Video Vanitas: the MTV Music Video Awards 2013 –An essay post-twerk

Same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was
~Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime” (1981)

Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas
~Ecclesiastes 1:2;12:8

While the social media world unsurprisingly euphorically memes an old dance move and sociologically analyzes absolutely nothing new, I instead continue to mourn the death of the music video. 

Everyone has their point, and everyone has their angle with regard to the events that transpired on the night of the recent MTV Music Video Awards of 2013. We have reached the point where certain derrière moves are racially-owned and motivated. But, what is forgotten, or worse, ignored, is that the event in question is an award show honoring the medium of the music video. It is in the initial ceremony of 1984 in New York City that another young star would master the media with a sexual romp and roll across the stage during her performance of “Like a Virgin.” Sexual gesticulations were apparently blasphemous and radical then. We do our best to make Miley Cyrus’s performance blasphemous and radical now, nearly thirty years later, because we are so completely and utterly bored with our lives. 

Today, Madonna is lost in her own image, and any sexual romp now comes with gender-ageist charges of health disorders. Besides this example of our looped exaggerated media ecstasy, and our continued misadventures with our monotheistic, masochistic sexual inadequacies, the real tragedy is no one remembers a single music video during the night in question, and the greatest example of the travesty is Justin Timberlake winning the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award –an award given to those artists and directors considered innovative to the medium of the music video.

Timberlake’s role in the death of the music video is personal to my taste; you may draw your own line fallacy elsewhere. After all, reality TV killed the music video star. For me it is only fitting that during this night of the VMAs, where there can be no doubt that pop has eaten itself, gorging then shitting itself out again, only to be consumed once more (which I have heard has no real nutritional value), that this paradoxical mass-media solipsistic media event would honor and celebrate Timberlake as a vanguard music video artist. It is Timberlake who in 2003 won for Best Male Video for his supposed take on his relationship with Brittany Spears in the video for, “Cry Me a River.” 

The video, directed by Francis Lawrence, is typical of the spectacle era of music videos –over produced and stylized. In this case, there happens to be a narrative, one in which Timberlake, a scorned lover, breaks into a former lover’s highly expensive home in order to record a make out session with a new girl, leaving the evidence for the old girl to see. The old girl happens to look a lot like former girlfriend, Spears. For some inexplicable reason, Timberlake even has a moment of gravity defying –jumping and floating around the living room while explaining the situation to us –call it the Hype Williams Effect. Music video director, Williams, known for his work for Busta Rhymes and Missy Elliot has made a career of taking primarily hip-hop, pop, and rap to surrealistic heights, distorting perspectives and figures with, usually, no relevance to the lyrical content of each song. Timberlake’s own moon dancing in “Cry Me a River” is similarly out-of-nowhere.

I draw the line at this particular video and award show not just because Timberlake carried many awards that night (he happens to be one of the most winningest male artists), or because of Madonna’s ménage à trois performance which featured the aforementioned Spears and Christina Aguilera acting out pseudo-lesbianism (in a vain, convoluted, and ultimately exploitive attempt at passing the “torch”).  Rather, I draw the line here because Timberlake’s video won in the face of mortality, beating out Johnny Cash’s cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt,” with a video directed by Mark Romanek (NiN’s “Closer,” Jay Z’s “Picasso Baby”).  I do not so much care for awards, and I do not even mean to give MTV so much critical weight, but few moments can be as evidently wrong and insightful as this.  For clearly, there is a difference when at one point the likes of Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, and David Bowie would be honored, and later, Spears and Timberlake.

Cash’s partner, June, had recently passed, and the Man in Black’s broken heart perhaps only compounded his deteriorating health. The year previous to the 2003 VMAs, Cash had released his final record while alive, American IV: The Man Comes Around (2002, American Recordings), a collection of mostly stripped down covers of Depeche Mode and the Beatles, among others. It was his reworking of Trent Reznor’s “Hurt,” which would become most notable, firstly, for its bare acoustic/piano interpretation compared to the initial, also excellent, industrial-hit of the Downward Spiral (1994, Interscope). But, it is the accompanying vivid, gothic music video featuring the aged artist amongst memories and images of the House of Cash Museum which will persist. 

The video features Cash, old, deteriorating and prophetic, playing guitar and piano. Throughout the somber and vivid video the director intersperses a series of past clips of the younger Cash. The success of the video lies with its use of the Kuleshov Effect, named for Russian Lev Kuleshov’s theory of film editing whereby a sequence of clips, or montage, form the basis of not only the visual narrative, but also a viewer’s emotional reaction to them. In this video, the living Cash performs while the musical crescendo compliments a rapidly building series of documentary images and visual motifs: cracked playing hands, memorabilia of a musical career, and the likes of a crucified Willem Dafoe in Last Temptation of Christ, (1988, dir. Scorsese) –all aim to support the narrative of “the end.” The composition is dynamic and emotional –a life lived, lost, loved, triumphant and ephemeral –Cash walks alone along a body of water. Piano crescendos, hammered stakes through Christ’s wrists create the violent visual beat, repeat, we build till a fade to the Man in Black.

The transience of life is expertly and beautifully portrayed in the final dinner scene. Cash sits like a king at a dinner table filled with an abundance of lobster and fruit. Its symbolism references 17th century Dutch vanitas paintings by the likes of Jan Davidsz de Heem and Willem Claesz Heda.  Cash, no stranger to gospels and hymns, shakes as he pours a cup of red wine over the table, warning of the inevitability of death in contrast to the achievements and vanities of life. “Remember, you will die,” it all seems to say, as the then living June looks on, fearful and lovingly. Cash, a dead man walking, like the music video medium of 2013, was ignored by fans and media who’d rather not be reminded of their insignificance. So, we move on and pretend it’s all shocking, blasphemously new, sexually radical and forever alive –we award the immortal over the dead.  

Cash, due to health concerns, was unable to attend the VMAs of 2003, and he died on September 12th of the same year, only four months after the death of his wife.

Norberto Gomez,Jr. 
September 15, 2013
www.norbertogomezjr.com