Like pressing on a bruise: on MTV and the music video

In the year 2000, two things happened which made an indelible impression on my then-twelve-year-old psyche: the Tate Modern opened, and my family got a Sky package that included MTV. I could not tell you for certain what it was that I saw at the Tate on my first visit which convinced me that video art was potentially the freakiest, ipso facto the most interesting, of all art forms. But per my hazy recollection it was something from Bruce Nauman’s Clown Torture series – more specifically, the video No, No, New Museum (1981), in which an actor throws a deeply unsettling, screaming tantrum dressed as a mall-Santa elf. Whether or not this was literally the work that ignited my lifelong fascination with the genre, it feels perfectly illustrative of that early interest by dint of its themes of subversion and refusal; its neurosis; its perverse blend of childishness and too-adult nastiness.

In the 2016 documentary The Art Life, the late and much-missed director David Lynch recalls how, as a child, he was banned by his mother from owning colouring books, and that her decision to inflict this particular restriction on his play – one which, it should be noted, she did not choose to enforce with his siblings – sprang from a canny understanding that her spooky, art-loving son should not be encouraged to stay inside the lines. My parents, neither of whom had an academic background or the slightest professional experience of the arts, made their own faintly eccentric decision with regards to how my burgeoning interest in the art life should be handled: if a thing could be judged, within reason, to be art, they would not seek to limit my exposure to it. My porous child’s brain was thus permitted to fill up with things that, frankly, it was not always equipped to understand – a library of references and feelings that, as it turns out, they were irritatingly correct in thinking would eventually prove useful to me as a writer, i.e. as a certain kind of artist myself.

What did I see on MTV late at night in that same year, given my freedom to absorb as much avant-garde grown-up culture as I liked? Things that were more frightening by far than a petulant elf. In 1999, the electronic artist Aphex Twin, née Richard James, released the track Windowlicker, and its Chris Cunningham-directed music video both cleverly and terrifyingly mirrors the audio’s half-queasy, half-sexual sound: we are treated to a bevy of classically curvaceous music video beauties dancing on a beach, but their faces have been horribly replaced, sometimes with a straightforward replica of James’s own, and sometimes with a sick, buck-toothed distortion of it, the result a bait-and-switch that leaves the viewer thoroughly unmoored.

A Jonathan Glazer-directed video from the previous year, for Unkle’s Rabbit in Your Headlights, had a similarly hypnotic effect on my pre-teen self, depicting as it did a staggering man being hit by cars on a motorway again and again, each collision leaving minor but distinctive marks on his body. I vividly remember the first time, flipping channels, I came across the Jonas Åkerlund video for the unfortunately named but brilliantly propulsive 1997 single by The Prodigy, Smack My Bitch Up – a first-person nightlife odyssey that felt like a video game, and featured its protagonist fighting, fucking, vomiting, and getting high, only to conclude with a shot of that protagonist reflected in a mirror which revealed them to be, ha ha, a small, doll-like blonde. These were clips that I liked in the same way I liked pressing on a bruise, which is to say: I liked to watch them, nauseously adrenalised, pleased that I was tough enough to do so, even if I sometimes wished that I could stop.

There was, too, something in all of them that I would later come to recognise as a foreshadowing of my adult tastes in art: a marriage of body horror and sexual explicitness in Windowlicker; a full-throated, sybaritic form of revisionist feminism in Smack My Bitch Up; a violence that gave way to an intensely spiritual beauty in Rabbit in Your Headlights. (As a child, I barely noticed the martyr-like aspects of Glazer’s music video, with its final moments depicting the figure in a Christ-pose, his body strong enough to smash an oncoming vehicle; now, its imagery feels more touching than transgressive. By contrast, the provocative, haute-ladette vibes of Smack My Bitch Up have lost some of their lustre in an age when we are fully aware that hot white women can be cruel and self-destructive, too.

There are obvious parallels between the music video and short-form video art, quite aside from length. In fact, the restrictions that govern the production of a useable promo are extensive enough that they rival the artistic-cum-monastic rules of Dogme 95, the purist movement in 90s – 00s arthouse cinema founded by auteurs – and sometime music video directors – Thomas Vinterberg and Lars von Trier. If a track has lyrics, there are already suggested themes and story beats in play; there is also very limited opportunity for dialogue, making most clips wordless affairs. Above all else, the music video is a commercial product by design, and if it is art it is also an advertisement, designed to stick in the mind as insidiously as any great pop chorus.

What is thrilling about many of the genre’s most outré examples is the idea that beyond these narrow confines, as with video artworks, anything can happen, and that sometimes, anything does. That this anything can, furthermore, be genuinely startling – even shocking or repulsive – is the beauty of the medium. At the turn of the millennium, aged 12, I did not yet know that the same thing could be true of feature films, having no experience of experimental cinema. What I was discovering was the idea that a three-or-four-or-ten-minute video could surprise you by offering what seemed to be the ultimate subversion, whether it was one that you watched in a gallery, or at home on your sofa in the suburbs, reeling at the idea that something so lawless and eerie could be accessed via satellite TV.

David Lynch himself, as it happens, made several music videos, though none of them are particularly idiosyncratic or exciting. Perhaps this makes perfect sense – at their best, after all, such clips are less about being free to colour outside the lines than about creating art within them that, against all odds, resembles nothing you have ever seen before. Now, in an era when I have to assume that teenagers do not care one iota about watching MTV, those outlines have shifted again, and a new kind of music video has been made possible – one that may, for instance, feel even less like a traditional example of the form by dint of actually being four promos in a (rubber) trench coat. In 2015, FKA twigs debuted a sixteen-minute short film showcasing four tracks from her new EP, M3LL155X, not on MTV, but on YouTube. Self-directed, the short deployed its own hyper-feminine take on the Lynchian aesthetic, and its quadripartite structure gave it the shifting, hazy quality of a nightmare.

Rewatching the twigs clip now, it strikes me as an example of the same kind of boundaryless music video art that I remember from my youth, but with a twist. If there was a certain gleeful trashing of gender roles inherent in Cunningham’s jiggling bikini-clad Aphex-babes, or in Åkerlund’s depiction of a Barbie-pretty chick on a drugged-up rampage, here it is the status quo that provides the most unsettling material on show. Being transformed into a blow-up doll, and then fucked into deflation; a sudden full-term pregnancy; a strange kind of birth: all of these images seem to reflect female anxieties, not male ones. This time, the call is coming from inside the haunted house of womanhood itself, and, if I occasionally miss the Wild West of late-night MTV, it is also something of a novel thrill to have a female auteur on the line for a change.

Short Form: 40 Years of Music Videos, Ads, and the Art of Moving Images by Academy Films published by MACK (2025) is out now.