me that theyʼre reaching out to a guy like me to make an Usher video,” Murai said,

27
speaking of commissioners like Younce. “They understand that there has to be a new
way to get things done for the money, even if itʼs a big pop video.” Muraiʼs video for “DJ
Got Us Falling in Love,”
36
Usherʼs fall 2010 ode to the club, relies on footage run
backwards and the singer dancing at full-speed through a slo-mo dancefloor as much as
it does on the requisite popping and locking, effects that arenʼt earth-shatteringly original
upon viewing. Significantly though, the effects were achieved by Murai and a team of just
four others in about two weeks, using a method of rotoscoping that had just been
updated in Adobeʼs software and which released the team from the need for a motion-
capture camera or even green screens
37
– absolutely critical for a video with a swish
location, choreography, a clubsʼ worth of professional dancers, and a total budget of
around $200,000.
38
Perhaps more astoundingly, Muraiʼs VMA nominated video for
B.O.B.ʼs “Airplanes” was shot almost entirely without lighting, enabled by the brand new
RED MX camera and the ambient lighting from the 20,000 lumens projector which also
created all of the larger-than-life scenery for the video.
39
That video has, at the time of
this writing, over 131 million views on YouTube
40
and was produced for under
$125,000.
41

36
“Usher – DJ Got Us Fallinʼ in Love ft. Pitbull,” YouTube, accessed June 28, 2011,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-dvTjK_07c

37
Hiro Murai, e-mail message to author, May 26, 2011.

38
Jeff Pantaleo (Executive Producer, “DJ Got Us Fallinʼ In Love”), phone conversation, May 26,
2011.

39
Hiro Murai, e-mail message to author, May 26, 2011.

40
“B.o.B. – Airplanes (Feat. Hayley Williams of Paramore)”, YouTube, accessed June 28, 2011,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn6-c223DUU

41
Jeff Pantaleo (Executive Producer, “Airplanes”), phone conversation, May 26, 2011.

28
“Itʼs almost like youʼd rather have the freedom than the money, because youʼll
always figure out some way to do it, on the creative end,” Murai said, sounding so utterly
un-Hollywood it was hard to believe we were a stones throw from a major studio. “A lot
of people whoʼve been through the regime change are like, ʻMan, weʼre so fucked, we
canʼt do this with this money.ʼ And itʼs like, well, no, if we shoot in our backyard, and use
work lights from Home Depot, we can do it.”
That Muraiʼs language of possibility is still anchored in the DIY, even as he
operates at the mid- to high-end of music video budgets, matters. The changes in the
film production process have analogues in music: just as the internet has abetted the
proliferation of “bedroom musicians” into the mainstream, cultural curiosity and the
increasing allowances of digital technology have fostered this boom as much as the
internet has given it voice. Murai operates not just within film and music, but within a
culture that is increasingly user-driven and self-tailored. For this reason as much as
many others, of music videos no longer having a place on MTV, Murai told me, “I like it. I
never liked the weird, untouchable lore of music. I like it being more personal and
approachable, you know? With the internet, thereʼs a lot more ways that people can find
music or their own pockets of music. They donʼt necessarily have to watch TRL. A lot of
music videos and bands that I like would never be on MTV, youʼd have to watch MTV7
or something.” This was more than the blithe blush of youth talking – it is the ethos of an
era.
“Music is a really personal thing, no matter what kind of music it is,” Murai said,
lighting his last cigarette. “Whenever I hear a song that I really like, I always search out
the video because I want to see a visual representation of that song, not just content, but

29
even just the artist themselves, performing the song.” Muraiʼs eye contact was steady,
his thoughts on the matter certain. “Thereʼs something about that that people want, that I
want. I like watching artists perform their songs. Even though itʼs not as intimate, thereʼs
something that you can build around what you already know about the song.”
As we ambled to the overflowing ashtray near the back door of the loft, I asked
him, as his career matures and his budgets grow, whether heʼll ever end up shooting on
the beach with helicopters.
Murai exhaled the last puff of smoke of my visit and stubbed out his cigarette. “If
they explode at the end.”

5.
At 2 p.m. on a Friday afternoon in late winter, the sidewalks of Times Square
surged lightly with the end of the lunch crowd and throngs of tourists, free from any
schedule in particular. Taxis and trucks flowed smoothly down Broadway under the giant
floating faces of P. Diddy and Aziz Ansari, mouthing unheard dialogue in a commercial
for Ciroc Vodka on an LED jumbotron high above Toys ʻRʼ Us. An interactive video
billboard zoomed in on pedestrians and overlaid some forgettable, branded graphic on
their unaware persons, fair game by default for being bodily present in the most
commercialized public space on the planet. As the afternoon turned lazily towards the
evening, it was easy not to realize that just a decade ago, this space at this time might
have been impassable. Mobs of teenage fans, *NSYNC partisans, Britney adherents or
Eminem aficionados often overflowed the sidewalks, a crush of screeches and
handmade signs held lightly in check by NYPD blues on foot. They came to be seen by

30
the camera crews sent from the studio of Total Request Live, MTVʼs long-running
countdown show, live representatives of the hundreds of thousands of viewers who cast
votes each day by phone and, eventually, internet, in hopes of securing the #1 spot for
their favorite song.
For Americans of a certain age, TRL was inescapable. It aired from 3 to 6 p.m.,
those crucial after-school hours when the extracurricular energies of middle schoolers
and high school students were most likely to be both unsupervised and unstructured.
The programʼs hallmark, voting by phone, was an element of everyday interactivity that
foreshadowed the internetʼs aptitude for overnight king-making as well as sensitivity to
shifting currents. The show officially debuted in 1998,
42
discontinued phone voting in
favor of online-only ballots in 2006,
43
combined online voting with MP3 and ringtone
sales to determine chart placement in October 2007,
44
attempted a re-branding as
“YouRL” in the same year,
45
and aired itʼs last episode – a three-hour prime time
extravaganza called “Total Finale Live” – in November of 2008.
46
In the press release
that announced the finale, the programʼs executive producer, Dave Sirulnick, refused to
literally cancel the show, instead artfully suggesting that, “we hit this 10
th
[anniversary]

42
“Total Request Live,” IMDb, accessed June 28, 2011, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0167735/

43
“The TRL Archive: About TRL,” ATRL.net, accessed March 6, 2011,
http://atrl.net/trlarchive/?s=about

44
Ibid.

45
Anne Becker, “MTV Favors ʻYouRLʼ Swap for ʻTRLʼ.” Broadcasting & Cable, April 30, 2007,
accessed March 2, 2011,
http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/108706-MTV_Favors_YouRL_Swap_for_TRL_.php

46
Ben Sisario, “Totally Over: Last Squeals for ʻTRL,ʼ” New York Times, November 16, 2008,
accessed February 24, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/arts/television/18trl.html
?_r=1&scp=1&sq=sisario%20trl&st=cse

31
and we thought, ʻYou know what? This feels like the right time and letʼs celebrate it and
letʼs reward it. And letʼs let it have a little bit of a rest for a minute.ʼ Let it catch its breath!
Been working hard for 10 years!”
47

Careful to distance themselves from a complete disavowal of video programming,
MTV announced that FNMTV, a video premiere vehicle hosted by Fall Out Boy bassist
Pete Wentz, would begin a second season after TRLʼs bow.
48
One post-TRL episode of
FNMTV did appear, on December 5, a holiday-themed episode that debuted four new
videos before slipping into radio silence.
49
MTV had no video programming until March of
the next year, when AMTV, comprised of a mix of full videos, concert footage, news and
interviews debuted in the not-so-coveted weekday 3 a.m. to 9 a.m. timeslot. This early
morning island of music programming – the wee hours of June 29, 2011 were filled by a
line-up of six hour-long shows entitled AMTV: Hip Hop Heavyweights, AMTV All Night
Party, AMTV Summer Jams, AMTV Guy Candy, AMTV: Top 10 on Countdown, and
AMTV: Killer Collaborations
50
– remains the best the networkʼs got at vaguely video

47
Erin Carlson, “TRL Canceled: MTVʼs ʻTotal Request Liveʼ To Conclude in November,”
Huffington Post / Associated Press, September 15, 2008, accessed February 24, 2011,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/15/trl-canceled-mtvs-total-r_n_126619.html

48
Sam Schechner, “MTV Will Pull the Plug on ʻTRL,ʼ” Wall Street Journal, September 16, 2008,
B9.

49
“FNMTV Premieres,” IMDb, accessed February 24, 2011,
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1257695/episodes

50
“MTV Show Schedule, Tuesday, June 28, 2011” and “MTV Show Schedule, Wednesday, June
29, 2011,” MTV.com, accessed June 29, 2011, http://www.mtv.com/ontv/schedule/

32
oriented programming. In early 2010, MTV officially removed the words “Music
Television” from its logo.
51

The floor-to-ceiling glass studio walls that were once the windows into MTVʼs
soul now bear floor-to-ceiling ads for The Lion King, the Disney musical that arrived in
Times Square a year before TRL and has outlasted the TV program by another three.
Twenty-five stories above, Frank Ho, of MTVʼs Music, Talent and Programming Strategy
department, sat down to explain whither videos from his iconic station.
Hoʼs haircut and jacket were both fashionable but not overly stylish, his office full
but not cluttered, and he had been able to set aside an hour to talk to me with only a
dayʼs notice – all comfortingly approachable indicators that denied the potential power of
his small team. “We work with all the different publicists and managers and labels to kind
of bring in the new music and new projects, and then we disseminate it within the
department,” he said. “We also book onto all the different platforms,” which in the US
include MTV2, MTVu, MTV Hits, MTV Jams and MTV.com. “Anytime you see a musician
or artist on the channel in any way, it came from one of the four of us in the department.”
Gen X himself, Ho was raised on the same programming as industry colleagues
like Bryan Younce, the video commissioner at Columbia. “When I was younger and MTV
first started and it was completely video-based, thatʼs because that was how people
found music. There wasnʼt internet, you either had TV – and MTV really was the only
music-based thing in the mid-ʻ80ʼs – or you had radio, and that was it.” Because he and
his colleagues were as tied as anyone to the belief that videos should be the channelʼs

51
Denise Martin, “MTV drops ʻMusic Televisionʼ from the network logo,” Los Angeles Times,
February 8, 2010, accessed February 24, 2011, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/showtracker/
2010/02/mtv-drops-music-television-from-its-logo.html

33
stock-in-trade – remember that “MTV Generation” is a synonym for Gen X – the long,
gradual decline in the formatʼs ratings was more than a slight concern for the channel.
Hoʼs simple, blunt answer for why MTV doesnʼt play videos anymore? “If we put music
video blocks on our main channel, the ratings drop to nothing.” The reason? “People
donʼt need it, thatʼs now how people consume music,” Ho said. “It actually took a long
time for everyone here to realize that. Itʼs not that people care less about x, y and z
artist, theyʼre just not getting it in the way that we thought they were getting it.”
What Ho said rings true, both in the numbers and in personal experience. TRLʼs
peak ratings, in 1999, were an average daily viewership of 761,000 but had slipped, by
2008, to 322,000
52
– well below 7,000 viewers per each state of the union. Compare this
not just to ratings for MTVʼs most popular fare, which at the time of TRLʼs good-bye was
The Hills, commanding an average of four million viewers an episode,
53
but to the
answer you get when you ask yourself if you would be willing to sit through an hour or
two of videos that you couldnʼt pick or skip when you wanted to, and the programmatic
realpolitik behind MTVʼs shedding of the video becomes undeniably clear. “Everything is
on demand,” said Ho. “You donʼt have to watch MTV for two hours to see the new Lady
Gaga video, you can get on your computer, google it, watch it and youʼre done.”
It would be easy to summarize, as was the general consensus when TRL left the
airwaves, that the internet has simply replaced television as the best site for videos to
live and be seen. However, other factors point to more fundamental shifts afoot, signs
that this migration might indicate more complex consumption tactics at play. In the first

52
Villeareal, 2008.

53
Sisario, 2008.

34
place, as we have seen, audiences with fairly sophisticated consumption practices took
to a space that inherently allows investment of more than top-down, producer-created
meaning in a chunk of media. In the second place, as Murai had intimated in Los
Angeles, the possibilities the internet afforded dovetailed nicely, in the late ʻ90s, with an
expanding sense that MTV and the mainstream music industry, which were functionally
inseparable, had lost our confidence. More people were in the practice of actively looking
beyond the Top 40 when the web suddenly made it possible to venture even further
away without even taking a trip to the record store.
In seeming opposition to this moldering of a mainstream music culture, Ho noted
that the 2010 the Video Music Awards, in the peculiar position of celebrating the product
the channel no longer displays, had seen their highest ratings since 2002.
54
“For us itʼs
still the highest rated thing of the year, and from a business standpoint, itʼs our biggest
ad sales outlet, kind of like for the NFL itʼs the Super Bowl.” Indeed, like the VMAs, the
past two Super Bowls have proved a prime time check-in for what we are told is an
increasingly atomized American culture. 2011ʼs match-up number XLV was the most-
watched telecast in American history,
55
vaulting past Super Bowl XLIV, the previous
record-holder, by over four million viewers.
56
2011 also saw the Grammyʼs hit their

54
James Hibberd, “MTV VMAs draws record ratings,” Hollywood Reporter/Associated Press,
October 14, 2011, accessed June 28, 2011, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/mtv-vmas-
draws-record-ratings-27784

55
Ben Klayman, “Super Bowl packs in record U.S. TV viewer total,” Reuters, February 7, 2011,
accessed February 24, 2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/07/us-superbowl-ratings-
idUSTRE7163GS20110207

56
Ibid.

35
highest viewership since 2001,
57
while 2010 gave World the Cup Final
58
itʼs highest U.S.
numbers ever – even the buttoned-down Kentucky Derby
59
garnered its highest ratings
in two decades . It seems possible that, like teenagers who lose our will to sneer the
moment our parents arenʼt looking, now that we regularly exercise the choice of what
media we consume, weʼre at peace with or even crave moments that can function as
cultural touchstones.
Indeed, even as the VMAs have held steady as MTVʼs flagship program, web-
based rubrics have been developed that track the publicʼs increasing mainstreaming of
the off-mainstream. “People are really expanding their music tastes, I think because this
new generation growing up in the digital age is being taught, ʻYou can go find music
yourself, nobody has to tell you what to listen to,ʼ” Ho said. He swiveled his monitor to
show me the MTV Music Meter,
60
a new analytic tool similar to Billboardʼs recently
debuted Social 50, a weekly rankings chart derived from mentions, friends, followers,
song embeds and site views on leading social networking sites.
61
“They compile all the
data from our own online traffic. It shows the top ten artists that people are looking for

57
Marisa Guthrie, “Grammy Ratings: Most Watched Show in 10 Years,” Hollywood Reporter,
February 14, 2011, accessed February 24, 2011,
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/grammy-ratings-watched-show-10-99364

58
Ronald Blum, “World Cup Final Ratings: 24.3 Million Viewers in US for Record,” Huffington
Post/Associated Press, July 12, 2010, accessed February 24, 2011,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/13/world-cup-final-ratings-2_n_644127.html

59
Deborah D. McAdams, “2010 Kentucky Derby is Most Watched in 21 Years,” Television
Broadcast, May 5, 2010, accessed February 24, 2011,
http://www.televisionbroadcast.com/article/100278

60
“MTV Music Meter BETA,” accessed June 28, 2011, http://www.mtvmusicmeter.com

61
“Billboard Charts – Social 50,” accessed June 28, 2011, http://www.billboard.com/charts/social-
50#/charts/social-50

36
within all our digital properties. And you think, ʻWho goes to MTV.com?ʼ, the stereotype
is that all they care about are the Britney Spearses of the world, but if you look at this –
and this changes by the minute – itʼs much more indie than people really suspect.” Hoʼs
screen displayed James Blake, Kurt Vile and Wye Oak all within the top ten, artists who
were also prominently featured within indie-stalwart Pitchfork.comʼs Most Read reviews
list
62
when I crosschecked later that week.
In some respects, the congruence between MTV and Pitchforkʼs lists seems like
cheerful news – I know for a fact that when I was a sixteen-year-old Pitchfork devotee in
2000 that there was precious little overlap between the two, which was admittedly how I
liked it. However, I liked the gap because it represented the work I was proudly doing,
because the truth is that in 2000, if I wanted to find anything besides Britney Spears, I
needed services like Pitchfork. As we have become adept at finding music ourselves
and, once found, embroidering it into our lives through many means, MTV simply doesnʼt
– and canʼt – provide the same service it once did.
So what connections – or relationship – to music does MTV foster? “We have this
thing called the ʻPUSH campaign,ʼ” Ho explained, “which stands for ʻPlay Until
Somebody Hears.ʼ Itʼs just our music franchise but itʼs not a show, so itʼs basically
across MTV, between fifty and seventy-five credit squeezes at the end of a show. So if
youʼre watching ʻJersey Shore,ʼ the credits roll but the top half becomes what we call
ʻPUSH,ʼ
63
and each week we spotlight a new emerging artist, or sort of a more indie
artist.” If youʼre rolling your eyes at the notion of a five second clip supplanting a three-

62
“Pitchfork Reviews, Recent, Most Read” (sidebar), Pitchfork Media, accessed February 22,
2010, http://pitchfork.com/reviews/recent/

63
“PUSH,” MTV.com, accessed June 28, 2011, http://www.mtv.com/music/artists/push.jhtml

37
minute video, perhaps it would warm your cynical and probably middle-aged heart to
know that MTV also supplies these indie and emerging artists as score and soundtrack
within programs themselves, a task that falls to the Creative Music Integration Team, a
sure bet for the Cheerful Corporate Euphemism Awards if ever there was. According to
Ho, the feedback he and his colleagues receive from labels and management show that
these brief mentions are directly responsible for spikes in digital sales, and so perhaps
MTVʼs revolutionary new format is actually the lifestyle embed – not demonstrating to
audiences that an artist merely exists, but helping them imagine when and where they
might want to hear that artist again, in their own lives. Harder to celebrate, but no less
effective. “Thatʼs what we learned about our audiences, obviously in the digital age, and
our audience specifically,” by which Ho meant millennials, but could just as easily have
meant any of us, “is [that they are] very ADD when it comes to how they consume things.
If somebody is watching TV, theyʼre probably also on Facebook, also on their laptop
doing multiple things at once.”
A recent music industry shakeup shows just how seriously MTV is taking this
new role for music on its channel. On top of Ho and his team, in April the channel
announced that it had secured the talents of Nic Harcourt,
64
a Los Angeles DJ with a
strong track record, over the last decade, for breaking artists through to the American
mainstream. As long-time Music Director for “tastemaker” radio station KCRW, Harcourt
has been credited with the early promotion of acts such as Coldplay, Interpol, Adele,
Norah Jones, Franz Ferdinand and Sigur Ros, a Midas touch MTV expects Harcourt to

64
Annie Yuan, “MTV Hires Nic Harcourt as Music Supervisor in Residence,” Hollywood Reporter,
April 4, 2011, accessed June 25, 2011, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/mtv-hires-nic-
harcourt-as-174416

38
extend in his new role as Music Supervisor in Residence, a salutary title indeed. When
MTV Senior Vice President of Creative Music Integration Joe Cuello, who the press
release promises will be Harcourtʼs close workmate, said of the new hire, “We are
excited to bring his wealth of knowledge and experience into the dialogue that MTV has
with our audience about music,”
65
his corporate speak almost glossed over the elegance
with which he articulated the limits – and possibilities – of the channelʼs music policies.
And while this overture towards honest-to-goodness curation seems a step away
from serving as a mere barometer of current tastes and back towards actually pioneering
them, it is hard to believe that Harcourt and the Creative Music Integration Teamʼs efforts
will overrule the prevailing methods, pegged to social media, that MTV currently
employs. As Ho explained, “We have a much more symbiotic relationship with our
audience. So you get everything from, you know, weʼre putting stuff out but weʼre putting
it out as feelers – are people biting? Weʼre looking at traffic online, are people really
coming to look at these artists on our site?” Sure, why not? If the MP3 playlist of a 35-
year-old music television executive can be trumped for obscurity by the results of a
dedicated 15-year-oldʼs online trolling through The Hype Machine, mightnʼt that
executive just release himself to pick backing tracks for 16 and Pregnant ad infinitum?

6.
Roberta Cruger is here to tell you why not. Just one week after my meeting with
Frank Ho, I had returned to shamefully sunny southern California and heard Cruger

65
“MTV Taps Industry Tastemaker Nic Harcourt As First Music Supervisor In Residence,”
MTV.com, April 4, 2011, accessed June 25, 2011,
http://mtvpress.com/press/release/nic_harcourt_named_first_music_supervisor_in_residence

39
speak to a roomful of music journalists and pop critics at Experience Music Projectʼs
annual Pop Conference. Her wiry graying bob and smart red jacket, worn over the kind
of garden-to-business black trousers customary to women of an age to have grown
children, almost obscured the whiff of the subcultural that Cruger still carried about her.
(Once the founding media editor of CREEM, always the founding media editor of
CREEM…) Her talk, drawn from her experience working at MTV from 1981 to 1988,
discussed “MTVʼs switch from programmer to self-promoter, from taking chances with
new artists to playing hits, from inclusiveness to exclusivity,”
66
and was an impatient
counterpoint to much of what Ho had said. We made an appointment to meet up a
couple weeks later at a delicious, slightly overpriced café in Pasadena famous for its
artisan breads, epicures in the shadows of our younger selves.
Over her cup of black coffee Cruger explained her first job at MTV in 1981, the
year of its debut. “I was ʻSenior Evaluator,ʼ isnʼt that a great title? Itʼs like Clip
Coordinator, basically. So all the videos would come in, and I was the first, Iʼd screen
them all.” It is important but often over-looked that MTVʼs early championing of bands
like Duran Duran, Culture Club, Depeche Mode, The Thompson Twins and New Order
was largely a convenient accident. The criteria for programming videos was, according
to Cruger, “just if it fit the music format, which we had determined was AOR [album-
oriented rock]. Of course most of the videos – Iʼll say 50 percent, just to be safe – were
from England. So that was what we had to start playing.” Cable television, still in its early
days, was primarily a service for rural and secondary markets, which meant that MTV

66
“2011 Pop Conference Bios/Abstracts – Roberta Cruger,” empmuseum.org, accessed June 25,
2011, http://www.empmuseum.org/education/index.asp?categoryID=26&ccID=127&xPopConfBio
ID=1430&year=2011

40
was often the only broadcaster, in any media, playing such artists in most locales. “So
what happened, as the record companies started getting savvy, they would go, ʻWeʼre
selling out of Duran Duran records in Podunk,ʼ and thatʼs how they started to realize the
power of MTV.”
MTVʼs early zenith, from 1981 to 1984, was heady. The animated image of an
astronaut planting a flag in the moon that the network adopted as its station ID indicated
the perceived significance and cultural pervasion of MTVʼs platform. When the Moonman
was adopted as the design for the statue for the first VMAs, in 1984, the network was
effectively canonizing winners as pioneers – not just the honorees of a normal awards
show, but brave, elite specialists who were lifting all of humanity to a higher plane.
Hubris schmubris.
Cruger recalled watching the sea change from her vantage at MTV and said,
“There was a point between, I think, ʼ82 and ʼ83, there was a figure I found some place
about the shift that happened at radio. They had been playing about 75% classic music
– these are rock stations – and within the year it had completely switched, and they went
to 75% pop.” Just as she saw the effect the channel could have to develop an audience
for certain kinds of sounds, by 1985 the natural cycles of success meant Cruger was
experiencing the music industryʼs ability to inundate tastes. “We didnʼt have to be
trailblazers because the radio had already come aboard and the record companies were
making more videos for hit songs, and we were playing them. And that was like, yeah,
we were mainstream, but it wasnʼt necessarily by design, except that you get more
people watching, and you canʼt really fight that either.”

41
That same year saw much of MTVʼs original leadership depart, replaced by
career music industry and advertising executives, according to Cruger. “I was told we
had to do marketing plans for all the artists on our roster,” she said. Her department of
three people, much like Hoʼs department of four, handled talent booking, video
acquisition and how to build music programming into shows. Among them, they divided
liaising with all the major labels. “I had a roster of letʼs say Warner Brothers, Capitol
Records and A&M Records, Geffen. So all the releases, every quarter, Iʼd have to make
marketing plans for those artists on the channel. So Tom Petty gets the full nine yards.
Anything that MTV has to offer, we wanted him a part of, from music news to an
interview to a guest VJ spot to a promotion to the award show. The bigger the artist, the
bigger they got,” Cruger said. MTVʼs skill at positioning itself as the vanguard of teen
culture found a way to seem articulated even in this heavily predetermined space, as she
explained, “We were told, ʻFind those acts that you think are going to break.ʼ We still
wanted to break acts, there was still that sense of that being a mandate, that being
something we could do to flex our muscle, to prove our value. It was what defined us,
what our impact could be.”
Having experienced the sublimation of a specific musical taste within an entire
generation, as well as more than one occasion where a video that audiences responded
to strongly was left to wither on the vine by labels unprepared or unmotivated to put their
machine behind its promotion, Cruger scoffed at Hoʼs assertion that the audience for
videos on TV had disappeared, saying, “It can be done in a creative way.”
As MTV learned how to develop viewers for short form content, the breakthrough
was, according to Cruger, “realizing that if you put it in a half hour or hour-long package,

42
then you can kind of bring an audience there. It was less of an issue in the early days,
but I think it became much more of an issue, especially once we started playing 120-
some videos [in the weekly rotation]. It meant it was much more random, much more
eclectic musically.” Packaging truly took flight when it became more than a programming
department hunch and was the answer to the advertising departmentʼs need to deliver
tailored demographic audiences to MTVʼs sponsors. “We didnʼt have a countdown show
then, we had a requests show,” as befit a television network that saw itself as a national
radio station. “And the requests show kept getting all these heavy metal things in it –
KISS, Scorpions. I said, ʻoh my god, I know whatʼs happening here.ʼ Speed dialers, and
an active audience, as they call them in the radio business.” In response, programming
developed Basement Tapes to showcase unsigned and independent acts, 120 Minutes
as a focus on broadly alternative acts, Club MTV for the late night dance crowd, and of
course the hugely influential Yo! MTV Raps and Headbangerʼs Ball.
While MTV certainly never invented any music, and at its best was simply
extraordinarily good at presenting just-below-the-surface acts to audiences mostly
unaware that there even was a surface to be penetrated, thereʼs something to be said for
that. Itʼs a useful memory exercise to point your browser to MTV Hive (no, no one else
has ever heard of it either) and watch any of the nine “classic full episodes” of 120
Minutes there encased. Before the metal guitar wail of the theme song has had even five
seconds to fade away, Matt Pinfield is ticking off the bands that will be featured on
Episode 25
67
– Sponge, Superchunk, Luna, Sugar Ray, Smoking Popes, Green Apple

67
“120 Minutes: Oasis [10/16/1995] (25),” MTVHive.com, accessed May 7, 2011,
http://www.mtvhive.com/playlists/AF1B250202251BAF000102251BAF/mgid:playlist:video:mtvmu
sic.com:72974

43
Quickstep, and Johnny Q. Public. Yes, the internet obviates the need to sit in front of the
TV for two hours to sample this playlist, but as Pinfieldʼs gravelly bass rocketed me
straight back to the excitement of feeling my world expanding in front of my eyes and
ears, the value of the trusted curator – the mid-century DJs like Wolfman Jack, the late
century VJs like Pinfield, and the every-era figure of the older sibling – was made
apparent.
It is worth pausing here to consider two things. The first is the difference between
a “curator” and a “tastemaker,” and what we get when we engage the latter over the
former. A curator, whether in a museum or a bedroom, necessarily initiates us into a
whole cosmology, uses a painting or a song to introduce us to collections that they have
been caretaking. Their expertise deeply desires that we learn how to interpret what we
are being shown, and to understand how it relates to other parts of their archive, what
came before, after and alongside, how one thing influenced or was influenced by
another. A tastemaker is concerned mostly with the fringes of the future, and seeks to
pull us ever forward, dropping aesthetic crumbs in their wake. Their expertise is usually
built on the same passions and knowledge as curators (just as curators are as
susceptible as anyone to the new), but their driving force, their currency in the world, is
in the bright and fashionable, rather than the holistic.
So then with this in mind, the second question for consideration is this: when we
lose the curation of music videos, what do we lose? Music videos feed a particularly
complex human tic, which is not only to express a worldview with every part of the
sensorium possible, but to understand how a lived culture hangs together. We love
music videos for the same reasons we crave fashion, travel documentaries, period

44
dramas, photos of our ancestors, and Google Street View. They dip us into whole
worlds, and give us the opportunity to do something weʼre really, really good at: glean
clues to help us determine the value system of what weʼre seeing, decide whether we
agree or disagree, and figure out how to copy or distinguish ourselves from that style.
Music on itʼs own gives us much of this information, but we naturally need to know more
about the world from which the music has come.
Pushing back her drained coffee cup, Cruger danced around how to express this
expediency of the visual. “You know, I used to buy records as a kid because I liked the
album jackets. The music might be crap, but I always figured, maybe it wasnʼt, and it
usually wasnʼt. I figured well, if they have an interesting jacket, then you know. And I
collected Beatle cards and poured through the magazines, all of that. The germination of
all of it is the same thing.” She paused, trying to distinguish what a music video could
deliver that a poster or single couldnʼt. “But there isnʼt anything like seeing,” she began,
still stalking her thought. “You canʼt convey…what Cyndi Lauper did in her music videos,
you canʼt convey that on a track.”
Cruger shifted in her seat, leaned forward, and tried a new approach. “It reminds
me of magic realism. I was talking to a guy from Peru,” she said, “and what this guy said
is, ʻI cannot convey it in language. I cannot convey the same thing in language, itʼs
saying something else, itʼs another language.ʼ And I think to me, thatʼs what music
videos are. Itʼs another language.”

45
7.
Before talking with Roberta Cruger, while I was still in New York and only a
couple days removed from sitting down with Frank Ho, I found myself further east in
Brooklyn than Iʼd ever been. Warm lights blinked from warehouse windows here and
there, the quiet signs of Bushwick colonists spreading outward. This cold and lonely
meeting place had been appointed because it was near the home of Mark Zemel, a staff
producer at Pitchfork.tv, the video-centered arm of the indie music website. Despite the
dim lighting in the appointed bar, recognizing Zemel was easy – under 30, dark blue
flannel shirt, clean-cut hair, sensible but fashionable shoes, and a gaze that seemed
perturbed but not altogether unfriendly.
Zemel has worked for Pitchfork.tv for two years, most of its existence, as its day-
to-day operations manager. He produces, shoots and edits original content for the site,
which includes shows such as “Tunnelvision,”
68
intimately shot presentations of a single
song, “Selector,”
69
in which hip-hop artists like Das Racist and Clipse talk briefly about
their work followed by freestyling, and a new feature called “Over/Under,” in which artists
rate given topics as over- or underrated. Critically, I now know that Wavves and Best
Coast, who are dating and did their interview together, diverge on their feelings on
sporks, that she has a sort-of-a-tramp stamp, that they both feel Justin Bieber is more or
less “rated”, and that she prefers Tim Allen to Tom Arnold, whom he calls a “true-to-life

68
“Pitchfork.tv – Shows – Tunnelvision,” Pitchfork.tv, accessed June 28, 2011,
http://pitchfork.tv/tv/

69
“Pitchfork.tv – Shows – Selector,” Pitchfork.tv, accessed June 28, 2011, http://pitchfork.tv/tv/

46
cokehead.”
70
Though the content tends not to exceed five minutes (and is usually under
three) and is stylistically fairly slick, the general sensibility otherwise recalls early MTV in
its throw-stuff-at-the-wall conceptualism and sheer reliance on personality, aesthetics
and reference.
Zemel also spends his days, as apparently do all Pitchfork staffers (and MTV
programmers), discussing who to feature, when and how, on the site. “Dealing with what
merits coverage and exposure and what doesnʼt is a large part of what we do. Itʼs less
doing duties, but we sit around and talk, we have huge debates. Weʼre constantly trying
to figure out, if weʼre on the fence about an artist, should we get off it and get behind
them, should it go on the front page of .tv or .com or in the library, how do we treat each
thing?” It should be said at this point that Pitchfork.tvʼs staff numbers only five people in
production, as well as one additional person each handling ad sales, PR, and writing
copy.
I had wanted to speak to Zemel because Pitchfork.tvʼs business model and
standing within the online community seemed curious. In my own musical life and, I
suspected, many others, Pitchfork had plateaued. The site was a steady drumbeat in the
indie community, which had acclimated to its occasional controversy and constant
foibles like a childhood friend, able to be alternately enjoyed and ignored for stretches at
a time. Like MTV, they used a proprietary player for video content, which meant that
while any blog or website sharing their content was a direct portal to and ad for their site,
they had to produce everything themselves or else go through the laborious process of
licensing any content that they wanted to show, severely restricting their catalog.

70
“Pitchfork.tv – Shows – Over/Under, Best Coast & Wavves,” accessed June 28, 2011,
http://pitchfork.tv/tv/#/overunder/1669-best-coast-wavves/2684-fun-with-sporks/

47
Additionally, despite having an extremely durable and specific brand, they had not, like
aggro-indie tastemakers VICE and their video arm VBS.TV, done too much in the way of
courting sponsorships that would have allowed them to expand their programming.
Zemelʼs answer for why Pitchfork preferred to remain a shoestring operation
came back, as all things seemed to, to its founder, Ryan Schreiber. “Schreiberʼs deal
has always been just to do things on his own, and heʼs not necessarily against
partnerships, but for the longest time Pitchfork had no sponsorships. Sponsorships come
with restrictions and the shows are usually a bit boring,” Zemel said, recalling a segment
for the Southern Comfort-backed “Faces in the Crowd,” which picks random audience
members to interview performers backstage, in which Perry Farrell told an amazing but
lewd story that was the highlight of an otherwise staid interview, and which was
subsequently excised at the beverage brandʼs request. Interestingly, Zemelʼs description
of the upside of a lack of sponsors sounded almost note-for-note like Hiro Muraiʼs
quandary over artistic freedom versus adequate budgets: “One of the great things about
having no money is having the freedom to do what you want to, when and however you
want. If weʼre trying to build an editorial voice or curate, someone selling a product
doesnʼt have the same goals as you, so thereʼs a real upside to dealing without that
funding.”
And here was the magic word again: curation. This was Pitchforkʼs un-
comprehensive approach made into a strength, its anti-MTV, anti-Rolling Stone, anti-
aggregator approach to covering the music it cared about and wanted others to care
about. “Thereʼs so much stuff out there now that one site canʼt cover it all,” Zemel said.
“With video thereʼs still so much shit, even though thereʼs really good stuff, itʼs included

48
with the bad. So itʼs nice to have a place that curates it for you.” This was the topic, in
the age of Google, that had dotted every interview. Do we like the deluge, and how do
we navigate it? Free to define our own musical tastes and build our own playlists, do we
end up self-selecting in predetermined patterns? What can be the stopgap against the
sense that we are shutting ourselves off from what we might otherwise, as they say,
stumble upon? Chat Roulette-style music randomators or Hype Machine-esque affinity
engines? I hate Pandora both because it recommends things on too narrow a scope and
because it occasionally gives me a Tejano torch song in the middle of a mutant disco
session. Our glee at being able to leverage technology to consume more has outpaced
technologyʼs ability to understand what we want to consume, and weʼve cobbled
together a working approximation somewhere in the middle.
Schreiberʼs commitment to independence, which even three years ago would
have secured for him not much more than being able to sleep at night, might now, in the
era of the app, serve Pitchfork quite well indeed. “We think a lot about how, since we
started with .tv, everything has changed so much. A couple years ago everything was
4:3 aspect ratio” – the boxy shape of traditional square televisions – “now itʼs 16:9,
because peopleʼs TVʼs are,” Zemel said. “Weʼre looking at the site as a real channel, or
network idea, because everything is melding. People could potentially watch Pitchfork.tv
on a TV, which is only becoming more common. Thatʼs when weʼll really hit our stride, I
think.” There is some beauty and humor to the idea that an independent website,
established to cover the music being ignored by a television network, now sees a
gleaming future where it is its own station, assured in its authority to ignore and spotlight
at will. Thereʼs also probably a lot of money in that idea, for those who figure out how to

49
cut through the noise with exactly what people want while also making enough noise to
reach those that donʼt know they want it.

8.
In the six months that reporting this piece has taken, 120 Minutes has returned
as “120 Seconds,” a web show hosted on MTVHive.com by Matt Pinfield, and will begin
as a monthly program on MTV2 in late July.
71
Beavis & Butthead has been announced to
return to MTV in summer 2011,
72
directed by Mike Judge, exposing current videos to
derision and fartknocker jokes, as good as sign as any that their condition is no longer
considered critical. (It also exposes, in a way I had never realized, Judgeʼs forward-
thinking in creating characters actively engaged with bringing their own meanings to
media texts. Quick, someone get him and the MST3K guys honorary doctorates!)
VEVOʼs unique visitors over my reporting period have increased by 119%, with a 135%
jump in number of videos watched,
73
compared to a 101% increase in unique visitors to
YouTube and 112% growth for videos watched at that site in the same period.
74
If the
average music video runs for three-and-a-half minutes, VEVO users are watching thirty

71
“At Bonnaroo with…Matt Pinfield,” theweeklyfeed.org, June 13, 2011, accessed June 27, 2011,
http://www.theweeklyfeed.org/2011/06/13/at-bonnaroo-with-matt-pinfield/

72
“Beavis and Butt-head Return to MTV,” (video), CBSNews.com, February 3, 2011, accessed
March 18, 2011, http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7314873n

73
“comScore releases May 2011 U.S. Online Video Rankings,” comScore Inc, June 17, 2011,
accessed June 27, 2011, http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/6/
comScore_Releases_May_2011_U.S._Online_Video_Rankings and “comScore releases
December 2010 U.S. Online Video Rankings,” comScore Inc, January 21, 2011, accessed June
27, 2011, http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/1/comScore_
Releases_December_2010_U.S._Online_Video_Rankings

74
Ibid.

50
music videos a month, or at least as near to that number as repeat viewings may allow.
In mid-May, YouTube quietly unveiled the YouTube 100,
75
a chart that lists the top 100
videos by view count and allows the videos to be played straight through automatically.
Gizmodoʼs celebratory post announcing the chartʼs debut hailed the development, saying
it “returns us to an era when finding and watching music videos wasnʼt an arbitrary,
single-serve experience. And itʼs as populist as the MTV as yore: our clicks determine
what hits the top of the list. It will make videos relevant again, which they havenʼt been
for quite some time.”
76

While Iʼd quibble with the idea that music videos themselves were ever more or
less relevant – rather than, say, the means by which we receive them – there is, in the
air, a burgeoning sense of purposefulness surrounding them. The patchwork of all the
above news represents a vibrant, multi-faceted engagement with media, one which
includes relatively inert reception (like Freud says, sometimes you really are just
watching a Lady Gaga video), active reception (making like Beavis & Butthead yourself),
active acquisition (searching for a video on VEVO), regular old production (“making”
something for the purpose of having others watch it), and, well, active activity (tweeting,
posting, embedding and linking, as well as writing fan fiction, attending conventions,
downloading podcasts, buying t-shirts, etc).
As the tools of creation and reception have become one and the same, coming to
rest in these powerful little miracle boxes we call computers and digital devices, a

75
“YouTube – Music – Top Music Charts,” (sidebar), YouTube, accessed May 17, 2011,
http://www.youtube.com/music

76
Adrian Covert, “Screw MTV. YouTube 100 Makes Music Videos Relevant Again,”
Gizmodo.com, May 13, 2011, accessed May 17, 2011, http://gizmodo.com/5801695/screw-mtv-
youtube-100-makes-music-videos-relevant-again

51
remarkable fecundity, a fantastic bio-diversity of methods, has arisen in both production
and consumption. As a pre-teen watching Weezer with my dad, I was already deploying
many of these skills – soaking up a culture that was implicitly conveying its values, its
interests in the ironic, the vintage, the referential, the composited, the nerdish and,
perhaps, the perpetually teenaged. For my dad, past the point where he was seeking a
subculture to help articulate his personality, the video conveyed a playful interest in new
technologies, a nod to how a layer of innovation could make something old fresh again,
could show how the concerns and sounds of mid-ʻ90s alternative rock were not so
distant from those of his youth. We both were in thrall to the fact that we, not a TV
engineer somewhere far away, had summoned it to our screen.
What has been traversed, in the time and space between “Buddy Holly” and
“Wilderness,” turns out to have been very much the path of a classic coming-of-age. As
the chromatic windows of “Wilderness” pop up, unbidden by us but asked for when we
type in the web address, we cross the dividing line from receivers to navigators. Media
sends messages all around us, creating a chatter we canʼt control, and we alternately
look for voices to vet the noise and are assured we can parse it best ourselves. We do
our best to understand those messages that catch our attention, and dive down into the
ideology, origins, influences and politics of those that keep ahold. Like only the whole,
real world before it, the digital world needs our input in order to unfurl. A new window
opens, and waits for us to look through.

52
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Asset Metadata

Creator Kinskey, Rebecca Jeanne (author)

Core Title Now our lives are changing fast: music videos, everyday curation & the digital deluge

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Specialized Journalism (The Arts)

Publication Date 01/22/2012

Defense Date 07/01/2011

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag MTV,music videos,OAI-PMH Harvest,social media,VEVO,viral videos,YouTube

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Page, Ellis Tim (committee chair), Jenkins, Henry (committee member), Seiter, Ellen (committee member)

Creator Email beccakinskey@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c127-642339

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