The line between music videos and advertising has forever been blurred.
Long before the advent of contemporary means of branding, videos have always been about selling the music itself – about presenting songs in a way that makes them quantifiable, and reducing hard-to-define sonic elements into commercially viable chunks. Even Bob Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, oft touted as one of the first real videos, is a promotion of its own genius, and as apathetic a salesman as Dylan appears in the clip – his eyes practically rolling, expression sour – a salesman he is nonetheless.
Music videos today feature the life you wish you had. They are elaborate swathes of fantasy set to the latest pop song, and even when dark and disturbing, they always star someone or something to aspire to. The Weeknd’s latest clip for ‘False Alarm’ might feature a bank job gone wrong, but it still has a kind of fatalistic heroism to it; a bombastic, blood-soaked sense of excess.
In more practical terms, recent advances in computer technology have also opened up the floor for ever-insidious commercial opportunities. As Rolling Stone noted in a 2014 article on the phenomenon, ‘Old Videos, New Ads‘, retro clips are being spliced with contemporary advertising slogans and product names, allowing companies to turn what might have been previously considered a missed opportunity for branding into a lucrative, highly evolved market.
Likewise, location-targeting software now allows the advent of geographic-specific branding in videos. YouTube knows where in the world you are, so it can offer different ad space in the background of videos to different international companies. You can be in Australia and see an ad for Vegemite edited into your Darius Rucker video; in England you might see an ad for Irn-Bru.
Increasingly, music videos are selling you a life, and a product, and a sound. They are conflating an ever-growing list of products into one packed, pre-prepared message, designed for you to gobble down without you ever realising you’re being sold anything at all.
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By contrast, Massive Attack’s music videos are a direct rebuttal to all that is commercial, a studied ‘fuck you’ offered up in place of a branding tagline. The clips released by the celebrated UK act this year – five hopeless, hideous slabs of paranoia – all deliberately avoid anything resembling an advertorial hook. Their narratives are confused; their heroes aimless and affected. There is nothing to aspire to in any of them, no message to take away.
A lot of that anti-commerciality is achieved because the videos go out of their way to reduce the signifiers we associate with identity. Identity is the cornerstone of advertising: before you sell something to someone, you have to work out who they are and what they desire. You have to appeal to the ways they quantify themselves, building up their ego so that you might direct it towards a product.
“The concept of identity is critically important in advertising,” wrote Nikhil Sethi in a 2013 dissertation on contemporary means of sale. “How can we aspire to provide relevant, meaningful messaging if we don’t fully understand who we’re speaking to?”
To that end, a clip like the one accompanying ‘Take It There’ is deliberately designed to obscure the boundaries of the self. The video’s protagonist is a man reduced to an action; to a movement. It’s not uncommon for characters in clips to lack dialogue of course, but it is for them to lack intent or ambition. Our ‘hero’, impressively played by John Hawkes, doesn’t do anything, really, except for stumble about the place, and as a result there is a distinct void between him and the viewer.
He is a far cry from the brooding yet admirable hero presented to us in most contemporary clips, and a further cry from the smiling, relatable everyman bopping away in others. The assembled, only just clothed characters in a clip like ‘Blurred Lines’ are blanks, sure – custom designed hollows that we might project upon – but Hawkes in ‘Take It There’ is a blank in a more basic way. We can’t project on him because there’s nothing there for projecting onto; because he is human in only the most functional sense of the word.
The same is true of the female protagonist in ‘Come Near Me’. The only character note we are provided with is her movement, the backwards walk that takes up the majority of the video’s running time. She is barely anything but a set of feet, tracing backwards: when she disappears back into the sea, we don’t mourn her because we didn’t know her. The only takeaway is the chilling, empty sense that fills us when a question goes unanswered.
‘Voodoo In My Blood’ goes one step further. It not only reduces a human to a single action, it takes away their very impetus for embarking in that act. Our heroine in ‘Voodoo’ has barely been introduced to us before her free will is removed; before her personality, already scant, is rubbed clean. She is a puppet controlled by a puppeteer whose motivations are never once revealed to us.
That selfsame depersonalisation is further emphasised in the video for ‘The Spoils’, though the tact is different. Rather than presenting a character that the audience cannot connect with, the video introduces one that we immediately can: the celebrated actress Cate Blanchett, playing, one assumes, herself. Blanchett’s face is comforting, in its way, and represents an established personality that most audience members will have a prior relationship with, however tenuous or surface-level.
There’s a rub of course, one that emerges quickly. Within moments Blanchett’s visage begins to alter and obstruct, and the boundaries of personality are tested. Is it still Blanchett when her face has been rubbed down to a contour? Is it still her when the skin has been peeled away? Is it still her when she resembles nothing more than a wind-blasted monument, featureless and pale?
In many ways, that final image – a face reduced so it is only just barely a face – represents the natural endpoint of everything Massive Attack have been working towards. It represents the ultimate commercial and cultural self-sabotage; a contemporary echo of monks lighting themselves on fire to protest bloodshed.
How do you stop yourself from being sold to in a world that’s built on selling? You eradicate you. You obliterate the personal. And you find your freedom that way.
Massive Attack’sRitual SpiritEP is out now through Melankolic/Virgin.
