In the world of music videos, you have your narrative stuff, your high-concept stuff, your performance stuff, and so on. Then you have your videos that center around a novel visual concept and just run with it.
This is really a format that came into its own in the 2000s with the advent of internet video - from "The Hardest Button to Button" to "Do What You Want", the 2000s were sort of a golden age of putting something into a music video that didn't fit anywhere else.
So today let's take a look at one of my favorite videos that falls into this category and music video era - 2008's "A Thing For Me" by Metronomy, directed by Megaforce.
The video starts out with a concept we're all familiar with - follow the bouncing ball over the lyrics printed out on the bottom of the screen, karaoke style. In this video, however, the bouncing ball on the screen soon becomes a real bouncing ball, and the words are superimposed over people. The ball travels from person to person, giving them a bop of the head as each lyric comes up.
Pretty soon the ball starts hitting objects, and then shortly after that the lyrics are wrong but sort of sound like the actual lyrics. "I've" becomes "Hive" (with a bee hive above it) and so on.
Eventually the bouncing ball gets violent, aggressively hitting people in the head (and the nuts), and then chasing them down the street.
My favorite moment in this video comes towards the end, when two people are sitting next to each other, and one subtly moves the lyrics from him to the other person, just in time for the dude next to him to get hit in the head.
This video is a ridiculous amount of fun, full of clevel visual puns and jokes. Megaforce never stops iterating on the central concept, so it never gets old for the relatively long span of the song (three and a half minutes). While this style of video is not as prevalent as it once was, I'd be happy to see a comeback of the awesome visual concept videos of the 2000s.
