Vid rec and meta

Someone on metafandom made a post about finding it difficult toget vids and parts of the subsequent discussion turned to accounts of ‘why we vid’ or why vids make sense. This would have been my contribution except that it got too rambly and off-topic.

A while ago the ipod was playing an old Joni Michell song from her jazzy experimental era. Hejira to be precise, it’s the title song of the eponymous album with the picture of her dressed like a crow, the open road visible behind/through her on the front cover and a similarly, desaturated shot of a frozen river on the back. So I was doing the washing up and singing along when I caught myself making up pictures to match the music. Very literal ones, very tied to the lyrics – for the line “there’s a man and a woman sitting on the rock” for example, I’d zoom in to the far bank of the river from the back cover to reveal, yes, a man and a woman sitting on a rock. The thing is, it also reminded me that I do this all the time with music and always have. Joni and I go back a long way and I think that particular image has been coming to mind ever since I first heard the song back in the days before I’d ever seen a fanvid or for that matter a music video - it was pre-MTV. So OK there was the one Queen did for Bohemian Rhapsody but that was about the only precedent. Still, even without the MTV experience growing up the idea of music being associated with images or narratives was hardly foreign. Movies and music go together like two very mixy things and most of my favourite movies are musicals. Sure dance sequences aren’t just a visual response to music and they don’t all tell stories but the idea that they might would be intuitive to any ballet fan.

I think visually, I solve genetic problems by conjuring up pictures, I read books and run mini-movies as I process the words, I listen to music and it evokes serial images and words set to music have even more power. They get caught in the crevices of your mind, sometimes I finds myself thinking in song lyrics, like an adult-onset form of echolia. All of which is to say that vidding, both making vids and reading them, seems an intuitively natural process. It feels right even while I’m not very good at it.

The original post was in response to lim’s new Harry Potter vid In exchange for all your tomorrows to House of the Rising Sun so while in a tl;dr mood, for illustrative purposes here’s the thoughts I had on it after obsessively watching it for most of this afternoon.

( Watch the vid first, it’s much better than the exegesis )