I’m part of the MTV generation . If you can immediately picture the videos for Hey Mickey , The Safety Dance , You Might Think , Money For Nothing , and Take On Me , you might be too. I was transfixed from day one , not just by the bands and the music, but by the format. Some videos told a story (of varying levels of coherence ). Others were more of a vibe , as the kids say these days. But always, the combination of sound and images, intertwined, synchronizing and diverging, pressed all my buttons.
My affection for an equal partnership between music and video is reflected in many of the movies I love . Goodfellas , one of my all-time favorites , is arguably structured as a series of music videos separated by exposition. The best Star Wars movies are famous for their pervasive and dominating scores.
Even today, the alchemy of carefully combined music and video has not lost its power. Witness the outsized cultural impact of a certain scene in Stranger Things season 4 .