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Comment by paypalcust83 | Hacker News Reader

Back when music videos were awesome works of cinematography, production, visual, and musical art:

Dire Straits - Money For Nothing (complete with CG and 80's pastel graphics on live video) - https://youtu.be/csje_Tb0U0c

Here's a playlist of 80's MTV videos, starting with the Space Shuttle and Apollo launches followed by landing the MTV flag on the moon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NBhuf1g-rY&list=PLDHCLXs2vT...

Like most things on Internet Archive, individual videos are not annotated very well so you have no idea what's in the content. Digging through it would be, sadly, mostly a waste of time. It would be more useful with annotations.

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> Back when music videos were awesome works of cinematography, production, visual, and musical art

They still are, but the mainstream eclipses everything and the noise level is much higher.

I have a music 'tv' dedicated to these videos: https://humanmusic.tv/

this is interesting, don't you think music videos were good also after the '80s?

In my very modest opinion they peaked somewhere in the '90s: basically everything by Michel Gondry until "Let Forever Be"[0] is awesome and some artists (Prodigy, Bjork, Fatboy Slim, Korn, Marylin Manson) have made their clips almost as recognizable as their music.

It seems these days they have become fairly boring but then again, maybe I've just become older and uncool.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5FyfQDO5g0

I think you're right, but there's always the element that the older crowd gravitate towards what we grew up with. And everyone eventually becomes the older crowd.

There would be some people on here for which even this stuff is too "young"; those who grew up with 50's, 60's and 70's music of course.

Music videos are still awesome works of cinematography, production, visual, and musical art. Videos like APESHIT from The Carters, Lady Gaga's Telephone, Childish Gambino's This is America, and pretty much anything from OK Go have been at least equal to the best videos made from that era.

It's not fair for a lens of nostalgia to mean you're comparing the best videos of an era to an average video from a current one.

Very true. Watching the first 4 hours of MTV had quite a few snoozers TBH. There are still great things being made and if we are willing to cherry pick there have been great things made in every musical era.

Back when music videos were awesome works of cinematography, production, visual, and musical art

IMO some recent videos are still "awesome". I hesitate to mention the recent Big Boi Chocolate video (it's much different than 1980s videos) but I really enjoyed it. The visuals were great, but probably too risque for many people. I got there from the Lucifer TV series.

It's an example of what I'm complaining about when I say I can't buy videos. I can find it on YouTube, but not on iTunes. I guess the label doesn't want to monetize it, simply considers it a promo?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8VZ52fWYnQ

> videos were awesome works of cinematography, production, visual, and musical art

I don't know if we are looking at the same thing or I'm too young to feel nostalgic about it but what I'm seeing looks like 95% complete trash.

music videos are like the one medium that barely evolved over the decades. and why bother? enough people are content with boiler-plate booty-shaking or simply showing the band playing.

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