With “Get Some Sleep”, Bic had a song about life as a touring musician, but the video was about the whimsical adventures of Bic’s mobile radio station. “Listening for the Weather” is another song about live on the road (and the relationships left behind), but this time the video is all about Bic’s life as a jobbing musician.
We find her on stage, cheerfully performing the song with a harmonica wired around her neck. The video makes the process of a live gig seem very workmanlike, but also satisfyingly artful. Outside of the live venues, there’s footage taken from the windows of cars and aeroplanes, scenic New Zealand, scenes from provincial streets and urban scenes. Every moment of life on the road seems glorious and cool.
The tour stops by the Opera House in Wellington and the Civic theatre in Auckland, but the old Southland Country Music Association building in Invercargill also makes an appearance. There are also quite a few shots of the different shoes Bic wears throughout her travels, but they are quite cool shoes.
“Listening for the Weather” is a pretty sedate song, and the video goes with that feeling. It seems to be a good reflection of where Bic was at the time of her Beautiful Collision songs, finding an more mature, slightly weary voice.
Note: Director Paul Casserly says the video was shot mostly on DV cam and Super 8, but that DJ Stipson “did all the really nice shots on a 16mm”.
Best bit: the glamorous old lady revelling at the Christmas parade.
The “Mother” video takes the familiar path of the close-up lip-sync, made most famous by Sinead O’Connor in “Nothing Compares 2 U” (though without anything that would prompt an open letter from Ms O’Connor). But Anika is not alone in this. A few seconds into the song she’s joined by another version of herself. Not an evil twin, just another Anika.
While Left Anika sings most of the song, Right Anika joins in to harmonise and has a few verses of her own. Left Anika is more thoughtful and serious, but Right Anika is full of energy, unable to keep still. I like to think that this is what the Breeders were like, back when it was just the teenaged Deal sisters duetting on country songs at biker bars.
Both halves seem to have no edits in them, which means Anika was able to two different lip-syncs playing two different characters. Even though Ms Moa is known for her jolly character, she’s able to knuckle down and give a serious performance (twice!).
The song itself is an ode to Anika’s mum, so it’s nice to think that such is her feeling of aroha for her mum that took two Anikas to really convey the emotion. Awww…
Best bit: Right Anika’s moves during the dance break.
Ladi6 appears in this video as a sort of career seer, narrating the tale of a man conflicted about his role in the high-flying corporate world.
The man in question emerges from Wellington railway station one morning and has an odd moment. A life-changing thought seems to have hit him. But maybe he was just glad to be out of Lower Hutt.
At work, he’s at a meeting, sitting at the head of the table in front of a decorative kimono on the wall. Channelling Tom Cruise, he leaps up on the table and gives a spirited speech, which gets an enthusiastic reaction from his colleagues. This move gets him the keys to a very fancy car (licence plate: I) and he has a hoon around Lambton Quay. Life made.
But strange things are afoot. Suddenly the man is on a rattly old city bus, a gold coin in hand. He stops off at Zambesi and gets a new suit, kindly giving the empty Zambesi bag to a homeless man. Here you go, chap, here’s an empty paper bag 4 u.
Back at work, things are different in the boardroom – there’s a different person sitting at the head of the table. The man pulls out a folder and slides it to the new head. This guy is not impressed by the folder’s contents and throws it back. The hunter has become the hunted.
I like that things are a bit surreal. If it had gone for a more literal depiction of the song’s lyrics, the video would risk seeming cheesy. But weirdness is very forgiving.
Best bit: that the homeless man is literally across the road from the Zambesi store.
Oh, what the hell is going on here? It’s some sort of attempt at a soft porn parody that makes the unrated version of “Blurred Lines” look like a profound feminist statement in comparison.
Unique plays both himself (the cocky young MC) and an Afro-wigged plumber who is attending to a major plumbing emergency at the home of the cocky young MC (seriously – every bit of plumbing in the house seems to have something wrong with it). As Plumber Unique gets to work, he discovers the house is full of party girls. Unlike most people, they find the sight of a man in a $8 nylon party wig to be highly arousing.
The song is a standard bragging anthem, but it features some really unusual lines, like this one: “I fantasise that in the future every day will be just like Easter.” What, a life of chocolate bunnies, egg decorating and church services to remember how Jesus Christ died for our sins? If you insist.
The non-wigged version of Unique can be found in his kitchen, where a party girl starts stripping off and Unique begins humping her on the kitchen bench. In the bathroom, Plumber Unique fixes the shower, whereupon two of the party girls get in and do a bit of awkward topless faux lesbianism. It is so awkward that it gives me newfound respect for pornstars and the directors of porn who make it all look so natural.
I found a description I wrote of the video in 2002, nothing that “in the middle of the video suddenly a fake ad comes on featuring the two ladies, naked in the shower.” This is missing from the version online. The shower action is just presented as part of the regular video, with no break into a fake ad. Curious.
After all this, the video seems to run out of ideas (and really, where can you go from that?), so it just peters out with a montage of the party girls and the two Uniques trying to be cool dudes.
It’s such a lame video. Apart from horrible stuff like the women being in the video merely as sexual accessories, it looks and feels really cheap. But most revealing – every room in Unique’s crib is painted the same bland beige colour.
I have this memory of the video playing on some late night music video show and the presenters having a dilemma like “It’s a bit rude, but we really want to support New Zealand music.” But no – supporting New Zealand music doesn’t mean having to support shit.
Best bit: n/a
Warning: This video is totally Not Safe For Work. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if this post alone actually triggered some keyword filters to kick in at some workplaces. Be warned.
Mama Said were from Hamilton, fronted by Jarod Brown. He recently made it to the bootcamp round of The X Factor under the name Vegas Brown. His brother Shannon was the band’s original bassist, but by the time this video was made, he had left to play in Tadpole. The brothers later went on to form punk-pop group 48may, but we’ll come to them later.
“Point of View” was their only NZ On Air-funded video. It begins with a snippet of the group’s previous single, a cover of Che Fu and DLT’s “Chains”, with strangely soundalike vocals. We find Jarod strolling along Alma Street, one of the few streets in central Hamilton to have a bit of character – though the video is careful to keep the great big Novotel out of frame.
Jarod pulls out his cellphone, calls someone and begins singing the song into the phone. All around him other people are busy on their mobiles, but is he actually doing some sort of mass broadcast? Is his message about understanding others going to touch the lives of strangers?
This outdoor footage alternates with the band performing in a warehouse, but the phone call hasn’t ended. Jarod tapes the phone to the side of his mic and continues his sung phone call.
But here’s the weird thing. About halfway through the video, all the outdoor scenes suddenly stop. It doesn’t conclude in any way, we just never see the people with cellphones again, with the video focusing solely on the band performing.
It’s like there’s a conclusion missing from the video – who was on the other end of the phonecall? It makes me wonder if something else was intended but they couldn’t film it on the day. Or maybe they just ran out of time editing.
Best bit: the girl talking on the giant 1980s brick-style phone, apparently without irony.
“One More Day” was the final single to be released from Stellar’s second album, and it was the first single not to chart, after a solid run of eight singles in the top 40 from 1998 to 2002.
It’s a pretty standard Stellar song, all epic motivational lyrics and Boh Runga sassing. But there’s nothing special about it, and it’s not at all surprising that it didn’t chart.
The lyrics suggest the song is a reaction to the relentless slog of a touring band (much like what Boh’s sister mused over on her song “Get Some Sleep”). The video avoids the temptation of literally depicting this with a “life on the road” montage, and instead just puts the band on a stage.
The band are performing the song on a slightly grimy looking stage, with steel grey walls and a tomato-soup-red floor. It’s reminiscent of Stellar’s first big video, “What You Do” – the band performing on a stage, with stylish coordinated outfits. The band seem so much more mature since their earlier days, but that seems to have taken away a bit of the crazy energy of their early days. Boh’s trademark neck shimmies are very restrained.
The song isn’t especially remarkable, and neither is the video. It seems like a band who have run out of ideas and have just turned to a kind of autopilot mode.
“I like the girly things, I like to feel pretty” sings Renee, in this rage against stereotypes. With the last few Tadpole videos having been for pretty sedate songs, it’s nice to experience Tadpole embracing their rockier side. But because of the subject matter, this song feels like a bit of pastiche. The band being as rock-rock-rock as they can be to show that while Renee might be a bit of a nana who likes an early night, the band can still rock out when required.
So the video follows this path, showing the band at a live gig. It’s all looking pretty grunty, and Renee swaggers about the stage like a boss. But if you look close, she has these funny little white mesh puffy things atop her black singlet, which seems like something out of Astar’s craft segment on Good Morning.
This rockstravaganza progresses for about two-thirds of the video. But then suddenly things get very interesting. The band jumps on a plane and flies to East Timor to provide entertainment for New Zealand defence force personnel stationed there.
There’s a bit of footage of island life, a welcoming haka by the troops and the chance to hang out with some tanks. Then the band hit the stage. There are no fairy wings this time. Renee is sensibly dressed in a singlet and cargo pants.
All the East Timor footage is a million times more interesting than the generic Tadpole concert footage at the beginning. I’d much rather the video had taken spent more time there, rather than tacking it on the end like a postscript.
Best bit: the travel map, tracking the band’s north-western journey.
This is folk musician Paul Ubana Jones’ cover of the U2 song from 1992 – reportedly done with Bono’s approval. The song feels like something from the ’90s. It’s a pretty simple arrangement – the man, his guitar and some hip hop beats – and judging by the YouTube comments it touches many people.
The video keeps it just as simple, and also feels like something out of the ’90s. Most of the video is Paul singing the song, alone with his guitar in a black space. He’s a very striking person, with his big Afro and expressive face, and the video lingers makes good use of this visual.
Cut with this is footage of people (mostly women) posing artfully – a pregnant woman, a couple of little girls playing, an elderly woman and her daughter wearing saris, another old lady holding a picture of a solider, a farmer holding a gun and a teen couple having a moment. It feels a bit like a by-the-numbers ’90s music video. It’s nothing remarkable.
But I don’t think it needs to be. The YouTube comments are full of remarks from people who have had emotional reactions to the song (as well as teens excited to discover that their guitar teacher is so cool).
With so much of NZ On Air funding (rightly) being given to music that is so hot right now, sometimes it’s nice to find a song that exists in its own universe, away from the world of pop.
In the middle of Duncan Greive’s fab profile of Lorde in the October issue of Metro magazine, Ella Yelich-O’Connor and her manager Scott Maclachlan are discussing why the Lorde videos were made without NZ On Air funding. Maclachlan says the productions were so simple and inexpensive that funding wasn’t needed. Then Lorde drops a bomb, saying of the NZ On Air logo, “You know how much negative power that logo has for my generation?”
Whoa!
It would be easy to dismiss this as just a teen sassing off at the establishment for the sake of provocation, but her other observations are pretty spot-on (David Guetta is gross). But what’s behind it? Why would the NZ On Air logo seem negative to young people?
Chris Knox creates while the original logo rotates
It comes down to what the NZ On Air represents. All funded music videos must display the logo in their videos (though it can be removed for overseas broadcast). All it signifies is that the video received funding from NZ On Air, and at the bare minimum the funding panel thought the song was good. But the NZ On Air logo is not a mark of quality.
Let’s assume that all songs that receive NZ On Air video funding are of above-average quality. They’re the sort that the funding panel decide have a good shot at getting airplay in New Zealand. But that doesn’t mean that all the videos made for these songs are of above average quality. In fact, the quality of videos greatly varies. Great songs can have poor videos; average songs can have great videos.
No one sets out to make a bad music video. It just ends up that way. Sometimes it’s not having enough money to fulfil the director’s vision. Sometimes the band doesn’t come across well on camera. Sometimes someone’s mate, who said he’d do the video for free, just takes ages to do it and makes a half-arsed effort, despite his best intentions. Sometimes things just don’t work out.
So when all these disappointing music videos end up on TV or the web, they’re all out there with the NZ On Air logo.
K’Lee: no longer do you feel her
Other videos just don’t age well. They belong to a particular time and place (and that’s perfectly normal for pop), but when viewed a few years (or even months) later they seem a bit naff. K’Lee and TrueBliss’ videos had a particularly short shelf life, all with the NZ On Air logo.
A lot of artists who get NZ On Air funding are new, trying to get noticed – and some artists receive funding for only one or two songs before they disappear. It’s these early years, when the artist might still be finding their sound, trying to figure out if this whole rock thing is going to work out.
Compare Bic Runga’s first solo music video – the low-budget “Drive”, which sees Bic hanging around an apartment on her own – with the far more ambitious “Something Good”, with a huge supporting cast and Bic floating above Cuba Street.
But this is good. NZ On Air should be allowed to take chances on upcoming artists without demanding screen tests or video concept ideas first. A lot of the time these chances pay off and New Zealand bands enjoy long careers – Shihad and the Feelers are two who have made the most of NZ On Air funding. And Kimbra took early steps in the mid ’00s before her international success in 2011.
The Metro article notes that Lorde chose not to release any of her earlier experimental recordings, waiting until she was finally satisfied with “Royals”. But not all artists have the luxury of taking their time. For some, they’ve got a decent song, they’ve got music video funding so they’re going to make a video, even though they might not quite be ready for primetime.
In New Zealand, we only experience this with local artists. When an overseas artist has enough potential for their record company to promote them overseas, the label is going to put a lot of effort into marketing to make sure it’s worth it. So we never see the crappy videos from Australian bands who never make it in New Zealand, or the homemade vids for up-and-coming American bands. For example, Fall Out Boy’s low-budget debut video “Dead On Arrival” happily avoided New Zealand screens, but two years later their super slick “Dance Dance” video was all over the place. So because of this, the implication is overseas = cool videos; NZ = rubbish videos.
Deceptikonz: preaching to the choir
And then there are local bands who made cool videos without NZ On Air funding. In 2001, the Deceptikonz and Blindspott both released videos without any funding by NZ On Air (“Fallen Angels” and “Nil By Mouth”). Dawn Raid Entertainment funded the Deceptikonz video (and it had a crane shot!), whereas Blindspott’s video was a self-funded, cheap-as, $800 job. Both videos were good and both groups went on to many successes – and received NZ On Air funding for later videos. But the absence of the NZ On Air logo on their debuts seems to have done them a favour. It put them in the same category as groups like Crowded House – New Zealand artists who are so successful that they don’t need NZ On Air funding.
That’s not to say that there’s something inherently bad about NZ On Air videos or something good with independent videos. I’ve watched over a decade’s worth of NZ On Air music videos so far and there are a lot of really good ones in there. Well, at least what I think is good.
And consider the non-funded video for The X Factor winner Jackie Thomas’ debut single “It’s Worth It”. It seems inspired by Lorde’s “Tennis Court” video, but it looks and feels cheap. There’s no magic. Over on her Facebook page, hardcore Jackie fans were really upset that their idol had been given such a poor video.
Dave Dobbyn: cool uncle
The NZ On Air logo creates a club of sorts, its brand uniting disparate artists with only one thing in common. The problem is, one artist might not necessarily want to be associated with others in the collection. Does Lorde want to be seen as a peer of, say, a roots band like Katchafire, a serious rock band like the Feelers, or a veteran like Dave Dobbyn? In the article Lorde has a playful dig at Goodnight Nurse, the old band of her producer Joel Little, who received funding for 14 music videos. Does Lorde want to avoid being lumped in with a fun pop-punk band of the ’00s – even when it’s the band of her creative partner?
It’s not that there’s anything broken with NZ On Air. Plenty of artists are more than happy to have the logo on their videos – so far I’ve only come across two out of over 600 videos where the NZOA logo has been obscured in a later edit. It’s more that the logo has covers such a broad range of music videos from 22 years of New Zealand music that it’s come to represent business rather than art.
So while the artist might be striving to create a certain kind of image, along comes this little logo that suddenly snaps the viewer out of the universe of the video and takes them to the reality, of the band manager filling in a form, applying for music video funding, just like hundreds of other artists have done over the past two decades.
Update: What’s missing from this page? The current NZ On Air logo! Here it is in two versions – full colour and the grey watermark. They’re more subtle and deferential – a big improvement on the garish rotating animation of the ’90s.
This was Jester’s final NZ On Air-funded video. “Enemy” is a crunchy rock song (a change from the gentle “Fries With That”, but its main riff is rather reminiscent of the intro of “Plush” by Stone Temple Pilots. I don’t like unexpected wormholes into the ’90s.
The band themselves are absent from this video, replaced by animated robots. “Enemy” takes place in a dystopian robot world where a robot scientist has made an experimental rock band. It’s not such a flash build – eight-ball stands in for one of the lead singer’s robo-eyes. The eight-ball starts off the video on a journey seemingly inspired by the groovy pinballs of the Sesame Street counting song.
This roboband proves a hit, with their songs lighting up the hit song meter and causing a media fuss (in this robot world, there are still newspapers). But it’s all too much for these metallic musicians. Like a real band, they burn out – but that’s literal burn-out, falling apart and exploding in front of the horrified scientists.
It’s chaos. The roboband runs wild, creating havoc. I’m sure it’s some sort of statement about manufactured pop, about how put-together bands will never last. Except Jester themselves broke up in 2003, with a final gig that didn’t involve exploding robots.
The animation is of average quality. It’s not the worst-case scenarios of a half-finished mess, but there are lots of short cuts and scenes with little movement.
All the drama is concluded when a scientist pulls the plug on the roboband. The screen goes blank and the message “Support NZ music” appears along with Jester’s (now defunct) website address. It’s lazy to expect people will support New Zealand music just out of national loyalty. First the music and the band have to be good.
Best bit: the “Cuss 2000” device, fitted to bleep out the song’s one swear word.
With “Get Some Sleep”, Bic had a song about life as a touring musician, but the video was about the whimsical adventures of Bic’s mobile radio station. “Listening for the Weather” is another song about live on the road (and the relationships left behind), but this time the video is all about Bic’s life as a jobbing musician.
The “Mother” video takes the familiar path of the close-up lip-sync, made most famous by Sinead O’Connor in “Nothing Compares 2 U” (though without anything that would prompt an open letter from Ms O’Connor). But Anika is not alone in this. A few seconds into the song she’s joined by another version of herself. Not an evil twin, just another Anika.
Ladi6 appears in this video as a sort of career seer, narrating the tale of a man conflicted about his role in the high-flying corporate world.
Oh, what the hell is going on here? It’s some sort of attempt at a soft porn parody that makes the unrated version of “Blurred Lines” look like a profound feminist statement in comparison.
Mama Said were from Hamilton, fronted by Jarod Brown. He recently made it to the bootcamp round of The X Factor under the name Vegas Brown. His brother Shannon was the band’s original bassist, but by the time this video was made, he had left to play in Tadpole. The brothers later went on to form punk-pop group 48may, but we’ll come to them later.
“One More Day” was the final single to be released from Stellar’s second album, and it was the first single not to chart, after a solid run of eight singles in the top 40 from 1998 to 2002.
“I like the girly things, I like to feel pretty” sings Renee, in this rage against stereotypes. With the last few Tadpole videos having been for pretty sedate songs, it’s nice to experience Tadpole embracing their rockier side. But because of the subject matter, this song feels like a bit of pastiche. The band being as rock-rock-rock as they can be to show that while Renee might be a bit of a nana who likes an early night, the band can still rock out when required.
This is folk musician Paul Ubana Jones’ cover of the U2 song from 1992 – reportedly done with Bono’s approval. The song feels like something from the ’90s. It’s a pretty simple arrangement – the man, his guitar and some hip hop beats – and judging by the YouTube comments it touches many people.
This was Jester’s final NZ On Air-funded video. “Enemy” is a crunchy rock song (a change from the gentle