MTV 20 - Pop

Pop music. The term means many different things, depending on who you are, how old you are, your general musical tastes and, of course, which country you come from. For those in America, the definition of pop during the ‘80s and ‘90s was largely controlled by pioneering cable music video channel MTV, which began operation just over 20 years ago. Those in charge of MTV couldn’t have known it at the time they set the channel up, but the timing was perfect - over in England, the punk movement had given way to New Romantic and its various permutations, a movement where a performer’s visual appearance and general “image� was just as important as the music - if not more so. These artists’ music was highly visual in sonic terms, and thanks to the likes of video clip director Russell Mulcahy (now a movie and television director) the songs were lavished with vivid visual illustration as well, spearheaded by a batch of immensely influential clips for the singles being released by Duran Duran, Ultravox and others - clips that were heavily influenced by cinema, loaded with glamour and often shot in exotic locations at ludicrous expense.

MTV almost single-handedly started a bona fide British Invasion when they began screening these visual treats in the early ‘80s, and soon US artists followed suit. The days of the “performance clip� (where the artist or band simply stood in front of flashing lights and mimed) were, for the time being, over. A revolution had begun. Amusingly, MTV has always claimed to have been the sole driving force behind the growth of the music video as an art form - in reality, Australia’s already-long-running Countdown was just as influential - but the impact that the cable channel had on the way music was marketed can’t be underestimated, even if today’s MTV bears little resemblance to the 24-hour music channel it once was.

This compilation of clips from the last two decades serves as a 20th Anniversary walk through some of the “groundbreaking� clips that made waves on MTV over the years - and not surprisingly, a great deal of them are from English artists. It’s a great idea, and an especially welcome opportunity to look back at what was one of the most exciting times for pure pop music since the 1960s. But has MTV taken full advantage of this opportunity? Let’s have a look at what’s here…

Gary Numan - Cars: Having already made waves in the UK with his band Tubeway Army and heavily influenced bands like Ultravox, Numan went solo with his landmark album The Pleasure Principal, from which Cars was the Big Hit Single. The clip, shot on videotape on a teensy budget in 1979, is cheesy but was highly influential stylistically.

A Flock Of Seagulls - I Ran: With a space-age musical approach, glistening record production by Mike Howlett and seriously silly hair, the Seagulls scored a big hit worldwide with I Ran and then promptly vanished from the charts (except in the UK, where they made an impact on the charts several times afterwards). Another very cheap clip, I Ran puts the emphasis on the band’s unique appearance.

Naked Eyes - Promises, Promises: One-hit-wonders in this country (with their cover of Always Something There To Remind Me), Naked Eyes scored big with this later single in the US, a very dated slice of Fairlight-powered computer-soul that doesn’t stand up well. By this stage, mock-Cinemascope clips were the order of the day, and using svelte models for no apparent reason was de rigueur.

The Fixx - One Thing Leads To Another: A less fashion-driven outfit from England, The Fixx’s trademark was the intensely processed production on their records (by Rupert Hine, himself a recording artist). This song, from the band’s second album Reach The Beach, was a huge US hit, but is by no means The Fixx’s finest hour. Neither is the clip.

Big Country - In A Big Country: The big hit from their superb 1983 debut album The Crossing, with a clip that successfully shows off the band in “live� performance (they were renowned for their live shows) as well as their more “pastoral� side via countryside footage that goes well with the guitar sound (it’s like bagpipes, y’know!)

Elvis Costello - Every Day I Write The Book: He’s still recording today and just as fascinating as always, but this 1983 single’s still one of his finest moments, marking a transition from his earlier punk and ska-influenced sound to something more refined. The clip’s amusing thanks to its use of Charles and Di impersonators…!

Lionel Richie - All Night Long: The first mystifying inclusion, Richie’s silly-accent megahit was cheesy then and just sounds embarrassing now, especially coming at this point in the compilation. The clip? Think West Side Story meets The Wiz. Scary.

Thompson Twins - Hold Me Now: Though best known in the UK at the time for their edgy electronic pop, Hold Me Now took the ballad route with huge success, giving them their biggest hit globally. It’s not their best song by a long way, but that’s the charts for you. The clip uses the patented Mulcahy multi-window approach so beloved of Duran Duran, though Mulcahy didn’t direct this one.

Tears For Fears - Shout: Want a hit? Write an anthem! Shout still gets heard today, and still sounds good despite an overload of That Bloody Fairlight Flute Sound. An epic song (only very slightly edited for single release) it scores an epic clip, though one obviously done on a modest budget (the band’s previous single, The Way You Are, had flopped badly). Music trainspotters should keep an eye out for drummer Chris Hughes here - a well regarded record producer who’s also co-produced this song, he also has played drums for Adam And The Ants (as “Merrick�) and for Roxy Music.

Lisa Stansfield - All Around The World: The tail end of the ‘80s, and the so-called “white soul� that had been threatening not to go away for several years in the UK made a sudden move back into the charts with this string-laden song, which involves a woman with day-glo-red lips trying to find her baybeeeahhh. Note the strategically-placed curl.

Aqua - Barbie Girl: A lot of people hate Aqua. Those people don’t get Aqua. But Aqua is only properly fun when you can see them - and this clip is hilarious, replete with grunty co-vocalist René Dif’s hammy antics and the lyrics that prompted Mattel to take the band to court. Great fun - and, of course, extremely pop.

Smash Mouth - Walking On The Sun: Summer party music that recalls the Austin Powers end of the ‘60s, this recent hit song comes with an unexpectedly moody video clip.

Chumbawumba - Tubthumping: A British band that’s been around for well over a decade, anarchist outfit Chumbawumba scored their first US hit with this ultra-simple, ultra-memorable sing-along ode to getting drunk and talking over-confidently. It’s fun to hear that the oft-repeated, sweetly-sung line “pissing the night away� remains in the clip despite this DVD being rated G!

K-ci & JoJo - All My Life: Okay, whoever compiled this disc either needs their head read or is on this duo’s payroll. This is NOT pop. It’s not even relevant to the rest of this disc’s content. It’s a turgid R&B ballad done by the numbers, and it’s utter crap. The clip, meanwhile, is the usual sunglasses ’n’ white gloves posturing. Avoid at all costs.

Semisonic - Closing Time: After Radiohead made it big, a lot of bands that sounded vaguely like them got major-label deals; Semisonic were one of them. Reasonably good as guitar-pop, and graced with an interesting split-screen video clip; the song was produced by Nick Launay, who has worked with Australian bands like INXS, Midnight Oil, The Models and Silverchair - and who also worked on the hit Pop Muzik by M. Which is an appropriate way to finish, trivia-wise.

The first thing to remember here is that we’re dealing, in many cases, with very old material produced for television in the pre-digital-video era. But even taking that into account, many of the clips here are presented with astonishingly poor picture quality. There’s a simple reason for that.

This is a PAL conversion of a disc produced for an NTSC video market, and so the quality loss that’s inherent in standard-converting the finished product for non-NTSC countries is a given. But there’s a deeper problem - most of these clips were originally produced and edited for the PAL format, shot either on video or film but post-produced and edited on good old PAL analogue videotape. But what MTV appears to have done is take the masters from their own library for use on this disc - masters that are PAL-to-NTSC conversions themselves. Standards conversion technology has improved, but back in the 80s it was fairly underwhelming, and it’s on display on many of the clips here, which have, effectively, been converted from PAL to NTSC and then back to PAL again. The result is messy - clips such as Hold Me Now or Cars look undeniably terrible, for example, and actually pale in comparison to old VHS recordings of them when they were shown on Countdown. Colour saturation is wrong, detail is minimal and there’s all manner of standards-conversion artefacts visible throughout, as well as a nasty “gauze�-like overlay on many of the clips. The newer material fares better (particularly the Aqua clip) but the entire compilation suffers from what appears to have been a reluctance to track down high-quality PAL masters of the individual clips, then have them converted afresh for NTSC and left alone for the PAL version of the disc. Don’t make the mistake of assuming the age of the material is at fault - that is not the problem here.

Though mastered on a dual-layered disc, the content here would easily have fitted onto a single layer - and interestingly, we could not find a layer change anywhere, despite some intensive searching.

Audio is a different story - the disc’s producers have made the wise (and unfortunately all too rare) decision to re-dub the audio on the clips using digital sources (probably CDs). That means you score near-CD-quality stereo sound on each and every clip, and in the case of many of the offerings here, they’ve never sounded better. However, beware the default Dolby Digital 5.1 track - while the end credits claim it’s a “remix� it is, in fact, just an “extrapolation� - a 5.1 track artificially created from a stereo master. Purists will want to go for the Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo track, which presents the songs the way the artists and producers intended them to be; this track is encoded at an appreciably high bitrate, too, which is welcome. Note also that the 5.1 track does NOT downmix well to stereo; the 2.0 track should really have been the default on this disc.

Extras are limited; the best of them is “Fast Facts and Short Stats,� a feature that uses a subtitle stream to display on-screen trivia about the artists and their careers as each clip plays. Good use is made of DVD’s subpicture capabilities here; the white text items are contained in a coloured “balloon�, and rather than just pop up, each one gracefully fades up and fades out again. The “facts� are often ill-informed or US-centric (“Despite Numan’s long career, Cars was his only hit� - tell that to the English!) but it’s a neat idea, well executed. There’s also an artist profile and discography for each act, where once again the “trivia� is often misguided (with Numan, they inform us that he “originally performed under the name Tubeway Army� - which, of course, was actually a band; The Fixx’s first single is incorrectly named as “Last Planes�). There is also a set of short MTV promos accessible as easter eggs (see our easter egg section for details on how to find them if you’re stuck).

This DVD is encoded with text information and makes use of the jacket picture feature (though the jacket picture in this case has been chosen seemingly at random and is badly encoded).

With any compilation such as this, what’s going to be controversial is not what’s here, but what’s missing. Notable omissions such as Duran Duran and Thomas Dolby are surprising, given those artists’ influence on MTV at the time - and it’s not like there’s a shortage of space, either, with the entire compile running only 71 minutes, including credits, some short interview segments (Gary Numan’s is unintentionally hilarious, and Lenny Kravitz appears for no particular reason!) and a few MTV promo trailers. Annoyingly, too, the end credits do not supply the names of the record’s producer or the video clip director - the latter having been one of the best features of early MTV.

Still, it’s good to see some classic pop clips on DVD at all; hopefully someone, somewhere in England, will attempt a larger-scale retrospective of what was, essentially, a minor revolution via the medium of music video. Because when a company with the resources of MTV can’t be bothered sourcing decent master tapes for such a disc, it’s a major disappointment.