If you're like me, you find enjoyment from sifting through the many music videos and visuals that music brings us today. I find extreme enjoyment from this. I am a firm believer that an artists' visuals are just as important as their music. It actually makes me so sad when I realize some artists just don't put any effort or work into the visual side of their career.
While I guess that songwriting and singing is what they actually signed up for, they could still take advantage of their music videos and or other outlets to add a different dimension to the song that it can't reach on its own. That's actually a really important aspect of music videos and visuals; they add more depth to the song, and it really adds a completely different dimension to the song.
As I've mentioned in one of my articles, I haven't always been a music buff. I really started to get into music about four years ago. And as I grew into an avid music listener, music videos and different visual concepts intrigued me more and more. To see how a musical artist could use this tool to harness their expression really interested me.
Music videos are like little movies. You have to pack a whole story in about three minutes and 30 seconds. To me that's really impressive that some artists can tell this whole intricate story in that amount of time when it takes some Hollywood director two hours to do that exact same thing (that's not a knock at directors of full fledged films, just an observation I've made through some artists' music videos).
What's even more impressive is this whole new wave of visual albums. From artists like Beyonce to bands like Arcade Fire, visual albums have been exploding onto the scenes. Marina and the Diamonds released an 11 part visual album that followed four different archetypes under the titular character, Electra Heart, which followed them through a quest of identity, illusion and love while using America as a setting to show how one could really lose themselves in the land where you can be anyone; she also ran a gallery of photos shot by Casper Balslev for the project that were inspired by artist, Cindy Sherman.
Beyoncé released her critically acclaimed self titled album in 2013 that comprised of 14 songs and 17 videos, meaning that every song got a video and then some additional filler films. Arcade Fire released a film with Spike Jonze titled, "Scenes from the Suburbs," inspired by their third studio album, The Suburbs. Florence + the Machine is doing a project for here newest album, "How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful," entitled, "The Odyssey," which is a series of music videos for songs off the album.
The visuals behind music are art. They are beautiful pieces of work. They are important to the cohesiveness and the package of the album. I love that in our day and age, artists realize how effective they are, and how they create a world around a song or album. I love that, for the most part, we don't have many shitty music videos being produced. Artists care about what they're putting their name on, and what they're giving to the public, they want the freedom of creativity, and it's really paying off for us fans and the artist themselves. We are so far past the meaningless, corny and terribly shot videos of the 2000's.
