Egg? Chicken? Egg?

Because I am pretty old, I remember when music videos were a big deal, a new thing. I thought the music video was a great idea--finally I'd get to see what the writer/singer thought she was doing when she wrote/sang the song. Because I don't really "get" poetry, and I am often baffled by popular culture, I need help. So hooray, a visual.

As is true with anything under the sun, music videos have detractors and admirers. Have videos killed the radio star? Do they change the listener into a viewer and thus divert attention from the musical integrity of the song to the size of the singer's thighs?

If not for music videos, would Susan Boyle even be a phenomenon? She might have had a singing career without requiring her recent "discovery." If nobody had ever felt the need to care about her eyebrow-waxing habits, we would never have had our recent epiphanies about the shallow nature of the entertainment business.

Speaking of brows: for those highbrows who wonder whether the term "musical integrity" can be applied to popular music--well, if you recuse yourself from participating in the party, sure you'll miss a lot of angst and hand-wringing. But if if you allow people to try to nail down distinctions between "art" and "commerce," you have time to actually eat something and drink your drink while their noses are either in the air or out of joint.

Anyway, I have always found music videos entertaining. I also enjoyed the riffs on music videos, like VH1's "pop-up videos," because I could not only watch the music video, I could learn something relatively useless.

And now, thanks to YouTube, we have something called a "literal video"--a video in which the lyrics to the song reflect what is happening in the video.

Here's a funny one.



If you search on YouTube, you can also see versions of REM's "Losing My Religion" and The Beatles's "Penny Lane."

Aren't humans are amazingly inventive beings? What's next--a new tune to go with the new lyrics that describe the video representation of the old tune and lyrics? I can't wait to see.