SATV: What can REM's UBerlin tell us about the art of the music video?

This article was first written for my own music video and review website "Shame About The Video" in March 2011. It remains one of the most read articles on the website, with over twice as many page views as the average article. The piece combines some of the more traditional SATV tropes, with direct comparisons to other, similar music videos - which I believe has helped it become one of the more interesting articles on the site. 
The original publication can be found here.

Hangin' out

When writing an article for this site it's often hard to find a suitable video to analyse. A lot of videos simply don't offer enough of a substantial story or message to look at. In general I've found that anything that just features the band playing doesn't work. Anything too self-aware doesn't work as there's very little extraneous information you can take from them without basically ruining the point of the thing itself. And anything that just features one simple idea throughout generally doesn't work. 

This last point is the most difficult to deal with because these are often the most interesting videos. But how are you supposed to look for deeper meaning or hidden messages in the most minimalistic videos? 

Well let's have a go...

SATV: World's First Review For The World's First Live Broadcast Music Video By Death Cab For Cutie

This article was originally written for my own music video analysis and review website "Shame About The Video". It remains one of the more ambitious pieces I have tried to write, in that it was written with the aim of being the first review of this video to be posted online, without sacrificing any of the thoroughness and quality that the piece would normally have. I am pleased to say that this experiment was a success - the article went live before any other review of this video, beating MTV by around 9 minutes. 
I have included this piece in my portfolio to highlight my enthusiasm to try out new and experimental ways of writing an article, and my ability to write well under severe time constraints and pressure.
The original article can be found here.

This review was written less than 45 minutes after the broadcast of Death Cab For Cutie's video for "You Are A Tourist" - the world's first live broadcast music video. This therefore makes this the world's first review of the world's first live broadcast music video. 


It’s always exciting to see a “world’s first” event, especially when it involves matching up art and technology in a way that gets people interested in both, and opens the door for similar ventures in the near future. In some ways it’s surprising that no-one’s thought of doing something like this before, but while a live Lady Gaga or Britney Spears video may have received more attention and more views it would have lost something in the process. With a band like Death Cab for Cutie the focus is always on the bands output, rather than the band themselves and that’s why the focus was never going to be on what happens in the video, more on the production of the video itself. This is simultaneously good and bad for Death Cab. Yes, we all got excited about the new video for their new album – something that I don’t think has ever happened for a Death Cab song before – and it was very cool to watch it and know it was live. But after that it just becomes another music video on TV and it has to be able to compete with all other videos. And unfortunately I really don’t think this one does.

SATV: Summer in the City - Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds

This post was first written for my own music video analysis and review website "Shame About The Video" in September 2011, after a brief hiatus for the website. The observation of symbolism and application of ideas in the video to real world news stories immediately makes it one of the classic SATV pieces - fulfilling exactly the ideas that the website tries to promote. 
The original publication can be found here.

Spoiler: This article's mostly about Oasis.

Holy unsubtle symbolism, Batman. Shame About The Video finally returns after a much too prolonged absence with an analysis of the music video for Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds debut song. Here's the Death of You and Me:

SATV: Promise tonight not to do you no harm - Brandon Flowers

This piece was one of the earliest articles for my music analysis and review website "Shame About The Video" and demonstrates some of the earliest ideas that the site was trying to promote. Despite being written so early in the websites history it still stands up as one of the most comprehensive, informative and entertaining articles I believe I have written for the website and demonstrates my ability to analyse a piece of work and produce an engaging article that relates to it.
The original publication can be found here. 

Hey everyone, Brandon Flowers of The Killers has made a solo album! He's taking a chance to break away from the band a bit and do something more creative, more experimental more...oh no wait it just sounds exactly like The Killers. Except he doesn't have to put the other three on the album cover. Here's the first single, "Crossfire":