Linked above is a music video released 4 years ago by the YouTube channel OFFCANNY, featuring Matt Watson of Super Mega. It’s a video I very suddenly remembered existed at 2 in the morning on a Sunday, and much to my surprise it’s held up really well from what I remember. The beat is strong, the performances are great, and the visuals are nothing short of absolutely gorgeous, which much to my dismay brought a huge issue to light.
I started thinking about when the last time I saw a music video that looked that good was, let alone when the last time was that music videos reliably looked that good, or existed at all. It’s all a rabbit hole that led me back to a conclusion I already knew but am always upset about when it’s relevant: short form content killed cool shit. It sounds inflammatory but it’s something I truly believe, because in a world where everyone is vying for algorithmic traction and 5 second hooks make or break a video, it’s a simple fact that almost nobody can justify the amount of time and care required to make cool shit. The way social media has changed and crushed our attention spans over the last 10 years has effectively rendered high effort projects a waste of time because they will always get less attention than someone talking at their phone on TikTok. It really puts into perspective how Overcast was one of the final holdouts of a dying breed, almost acting as one last hurrah of a bygone era with their high budget videos made to boost artists in the at the time fledgeling hyperpop scene.
This definitely isn’t to say that nobody is doing anything cool ever. There will always be edge cases like the wonderfully in depth worlds built around an Iglooghost album, but I still can’t help but look at all my favourite artists and live in a world of what ifs. If we rewind time there was a period where the financial and time investment required in making crazy ideas come to light came with a very real possibility of recouping that money if you were smart with your spending and gained enough traction, so there’s an alternate time line in my head where instead of admittedly gorgeous digital surrealist TikTok’s from Han.irl<3, we’re consuming these enveloping audio visual experiences that accumulate tons and tons of views on YouTube’s instead of thousands of short impressions on TikTok.
A small personally story related to all this. I purposefully don’t talk much about myself as a musician on AuraLink because it feels like a breach of my integrity as a music jounalist, but 3 years ago I was releasing my debut album while working full time in a warehouse. I was exhausted all the time, but I was always a “big ideas” kind of artist to a toxic degree, always falling victim to scope creep. I digress though, for this album I really wanted to do a live premiere that felt like as close as I could get to delivering a live show from the comfort of my home, so for a whole month I spent every day after work editing together a full hour of audio visualizers and lyric animations for the premiere of my album. I pulled some strings and I managed to recruit the Brakence Discord as the venue for said premiere, and got some other artists to do sets before it. It was a crazy experience, and in the end a whole 20 people saw the visuals I spent a whole month working on. It was, admittedly, a bit disheartening at the time, but truth be told in retrospect I wouldn’t change a single thing, because I think big projects outside of the music itself is a dying art, and that makes me immensely sad to see. All this to say that I know even the artists reading this likely aren’t stupid enough to dump a month of spare time into something big that won’t get nearly the amount of attention a basic TikTok would, but if you’re debating doing it, just do it. Do it for the art of it all. We all got into this to feel something and to show something to the world, and slowly we’ve all let algorithms suck that out of us. So if you’ve got an idea, go make it, because at least some of us will see it and recognize exactly what went into making that today.
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