While watching a music channel (playing, predictably, ancient Christmas hits) just now, it struck me how bad the music videos of the 1980s were:
Exhibit A: Shakin’ Stevens’ Merry Christmas Everyone
Exhibit B: Wizzard’s I Wish it Could be Christmas Every Day
- Poor acting/lip-synching/performing by musicians/actors
- Poor lighting
- Cheap props and sets
- Unsteady cameras
- (etc…)
OK, I get that technology back then wasn’t all of that - but none of the above can really be explained by not having fancy computers. The production values of videos from this era really sucked, yet these songs were mainstream commercial releases. Why are they so bad?
Could it be that, actually, there just wasn’t that much money around for that sort of thing back in those days? Maybe it was reasoned that comparatively few people would ever watch a music video, so why bother going to a lot of time, cost and effort?
Or perhaps ‘new’ music videos (which were not simply an audiovisual recording of a band playing) back in 1984 were such a new thing that people hadn’t quite figured out how to do it properly. They were necessarily amateurish, because no-one had built up enough experience about how to do it professionally yet.