Blow Up Your Video

A new era is upon us and you can catch it all on screen

A Toronto rapper by the name of D-Sisive is kinda stalking me.

He's very polite and very professional about it, but every week it's, "Hey, check out my new song," "Hey, want a T-shirt?" "Hey, I got a new album coming out."

I was mostly indifferent. I mean, I like the guy and I think the Iggy Pop album that he melted down and reimagined as The Idiot: Hijacked EP, then gave out for free, is definitely artistically credible and worth supporting.

But there are lots of smart, interesting artists with a bit of hustle doing interesting things.

Then D-Sisive sent me a "Hey, check out my video" email for the song "Nightclubbing." It wholesale rips chunks from the Iggy Pop song of the same name and the video is basically Al Pacino's gay clubbing scene from the 1980 movie Cruising with the music synched over top. The idea's OK and the whole mishmash is bound to send some copyright lawyer into a hissy fit. Still, in the grand scheme of things, it's not that big a deal.

Then, a couple weeks later, I get a "Hey, I've got another video for you to check out…" email. It's a link to the song "Underground" as sung by a silly Johnny Depp hand puppet doing D-Sisive's vocals and another furry green puppet doing the chorus, which is basically a chunk of Tom Waits' song of the same name that D has lifted.

It all makes for great music critic fodder, but what I took from the viewing experience — especially after D-Sisive mentioned that he's trying to film videos for all his other new songs, too — is that we really are entering into a brave new video age.

A lot of conventional thinkers might suggest that the steady decline of music video content on MuchMusic and MTV and the death of major record labels also means the death of music videos. But it's really only meant the death of ridiculous, high-gloss mega-budget videos. If anything, with access to YouTube and MySpace and with less gatekeeper interference from outlets like Much, the opportunity for musicians to visually represent their art is growing exponentially. All it takes is the time, the idea and a camera, and then "bam!": music videos.

Don't think that D-Sisive is the only one who's figured this out. Brian Jonestown Massacre's My Bloody Underground won't be out until April 15 but they've already shot and uploaded videos for all 13 songs on to YouTube. Sure, a song like "Infinite Wisdom Tooth" seems to consist entirely of band leader Anton Newcombe running around breaking stuff in his underpants, but in a brave new video world I'll take that over a tight rotation of Missy Elliott and Jonas Brothers clips any day.

These are just two amongst legions of acts who're taking this newfound DIY music-making and visual freedom to the online world, and I don't see an end any time soon.

If people were worried that video was going to kill the radio star back in the '80s, they ain't seen nothing yet.

This is my Blatant Propaganda column from the March 2008 issue of Chart Magazine. To purchase the issue, head on over to the Chart Shop.

Check out The Brian Jonestown Massacre's ""Infinite Wisdom Tooth":