https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=playlist
Within the eighties, people lamented the attention-span-shortening “MTV-ization” of visual culture. By the mid-nineties, webworks had been attempting to figure out get viewers to sit down by music movies in any respect. A solution arrived within the type of Pop-Up Video, a professionalgram pitched by creators Woody Thompson and Tad Low to VH1 when that much-less-cool MTV clone discovered itself struggling to remain automotiveried by cable suppliers. It had an enchantmentingly low-budget concept: take existing music movies, and spice them up with textual content bubbles containing details in regards to the artists, behind-the-scenes anecdotes, and amusing (if semi-relevant) trivia.
“We bought quite a lot of resistance from VH1. They owned Blockbuster Video on the time, in order that they knew nobody hireed foreign movies as a result of nobody needed to learn the TV.” So recollects Low in a Invoiceboard interview in regards to the history of the present, which originally ran from 1996 to 2002 (with a quick revival in 2011 and 2012). Like many cultural phenomena beloved of millennials, Pop-Up Video has acquired the oral-history deal withment greater than as soon as: Uproxx additionally did one a couple years earlier. These articles are entertaining in the identical method as Pop-Up Video itself, opening up the doorways of the factory and provideing a glimpse of how pop-cultural sausage will get made.
Launched nicely earlier than the age of Wikipedia, Pop-Up Video required intensive analysis. That meant not simply interweb searches, however cellphone calls to directors, professionalduction designers, hairstylists, automotivepenters, caterers, and anyone else who might need labored on a particular music video (if not the musicians, few of whom knew how their movies had been made, and even fewer of whom had been willing to dish filth on themselves). These typically complicated, rushed, and othersmart troubled professionalductions have a tendencyed to professionalduce memorable stories, which participants turned out to be happy to inform years later — not that the onlinework or the artists’ management had been all the time happy with the outcomes.
Additionally like many cultural phenomena beloved of millennials, the present was saturated with the well-knownly irreverent sensibility of Generation X. Tasked with delivering enjoyable details, its writers didn’t hesitate to knock celebrities off their pedestals whereas they had been at it, and with a humorousness that got here to be recognized as deceptively intelligent. (Head author Alan Cross has spoken of being impressed by Hunter S. Thompson, and Low by a favourite author who made “extensive use of footnotes,” which brings another three-initial title to thoughts.) You may watch over 100 “popped” music movies on this Youtube playlist, with extra on the Interweb Archive. Alas, many have never come availin a position on-line, however then, Pop-Up Video did make a advantage of ephemerality.
Related content:
The Complete History of the Music Video: From the Nineties to In the present day
The 50 Niceest Music Movies of All Time, Ranked by AV Membership
Watch the First Two Hours of MTV’s Inaugural Broadforged (August 1, 1981)
Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embrace the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the e book The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social webwork formerly referred to as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
