Iconic Music Video

 I have chosen to analyse Soundgarden's music video for their song 'Black Hole Sun'.

 

The song is arguably the band's most recognisable and most popular song, and remains a well known song from the 1990s. It topped the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, where it spent a total of seven weeks at #1. The video was released in June 1994. After several weeks of airplay on MTV, a second version of the video was substituted containing more elaborate visual effects than the original, including the addition of a computer-generated black hole. The music video for "Black Hole Sun" became a hit on MTV and received the award for Best Metal/Hard Rock Video at the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards. 

The surreal and apocalyptic music video for "Black Hole Sun" was directed by Howard Greenhalgh, produced by Megan Hollister for Why Not Films (London, England), shot by Ivan Bartos, and features post-production work by 525 Post Production (Hollywood, California) and Soho 601 Effects (London). Visually, the video is very effective however, In an online chat, the band stated that the video "was entirely the director's idea", and added, "Our take on it was that at that point in making videos, we just wanted to pretend to play and not look that excited about it." This is very typical of the american-rock early 90's era, paying homage to bands such as Nirvana who similarly performed their music videos with a very 'care-less attitude'. 

Greg Prato of Allmusic called the song "one of the few bright spots" of the summer of 1994 when "the world was still reeling from Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain's suicide the previous April". He said, "The song had a psychedelic edge to it". The lyrics were classic Chris Cornell—lines didn't exactly make sense on paper but did within the song."

Regardless of what some critics had to say about the song, evidently the song has been a commercial success, later featuring as a playable song in the 2007 video game Rock Band. The song is also available in the 2008 video games Karaoke Revolution Presents: American Idol Encore and SingStar 90s, for the PlayStation 2. Also, a section of the Nintendo DS 2008 role-playing video game Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood is titled "Black Hole Sun", a very likely reference to the song. Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock features the song in its downloadable content library.

Theorist Discussion: I have found certain features of Andrew Goodwin's theory.

1)  There is a strong correlation between the lyrics, music and visuals, as a 'black hole' appears in the video accompanied by very disturbing and manipulated imagery, making the characters featured look surreal; (surrealism). 
2) Sub Pop Records would have certainly demanded a lot of shots of the artists. It is likely that they opted for using Director Howard Greenhalgh to deliver the obscurity of the video, to help market the band in the alternative rock genre. It is interesting to note that Nirvana who were renowned for their strange visuals, were also signed to Sub Pop which suggests that the label played a big part in deciding exactly what they wanted to achieve from the Black Hole Sun video. 

The Twenty Most Important Events in Music Video History

1894 - First example of Illustrated Song. Still Images were projected onto a screen simultaneous to a live peformance of 'Little Lost Child'. 

1895 - The “first” music video is filmed at Thomas Edison’s studio. The oldest known film with music was made for the Kinetophone, a device developed by Thomas Edison’s lab that showed moving pictures and was also fitted out with a phonograph. In the film, its inventor, William Dickson, plays music from a popular operetta on a violin as two men dance beside him.

1926 - Arrival of 'Talkies': Music Short Films were produced featuring bands, vocalists and dancers.

1930 - The use of Musical Films began where songs were used within films. 

1930 - 'Screen Songs' were introduced. These were a series of short films introduced to encourage the audience to sing along by "following the bouncing ball". 

1940 -  Soundies put coins in jukeboxes across the United States. Direct precursors to the music video, soundies were three-minute films featuring music and dance performances, designed to display on jukebox-like projection machines in bars, restaurants and other public spaces.

1955 - The Scopitone was made which had a small screen on it playing wither animated or live action videos that were synced to the music playing.

1956 - Rise of Television: The increase in popular music coincided with TV which exposed emerging stars.

1964 - 'A Hard Day's Night': The Beatles set the stage for the modern music video with their motion picture.

1965 - The Beatles' began the first of ten films which were used to promote album releases. This essentially acted as a catalyst for video promotion. 

1981 - MTV was launched. This allowed Music Videos to play a central role in music marketing by the mid-80's. 

1983 - Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' was released. This has been viewed by many as the most influential and successful music video of all time. 

1985 - VH1 was released. This featured softer music and catered to an older demographic, widening the audience of music videos. 

1988 - HipHop sees significant growth and popularity as MTV launches YO! MTV Raps. 

1990's -  Renowned for popularity of punk rock and for being the decade that alternative rock became mainstream. In the 90's making music videos for your songs was the standard thing to do. With technology improving and now everyday people being able to afford their own video cameras and tripods anyone could make their own music videos.

1995 - The Jackson's 'Scream' was released. It cost 7 Million to produce and thus is the most expensive video of all time. 

1997 - Michael Jackson's 'Ghosts' video was a record 39:31 minutes long. It was considered to be a short-film because of its duration. 

2005 - Youtube Launched. This allowed people to view music videos online and brought about 'viral marketing'. Artists began receiving popularity through this new form of advertising. 

2005 - Itunes Launched. Allowed Music/Music Videos to be downloaded from the internet. There were over 1Million downloads in just 20 days. 

2010 - Lady Gaga's YouTube Channel reaches 1 Billion. Her song 'Poker Face' sees 375 Million alone. 

'Why Does Love Do This To Me?' Video

Here we used Imovie to practise the basics of a music video.