I Want My Music Videos - Flux Screening Series

At the end of the last century, the best place to turn for music videos was cable TV. Five years ago, the cable channel that still has music in its name but is better known for its reality programming, MTV, announced that its little sister station, MTV2, would put the focus back on music videos. Then they aired Wildboyz and the Andy Milonakis Show instead. Nowadays anybody who still watches music videos does so mostly online.

Flux changed that, for a night at least, last Tuesday when they curated a screening of five new videos at The Billy Wilder Theatre at the Hammer Museum in Westwood. First they screened the Jonathan Glazer-directed video for Jack White's latest project, The Dead Weather, which features White in a machine gun fight with bandmate Alison Mosshart. Next was a Chris Cairns video that featured green-screened DJs and would be at home on a Michel Gondry highlights reel.

The biggest applause of the night went to the group the New York Times once called "the most insufferable band of the decade"—Coldplay. Their video for “Strawberry Swing,” a pseudo-stop-motion masterpiece directed by UK director duo Shynola, is so creative it wouldn’t matter if the music was by Yanni. Shynola's work made me do something I haven’t done after seeing a music video in a long time: I bought the song.

The final video of the screening, H5’s Logorama, though not technically a music video, raised the central questions facing the music video industry today: Is a music video a sales tool for music? Or is it an advertisement for the director (and, by extension, the record label and their budget)? I won’t spoil the work, but the video left the crowd stunned—both at H5’s talent and the recent news that they are separating as a group.

After the show, I caught up with Sheira Rees-Davies, former head of Anonymous Content's music videos division, which was cut earlier this year. Rees-Davies has since moved to Hello!, and she brought many of her directors with her. Today she’s confident that, despite budget challenges, music videos will survive no matter where they find an audience. It’s an art form she considers beautiful. Given the extraordinary work presented by Flux, I see her point.

Originally in Los Angeles Magazine at: http://www.lamag.com/do/blog.aspx?dt=09/25/2009