Monday, April 11, 2022

Musicians with their own YouTube channels; Nostalgia and Documentation...is it really now?

 In the second half the Social Photo section Documentary Vision Jurgenson discusses the I was there, I did that sensibility as it is depicted on social media. Everything comes across with a bit of a 'sugar high'...always a bit elevated from everyday reality via the streamlining powers of abstraction. We also often see some form of nostalgia involving recent, or distant times, commonly defined as 'the jealousy the present has for the past'.  Somehow we see these two ideas mutate in the official videos and album trailers of Lana Del Ray, where she seems to live in a past that never existed.

 
 
Lana's career was kick started by the viral activity stirred up by the found footage video for her song Video Games. As these videos age they seem to become a kind of dated nostalgia, one that may reflect a 2012 idea of what the 1950s mixed with 1990s should look like. That doesn't deter younger artists like Maggie Lindemann from going down a similar path...
 
 
...but maybe with more restraint and a different twist on 'camp'.  Then there's an alternative sensibility that's a bit more real, complete with some comic documentary reenactment;


 Thao & The Get Down Stay Down deconstruct the 'serious pop star' sensibility and offer something more organic, with a good amount of live performance and behind the scenes video on their site. 
 
Older artists can indulge in more of an archive sensibility. Niel Young's youtube channel is an extension of his online music store, which actually called Niel Young Archive;
 

There are definitely a few lost gems here. This last video takes us to an entirely different place, documentary entirely stripped of nostalgia;

Dion Francis DiMucci, better known as Dion, has a sensibility more interested in now than then, but he isn't afraid to confront the past! Here he tries to remember everything possible about the tour that ultimately took the lives of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper. These were clearly the bad old days, played out in the winter hell of Wisconsin.



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