Teacher, Mother, Secret Lover

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People can talk without fear of ridicule about how hearing a particular piece of music is an intense emotional experience. And it's not generally considered insane for people to describe one or another pop song in such terms.

Others feel the same way about certain movies - including commercial hollywood output. So how come you don't hear people describing how certain pop videos made them feel? How three and a half minutes of promotional film affected the course of their lives in some way?

Well, I'm coming out and saying it. A few pop videos have made me sit up and stare. They, and the music they accompany, tend to be those audacious experiments that either spawn a thousand pale immitations, or become unique curiosities.

Three of them are below. They are videos that made one half of my mind shout "That's wrong! You're not supposed to be able to do that!", and the other half, "I don't know what it is but I want more".

Or if you like, "Huh?" and "Wow!".

Paul Hardcastle - 19. Not the version you may know.


Art of Noise - Close (to the Edit). The animated UK version.


U2 - Numb. Not a band I usually listen to much, but this video remix by Emergency Broadcast Network shows why channel hopping makes TV better.


If there's a single theme, it's "cutting up the banal to make it startling, abusing the meaningless to make it meaningful, and stealing the bad to make it good"

Or as someone once said, "Video makes, out of the ordinary, something out of the ordinary."

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