Music to my eyes...

One thing that separates my generation from most of my models is that I remember when MTV played music videos, and ONLY music videos, just for hours on end. My uncle's house in Columbus was one of the original houses to get cable and MTV, at least in Ohio, and I remember going up there one time and just being stuck to the set, watching them randomly cycle through the few dozen videos they had available at the time. Granted, by today's standards, most of them are pretty hokey or at least rough around the edges, but in the day, it was just great fun. There were shows on broadcast TV that would show a few videos on weekends, but MTV was oddly revolutionary for such a simple concept.

Even though MTV turned into a "reality TV" crapfest, music videos are still going strong, thanks to iTunes, MySpace, YouTube, cellphones, and various other online outlets. Recently, MTV announced they're getting serious about videos again with the launch of MTVmusic.com, an on-demand source for their video archives. That number pales compared to YouTube, but these are the legit videos in clear resolution with clean audio. You won't find obscurities like Hilly Michaels on the MTVmusic site yet, but I'm guessing they'll be adding to the library on an ongoing basis, so who knows?

It's funny, I used to daydream about how a business could make music and videos available to the public "on demand." This was WAY before the internet, and at least before broadband made something like iTunes possible. I even remember this idea where stores could have metal "masters" of various hit songs on metal rings, and customers could select 8 songs, and the rings could be placed in a holder concentrically, and it would press a customized vinyl record just for you, instead of buying 8 separate 45s. And when I first heard of digital recording technology (Ry Cooder's Bop 'til you Drop the first rock record that was digitally recorded) it immediately seemed to me that one could encode songs/albums onto computer chips that could be purchased and put into some sort of playback device. Oh well, good ideas are nothing without the resources to develop them.

Above is Kat from a recently-edited-but-not-so-recent shoot. Below is a vaguely Rauschenberg-ish video by the Pixies that I always thought was very cool, if deceptively simple.

The Pixies |MTV Music