Rolling Stone Kürte Beyoncé’s “Formation” for the best music video ever in 2021. But when it comes to the most influential, the first place could be a clip that is not even a real music video. And which was shot in black and white 60 years ago.
Last week Margo Price released a happy new single, “Don’t Wake Me Up”, accompanied by a video in which she holds up white cards with text excerpts. To read: “Cow Pasture Cemetery”, “Honky Tonk Leaky Tent”, “Dive Bar”, “Madness”. You didn’t have to be a classic rock historian to recognize the video as an allusion to Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”.
It is reminiscent of that iconic scene from 1965, in which the young Bob keeps and drops cards with song lines in a London alley. In the background, the poet Allen Ginsberg is in conversation with the Dylan friend Bobby Neuwirth, which is outside the picture.
Bob Dylan: The first music video ever?
At the beginning of the MTV era, this relatively primitive sequence was seen as a prototype of the music video and began to inspire imitations and homage. “When Margo came up to me with the concept, I took a closer look at groups who made similar projects with poster or keyword cards, and was shocked as many,” says Hannah Gray Hall, the director of Prices “Don’t Wake Me Up”. “It’s like continuing a tradition.”
The first example could have been “MISFIT”, the 1986 video of the stylish British pop band Curiosity Killed the Cat, in which Andy Warhol drops white cards during a short appearance.
A year later, Inx’s’ “Mediate” raised the Dylan homage to a new stage. Starting with singer Michael Hutchence, all band members held up song text cards in turn and then dropped them. “You had to get the timing right,” says Inxs member Andrew Farriss about the Rolling Stone about the shoot outside of Sydney in Australia. “You had to make sure that the cards also landed.”
In a further allusion to the Dylan video, some words were deliberately missed.
Since not everything was immediately available on YouTube in 1987 (YouTube, of course, did not yet exist), says Farriss that he did not know the source at the time. “I don’t know if it was the idea of the director or Michael, but I have to admit that I didn’t even know that Bob had such a video,” he says. “Maybe a few of the others knew. Everything I know is: it sounded like a good idea. I saw the original later and thought: ‘Oh, wow.'” The replica was so obvious that a critic was noted at the time, “both the filmmaker [Pennebaker] as well as his protagonist [Dylan] Should their lawyers drum together ”-this did not prevent the clip from winning the price of the video of the year at the MTV Music Video Awards in 1988, together with the Companion Clip for“ Need You Tonight ”.
Politically, poetic or postmodern
Since then, a real subculture of “subterranean homesick blues” videos has formed, which honor the original in different ways. As with Curiosity Killed the Cat, some approached their replicas than parodies. “Weird al” Yankovics “Bob” from 2003 shows the popular satirist with dylan wig, vest and own alley, a false ginsberg in the background, while Yankovic Dylans satirized surrealistic visual language (“Rise to Vote, Sir/Do Geese See God/Do Nine Men Interpret/Nine Men, I Nod”).
Although “Subterranean Homesick Blues” is not a political song, others used the setting for their own protest videos. Les Claypool and the Frog Brigade’s “Buzzards of Green Hill” typically shows carnival science Claypool texts, possibly about the dangers of drunkenness at the wheel. Hence Claypool’s use of keyword cards in the video.
At the beginning of this year, Kim Gordon transformed the pack list texts from “Bye bye” into a minimalist anti-trump protest song with the title “Bye Bye 25!” Completely with a video in which Gordon holds cards with new texts (“Immigrant”, “HATE”, “In justice”).
The artist Ed Ruscha, who has a connection to Sonic Youth (the band named her song “Brave Men Run” after one of his paintings), paid homage to his friend and concept artist Lawrence Weiner with excerpts from Weiners with his own index card video.
The video idea was also a hit in Germany
We are Helden’s video for “Only one word” from 2005 showed the now dissolved German pop band in a own alley, dancing and tingling while presenting her song leaves. (Since the song is about to encourage a reserved person to speak – “your silence is your tent” – the use of words in the video also made a conceptual sense.) And before he hunted zombies, Andrew Lincoln was busy in “Love” to district – exactly – white cards.
In the case of Price’s video, director Hall says that Price’s team spoke to her because of a dylan-like implementation. “But they said I should make it my own and make a contemporary version from it.”
It used 77 different poster cards for the shoot. Hall believes that the text excerpts also match the subject of the song and dylan legacy.
“Margo and I have not talked about it in detail, but for me it speaks strongly about our current social climate. People are isolated in their own worlds and do not look at the opinions of others. It is more social comment than protest song.”
For Farriss, one thing combines “subterranean homesick blues” homes for almost 40 years: “It is simple,” he says. “Just because something is complicated does not mean it is good.”