I’m usually not prone to getting into discussions like this very often, but it does seem to me that, as regards music videos, art does appear to be losing the cultural tug of war with its old partner/ nemesis, commerce. I say this in particular this month because it’s late June as I’m writing, and the airwaves are being simply flooded at the moment with that most dreaded of all clip genres— namely, the “movie soundtrack video.” I honestly can’t think of a major motion picture being released right now that doesn’t have an accompanying video designed to try and coax you into plunking down five or six bucks for what may or may not be a complete waste of an hourand-a-half of your life, but hey, isn’t that theme song something! And even if the movie stinks, you can still buy the record!

This, of course, seems to be the main marketing strategy of the rather unholy alliance between film companies and record companies—an alliance that first bore real fruit with such music-driven movies as Flashdance and Footloose, movies that had great intertwined box office/record store success. The problem at this juncture, though, is that mainly what I’ve been seeing lately are videos for songs from films in which the format is always the same: artist or group is shown performing song with interspersed shots from the film all adding up to nothing more than a trailer of coming attractions with music over it. The only difference is that we’re told this is a video and not an ad.