A Larger Universe

For as long as I can remember I’ve been fascinated with pop culture’s capacity to shape who we are. At a certain moment in time, music videos had a colossal impact — not just the songs and visuals themselves, but how they were consumed. The Y2K era saw a gradual shift from the ubiquity of MTV (an endless cycle of popular songs and their visual accompaniment on home television) into the advent of YouTube in 2005 (allowing for on-demand play for anyone with a computer) and finally the video iPod later that year, which empowered us to collect our favorites on a device that fit in our pockets. By the time the iPhone rolled around, we had complete control over what, where, and when we watched.

How we consume information can alter the way we think — the formation of thoughts, associations, and memories. There’s been a lot of discussion on this front when it comes to social media usage, such as Twitter rewiring brains to “think in tweets.” Lately though, I’ve been thinking about how the music video shaped many memories of my formative adolescent years, raised as I was by the slow-motion dream logic of my favorites. Certain music and visuals are now forever wound up in how I picture the past.

And yet, despite that profound impact, I realized this month that I really didn’t know much the music video as a form — or the people who made them.

Silly me thought there’d be a straightforward one-sentence answer as to the origins of the first music video, but instead I found a ton of rabbit holes! There was the advent of “illustrated songs” in 1894, the rise of the “musical short film” in the 1920s-40s, and something called a “soundie” in the ’40s (they made a special movie jukebox for those!). Musicians played with weaving film and song as technology continued to progress. One of the stories that floats around is Tony Bennett’s claim of filming the first music video for his song “Stranger in Paradise” in the mid-’50s. (I looked and looked but couldn’t find it online!) It seems like the industry began to shift into thinking of the video as a promotional form in the ’60s, thanks to sheer demand for bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

In the decades that followed, talented directors expanded the boundaries of the form through the power of creativity and imagination, showing that the music video was not just a commercial for a band, but an art in its own right. The brevity of the form allowed for greater freedom to experiment with concepts and visuals that couldn’t be sustained over ninety minutes. It’s often said that constraints breed creativity, and I can see that being the case for a director approaching a music video: These are the lyrics, this is your budget, and it’s got to be four minutes long — now, what can you make?

Before this month, I had a vague awareness that a few film directors I enjoy had made pretty extensive forays in the art of the music video, such as David Fincher (Michael Jackson, Madonna) and Spike Jonze (Weezer, R.E.M.). Otherwise, though, I was pretty clueless. Was it possible that I had a favorite music video director without even knowing it?

I embarked on a quest to find out. Of all the music videos that had backdropped my youth — in bowling alleys and friends’ living rooms and archived on iTunes — which ones stuck with me the most? I opened up YouTube and started searching. Funnily enough, there was one name that kept cropping up. I did indeed have a favorite music video director.

And y’all, if you read last month’s newsletter and like coincidences: her name is Nancy.

My life became infinitely more interesting when I started looking for these little connections linking points of interest in my everyday life. Carl Jung called them synchronicities; I call them clues. No matter how you might label them, these associations feel like a mental reward for paying attention — making your own connections rather than letting an algorithm guide you from one thought to the next. Last month I wrote about one Nancy, and here I was learning more about another.

It turns out that when I picture the late ’90s, the visuals are Nancy Bardawil’s. Lush, strange, and nostalgic, there’s something very textured and tangible about her style, whether she’s dripping water on the camera lens to blur the shot or pulling out a century-old hand-cranked camera to achieve an analog stuttering effect. Nancy’s dreamy pace allows the viewer more time to absorb rich colors and unusual imagery (which was how I caught a Wong Kar-wai homage in one video — always love a nod to one’s influences). Her ideas feel narratively satisfying, even if you’re only sitting with them for a few minutes. I wasn’t surprised to learn that she had a background in sculpture and performance art (though the David Sedaris cameo in her ’91 show was unexpected!).

Over the span of her directing career, Bardawil worked with everyone from Stevie Nicks and Bon Jovi to Mötley Crüe and Hole. I remembered her first for “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls, which features an agoraphobic character trapped in a room full of telescopes, gazing down upon a world he cannot enter. She cropped up again with the Goos as the director of “Broadway,” in which a factory turns blue-collar workers into glossy pop-stars before spitting them back out to work again, a self-aware poke at the music industry that grapples with imposter syndrome as well.

Curious now, I worked my way through the remaining three singles off the Goo Goo Dolls’ 1998 album Dizzy Up the Girl and realized she had, in fact, directed all of them. Together, these five videos comprise a world that could only have been conjured by a single director and album at a very specific moment in time. With these songs Nancy constructed a larger universe, something like a collection of interlinked stories. And all this time, I’d never realized it was the same person behind each one.

I began to seek out stories of Nancy in the music video commentaries of bands she’d worked with. Apparently if she was directing your video, you could expect the construction of remarkably elaborate sets, the complete transformation of a local restaurant into a ’50s diner, or a potentially dangerous crane setup extending you over a swimming pool on a spring: “I thought she wanted to kill me.”

This last point — as much as it made me giggle — also brought me back to one of the things I love about the music video: it’s a product of collaboration, and collaboration requires trust. “It’s just so out of your control. It’s not like when you’re making an album, where I understand all the components,” lead singer John Rzeznik mentions in the commentary for “Black Balloon.” Pretending to play instruments, engaging in a Mission Impossible–style chase scene, hovering above that swimming pool — these are all a far cry from the familiarity of the studio. But there’s a magic that comes from introducing unfamiliarity, from braving newness. Pushed out of their comfort zone, these musicians have the chance to see something they made take new form — even be part of its creation.

A music video isn’t just the director’s or the band’s, but an amalgamation of the two. As the director of a successful music video, you shouldn’t just go off and do your own thing independent of this other entity. The song is a gift, your project’s creative foundation. You should consider the band’s aesthetic, their intentions, the feeling of the music, the meaning in the lyrics. Nancy’s work for the Dizzy album reflects the band themselves — earnest, self-deprecating, haunted, yearning, and above all, real. Behind that 5x certified platinum album stand two guys from Buffalo who started a band forty(!) years ago and never gave up.

Another thing about making art? Trust does not end with the act of creation. When releasing anything, its creator must also let go of the idea that they will be able to control the outcome. What you make takes on a second life after you let it go, and you have no choice but to trust that it will find the people it was meant for.

Each listener, viewer, reader will bring a unique alchemy of personal experience, bias, and memory to your creation. Your art will likely be misinterpreted and dismissed by some, but it can also change and inspire others. And what a joy every individual reaction is — yes, even the ones you disagree with — because together their spectrum reflects the breadth of humanity itself. And isn’t that the point of art?

Imagine how different the world would be if we all had the exact same experience of every film and song and story. Instead, we have these:

One last happy note: Seems like Nancy’s still working in music! Here are a few magical photos she took at a Florence and the Machine concert a few weeks back. I hope she knows that what she made is still blooming, still evolving, still living in the minds and hearts of many all these years later.

• Why do certain songs endure? The Goo Goo Dolls have been experiencing something of a pop-cultural resurgence after hitting what could have been peak popularity back in the late ’90s. Last year saw “Iris” as the “Song of the Summer” almost thirty years after its original release, with the band playing everywhere from Stagecoach to NPR’s Tiny Desk. This Pitchfork piece has some theories about the why — TikTok, Deadpool? — but I think a lot of it simply has to do with the fact that John and Robby never gave up. Not on the music, not on their fans, and not on each other. An Older Brother Band if there ever was one.

• Past Microfascinations of interest: Speaking of bands, I’ve written about creative collaboration a few times now! Check out my investigation into what a band IS, the unlikely collaboration between David Lynch and Mark Frost (also known as Twin Peaks!), and that time I went to a fan event at a movie theater where we listened to a brand-new Pearl Jam album together with nothing on the screen.

• Wikipedia rabbit hole of the month: Unsurprisingly I spent a lot of time clicking through the many rabbit holes of the music video!

• Never forget Sad YouTube: If you also enjoy scrolling through the deeply personal comments that often surface beneath music videos, please take some time to peruse Sad YouTube, an archive that collected them for years. Fun fact, this site was one of my earliest Microfascination discoveries!

• Music video commentaries: Take a minute to see if your favorite musician has a music video commentary up on YouTube! That fish-out-of-water element that many musicians experience while filming can lead to some pretty funny stories. VH1’s Pop Up Video added a lot of behind-the-scenes anecdotes and goofy trivia, too.

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• New zine! Follow the Clues is my personal philosophy, a way of living, and an attitude about attention. I made this zine to share various prompts and exercises that’ve helped me hone my curiosity and build a personal practice in noticing. Super thrilled to put this out as part of Release Day, a collective deadline shared by a global community of creatives! Everybody worked on their projects all month and then released them together on May 29. It was a blast to participate and I can’t wait to do it again next year!

• Events: June’s write-in will be a little later this month, on June 29. If you’re just tuning in, Connecticut folks are invited to join us at Wesleyan RJ Julia Bookstore once a month to write in community and connect with other creative people.

Take care y’all! See you again next month.