ELVAD, I’m really happy for you, and I’m gonna let you finish

Wednesday September 16, 2009 · By

…but Beavis and Butthead had one of the best music video review methods of all time!

Apologies again for the delay in new posts, and I’m sorry to say it’s going to last another week. Don’t forget that you can subscribe to the ELVAD RSS feed (or follow ELVAD on Twitter) to know exactly when the blog stops being gobsmacked.

As a penance, here’s something I wrote after the whole Kanye thing.

Okay, I like Beyonce. Like, a lot. And that outfit is like, a great way to show her assets. And that grind move she does 55 seconds in, damn. Wait, what was I saying?

Okay, I came here to post that I’d never seen the video (nor pretty much any of the videos nominated, though interestingly I apparently HAD seen the inspiration video for this one as well as the SNL skit parodying it), and that it wasn’t that “great”. Then I watched the Taylor Swift vid and it was just your standard “dress up a hot chick like a band nerd and have her pine over the football star that should love her, and have her totally ignore the awkward guy on clarinet who is in the EXACT SAME POSITION pining over her” cliche. Which I’m SURE resonates with a ton of MTV’s audience, sure. But my initial point was, neither of those videos are very good.

Then I watched the Beyonce one again, and it’s sort of masterful in its simplicity. The lighting is amazing. The cuts are a little erratic for me, but I guess it matches the song (and does a passable job of creating some continuous-shot illusions). The choreography is obviously top notch and fairly refreshing. It’s just a dance video, but it’s clearly one of the great “just a dance videos”. And it does it without using the three-act device!

Okay, clearly I’m not posting enough over at ELVAD. Either way, I agree with our president. Kanye is a jackass.

Do I lose or gain credibility for not following the popular-with-MTV videos? Oh well. The winning video was directed by Jake Nava, who is not unfamiliar to us. He’s usually pedestrian but passable, in our opinion. We’ll share a vid or two of his in the coming days. Meaning after next week. Yes.