Reinventing The Music Video

The format hasn’t changed in 30 years. Budgets shrank. MTV has moved on. But ambitious filmmakers, armed with new technology, are ushering in another Golden Age by John Jurgensen.

In “Scenes from the Suburbs,” directed by Spike Jonze, armed troops patrol communities at war with each other. Music by the Grammy-winning band Arcade Fire forms a soundtrack, but the band doesn’t appear on screen. Instead, Mr. Jonze cast a handful of Texas teenagers who helped improvise dialogue for the script. “Scenes” premiered at the recent South by Southwest Film Festival—it’s 30 minutes long.

Thirty years after the founding of MTV, Mr. Jonze’s film isn’t strictly a “music video,” but it’s an example of the ambitious work that’s springing up to replace them. There once was a time when lavish videos by Michael Jackson, Madonna and Guns N’ Roses were as big as the songs they accompanied. Record labels signed off on extravagant concepts—Puff Daddy chased by helicopters, the Backstreet Boys in a spaceship—as they waged an arms race for hits on MTV, which offered exponentially more reach than any radio station.

“Those videos cost one million, two million, and they all started to look the same. We tried to tell them, ‘You don’t have to make it about the bling,’ ” recalls Van Toffler, president of MTV Networks Music and Logo Group.

Audiences eventually wearied of them and MTV, chasing ratings, moved on to reality shows (“Jersey Shore”). And when digital music shoved CD sales down a hole, the labels’ video budgets tumbled in after. Aside from a handful of high-production outliers, especially Lady Gaga, most videos in the viral era get made on the cheap, typically for less than $100,000.

So out of the ashes, with cheap new tools, a growing number of music acts and directors are trying to do something more ambitious: change the medium itself. They’re using interactive technology sponsored by the likes of Google and Intel to break out of a formula that hasn’t really varied for more than 30 years. What they’re not doing: a few minutes of music matched to a parade of visuals and lip-synching, whether it was Madonna voguing on MTV, or OK Go doing a treadmill dance on YouTube.

Instead, a recent video by the ’80s band Devo for the song “What We Do” gives viewers control of the camera, enabling a 360-degree view of various scenes, including an arm-wrestling match and a fat man cavorting in a diaper. Last week, MTV gave emerging singer Andy Grammer an award for a video to “Keep Your Head Up,” which put viewers in the director’s seat, allowing them to send the singer into different goofy scenarios with the click of a button. A video for the singer Robyn’s “Killing Me” grabbed her fans’ words off Twitter and integrated them into a collage of 3-D animation.

“Black” Vocals by Norah Jones

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