OttoBlog
2006/09/06: Music Videos
About a month ago, I was lamenting the fact that there are no decent music videos today.
Back in the ealy 1980s, we only had one music video channel (MTV) if you don't count the old "Video Jukebox" that HBO had to fill the space between movies and the local channels that occasionally had a half hour block of music videos on late-night weekends.
Some time in the ealy 1990s, MTV got farther and farther away from playing music videos, opting instead to air "original programming" consisting of game shows, celebrity softball games, "music news", cartoons, fashion shows, movie awards, and pretty much anything except actual music. By this time, VH-1 had started up, been bought out by MTV, buts was still playing mostly music videos (though not as "heavy" of a playlist, as it was aimed at an older audience).
These days, there are about 20 different channels that claim to play music videos, but alas--there isn't much worth watching (and most are still playing non-music programming). VH-1 Classic is still pretty good (though over the last year they have started to get bogged down by a ton of commercials, plus they've strayed away from the "mostly 1980s music videos" in an effort to choke in interviews, concerts, etc.
Then it was brought to my attention that mixed in with all the crap that gets uploaded to YouTube, there are a lot of really nice music videos that I haven't seen in about twenty years. You have to do some searching, and you might end up getting some teenager learning how to play "Stairway to Heaven" on his guitar instead of what you really wanted, but it's still a step in the right direction. I've actually stumbled on some really cool fan-made videos, like someone that made an entire stop-motion music video of Metallica's Whiskey in the Jar done entirely with Legos.
About three weeks ago, a friend mentioned a web site called 1500Videos that has (as the name might imply) 1500 different music videos (with no duplicate artists, so there are actually 1500 different singers/bands). And they're all from the 1980s. There's early stuff like Stray Cats and Adam Ant, to hits from the end of the decade like Extreme's "More Than Words".
I have literally spent hours there doing nothing but listening to (and watching) classic music videos from my college years. Check it out. You won't be disappointed.
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