Music vs. VHS

In the past, people associated the word “videos” with not only cassettes but — more specifically — cassettes with movies on them.

Films. Fully-fledged big-budget Hollywood fodder or shorts, TV shows, flicks, ads, documentaries, pornos, private, commercial, professional, home, amateur, art… the whole gamut of visually-focused messages, moving images or memories to be viewed in the confines of your own home.

In the current context, audio quality play a mere supporting role but once you precede the word “videos” with the word “music”, you suddenly have a completely different form of art — a very different product — and in my humble opinion the ultimate art form (but that’s topic for another discussion).

And as far as cassettes are concerned, part of my current project very much includes the “refreshing” (updating on discogs) and “ridding” (selling on Amazon) of those parts of my old music video and concert collection on the obsolete VHS format that have since been replaced by nice ‘n clean remastered 5.1 surround sound DVD editions, or scrapping the ones that haven’t stood the test of time.

One of those is NOW: The Video, as my discogs review predicted three years ago:

Apparently #15 in an already-established (UK) series and the second-ever music video I bought, this first South African edition was a welcome addition to a sadly-absent supply of affordable international (read: foreign) music videos down south of the Limpopo – certainly from the buying public’s perspective.
Seemingly absent, too were the consumers themselves; this was the only edition that I ever knew of.

The content, though, was great… for 1989. There’s some memorable and fun stuff on here: Jive Bunny, however silly and irritating, does bring a smile to one’s face and The Beautiful South’s take on shallow bubblegum music is rather charming. Other favourites are #1 & 10, while the rest is very much Zeitgeist fodder.

And no, this one’s not even worth replacing on DVD; in this day and age of YouTube and broadband connections, “videos” have become completely expendable and almost instantly viewable anywhere there’s an internet connection — while the internet itself becomes the media carrier.

Of the 15 video tracks included on the aforementioned music video compilation, it was (ironically) only the Jive Bunny video I wasn’t able to find on YouTube.

Just as video once killed the radio star, YouTube has now killed the M-TV star.

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