Video Perfection

After falling asleep on the couch last night I awoke to the video for "Beautiful Lie" by Shakira and Beyonce. Although not a bad video technically, and definetly a great video for the eye candy, in my barely awake state it flared connections that led me to thinking of this blog. I wrote this in my head about 2 this morning, let's see how it translates.
I no longer purposley watch videos for the most part as I believe it has really passed its prime. Back when we were watching MTV everyday after school there was a social relevance to it. That was our medium. It was created for us, and was singularly ours. But now, there's a reason MTV only plays about 4 hours of actual videos everyday: It's all been done.
This leads me to the point of this post. In 1985, 6 years before he would win a Best Director Oscar for 'Silence Of The Lambs', Jonathan Demme directed the video for New Order's song 'Perfect Kiss'. Never widely played, and only actually played a handful of times on MTV, the video stands today as the pinnacle of what a video could be. Both NYU and UCLA show it in their Video Production classes. For New Order fans, it is all that is great about the band. We see in thier faces even as they are creating this incredible piece of music live with no retakes, the sadness that underlies everything that they create. Born from the ashes of Joy Division after lead singer Ian Curtis's suicide due to near terminal epilepsy, New order set out to not stand in the shadow of their former band. Yet in so doing,they couldn't overcome it. Bernard Sumner, guitarist for Joy Division stepped into the lead singer spotlight, becoming renowned as the most unwilling frontman in music. Peter Hook, the bassist for both bands continued to wear his bass low and play it at punk rock speeds no matter the song. Stephen Morris took on the sampling keyboards, eschewing the drums, during the age of machine rock, while his wife Gillian played melody keyboards. They were, and still are in my opinion, nearly perfect in their musical meshing. The most unlikely creation of a band, with the most unassuming members, have become one of the most succesful bands of all time. Even today they are still playing, recording, and touring yearly, with only Gillian staying home to look after kids and business matters now. Indeed, as my second favorite group, I could have picked ANY of their songs to put on my Finetune 'Wander Well' list. The song I chose is 'Who's Joe', the first song off their most recent album, "Waiting For The Sirens Call". A song that is just the lead in to the album, and recieved no air play. If you can pick a song like that to best represent what you love about a band on a list of favorites, that is a band with some meat on its bones.
Like New Order, or thier music, or not, the video speaks for itself.