Getting to know me...

Having always dreamt of becoming a music video director, I had quite a bit of trivial knowledge about MTV and some of the other video-based channels. I was educated in the cinema of 4-5 minutes advertisements for a band's new album from the time MTV hit the air. I can't explain why they fascinated me. A majority have few redeeming qualities, mostly consisting of performance pieces mouthed to an audio track while the director barks out orders.

I needed to do something with all this information I had amassed. Sure, it was useful in certain conversations. Maybe somebody remembered the fact that there were two versions of Duran Duran's "Girls on Film." The clean version everybody was familiar with, then there was the adult version available on the VideoDisc compilation which was extremely rare. I was about ten years old so I would have to wait until it was available on the "Decade" VHS. All this knowledge wasn't soaked up for some contest, or so I could outwit somebody in a discussion and sound extremely pretencious. It wasn't even used to impress any ladies (as if that were an option).

I think I was stimulated by the avenues one could take when translating another artist's work into their own vision. You hear the lyrics, but what form should the visuals take? Literal, figurative, or even so abstract it has nothing to do with the meaning of the song? Unfortunately, 95% of the time the answer is a performance piece. Look, even if you have the group, band or artist in an atypical setting and they're performing, it's a performance piece. Sorry! It doesn't automatically make it a bad video.

Don't misunderstand my rant. Conceptual seems very hard to come by, and more than anything I assume the record companies strongly discourage it. Execs want to artist(s) to be seen. It amounts to more money for them. This might explain why bands like Boston or Supertramp didn't last into the '80s. Not the best looking bunch.

Around 2000 (A.D., of course) I found a site on the internet called EmptyV.net. It was run by a young guy named Andrew. He also had a larger site it was linked to covering multiple forms of entertainment. He would select a number of videos each week and review them. I was in Heaven. He also had practical opinions of what he was watching. If it was crap, he would call them on it.

Eventually he switched the site over from his college account to a full-blown independent site. Soon after the updates stopped and the web address belonged to somebody else. I've tried to contact him many times but nothing has come of it. With all of my efforts exhausted, I'm sort of picking up where he left off and giving it a shot. Maybe it catches on, maybe not.

I've had a little experience having done some year-end music video countdowns (2001, 2002, & 2003) for an an old friend's site. Hopefully this allows me some cred. But in the end it's all opinion. I'll try not to have any bias, or show favoritism to the style of music I prefer. And unless 1940's war-era music makes a huge comeback, that shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Please feel free to contact me to engage in any sort of conversation concerning the material I review or stuff you think I should know about. I love to talk about the format day and night.

Thanks for stopping in and I look to have my first weeks-worth of reviews in by October.

Grover, over.