Music videos are still made, but they never last beyond a day or two, and none become classics. Social media has no direction, and when you and all of your friends are using the same platform as major pop stars and politicians, everyone’s words and actions mean less. Music videos were, until the early-2000s, a potent pop cultural art form. Certain artists and bands were known for their provocative or distinctive videos: Madonna, Talking Heads, Eminem, Smashing Pumpkins.
The video for “1979” is widely recognized as a classic of the form and a highpoint, if not the peak, of the original incarnation of The Smashing Pumpkins. Shot on video with a relatively small budget, Billy Corgan called it “the closest we've ever come to realizing everything we wanted.” Although all four Pumpkins appear in the video, the stars are a group of teenagers cruising suburbia, fighting off boredom, and enjoying their youth in a series of Kodak moments that’re executed so gracefully that nothing comes off as a cliché: joyriding at dusk, trashing a convenience store, going to a house party, kissing underwater. "What I like is that it turned out to be about the spirit of the song, a good piece of representative art and not one of these horrific Aerosmith million-dollar commercials. It's more in the spirit of the early pop-music videos, a little more rag-tag, with a hand-held video camera, like watching a home movie." The Pumpkins continued to work with Dayton and Faris through the 1990s, and when their film Little Miss Sunshine got financed, Corgan was one of the first people they called. They told him that, “Without you, this never would’ve happened.”
Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle” came out nearly six years later in the fall of 2001. Unlike the Pumpkins, who were at their critical and commercial peak in early-1996, Jimmy Eat World were a small, relatively unknown band when their third album came out. Initially called Bleed American, the album was retroactively self-titled shortly after the 9/11 attacks and the band’s subsequent pop radio and MTV success. Nobody at DreamWorks expected Jimmy Eat World to break into the mainstream rock charts, let alone the pop charts; before Bleed American was produced independently and bought by DreamWorks, the band was dropped by Capitol after their first two records failed to make an impression past the club circuit. Jimmy Eat World were in the same orbit as Sunny Day Real Estate and At the Drive-In, not the butt-rock grunge runoffs they were inevitably compared to.
“The Middle” played in heavy rotation alongside P.O.D.’s “Youth of the Nation,” also directed by Paul Fedor. Although no one has ever said as much, the video is based on—“loosely inspired” at best—the “1979” video: teenagers in suburbia, house party, first kiss, lawn chairs in the pool, losers and outcasts. And of course the band is playing at the house party.
The basics are there, but the details reflect the distinct eras these videos were made in. “1979” is effervescent and looks and sounds effortless; it’s real euphoria, reflected in the super saturated color palette of the video (largely shot during the day). “The Middle,” on the other hand, is considerably darker, not only visually but in its execution. The teenagers in “1979” might be outcasts, but none of them are really miserable or burdened. The lightness of the song is reflected in their performances. “The Middle” is constantly on the verge of turning into Elephant or some horribly tragic MTV PSA. It’s a more sexualized video than “1979,” with most of the teenage and twentysomething extras making out in their underwear. It’s a grimy vision: there are couples in refrigerators, closets, bath tubs, and breakfast nooks crowding out the clothed protagonist, uncomfortable but persevering and not giving in to peer pressure. The song itself isn’t the pure burst of sunshine that the Pumpkins track is. Jim Adkins’ guitar and vocal melodies, now part of the classic rock canon, never rise above melancholy; there’s a tenuousness and an anxiety even in the anthemic chorus which is totally lacking in any part of “1979.”
By 2001, music videos regularly cost between $1 million and $5 million. You can see it in “The Middle”: anamorphic widescreen, steadicam, split diopters. “1979” was a lo-fi outlier in 1996, but nothing looked as cinematic as “The Middle” in the 1990s. The form thrived for another few years before evaporating along with MTV and VH1; YouTube, a directionless storage platform, has never allowed the music video to transcend the news of the day. There have been no classic music videos in the last 10 years, only infamously hated ones: “Friday” by Rebecca Black, “This is America” by Childish Gambino, “Imagine” covered by a number of celebrities who’re still smarting from the early pandemic backlash they deserved. “1979” and “The Middle” are two classics in a context that no longer exists. Although it’s fair to say “The Middle” is a shameless ripoff of the Pumpkins video, it isn’t wholly derivative or a lazy, uninspired homage, the kind so common across pop culture now. By Billy Corgan’s admission, “1979” is a simple, “rag-tag” video that recalls foundational works like “Video Killed the Radio Star,” “Once in a Lifetime,” and “Vienna.” Jimmy Eat World was the little band who could, but they made it with a big, glossy video of the corporate moment, completely divorced from the underground world they occupied just a few years before.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM