The first music video I saw was by accident. The cartoon I wanted to watch was interrupted by some sort of news bulletin, so I aimlessly flicked channels until I came across MuchMusic. The video featured a female voice, a body, and was shot in black and white (or was it brown and white?). The woman squeezed out one heartbreaking note after another, against a painstakingly “artistic” backdrop.

When I’ve shown you that I just don’t care
When I’m throwing punches in the air.

Who was this goddess you’re asking? Sheryl Crow. The song was called “Strong Enough,” and the video started me on a long path of video addiction. In fact, that video led me to buy the second CD I ever owned: Crow’s Tuesday Night Music Club.

Before music videos found me, I relied almost entirely on Vernon’s two radio stations, 94 CJIB and 105 CICF, to tell me what was cool. But when I found that Sheryl Crow video in grade 7, something switched in my head. I stopped listening to my little radio and started watching MuchMusic on a borderline obsessive level. Rick the Temp morphed into an all-knowing god of Taste and Cool. I became a fan of Coolio.

Because music videos told me what was cool, I gradually became something of a music video connoisseur. Through careful observation, I determined that there are really only six types of music videos. Keep in mind, however, that a video rarely uses just one of these types, but often combines two or three genres.

1.) The standard “band playing somewhere” video: this video is always classy, usually a hit, but you need a front man with great energy to pull it off. “Walk Idiot Walk” by the Hives is a good example.

2.) The fantasy video: this video type involves lots of stupendous looking cars, money, and girls/guys drinking and dancing all sexy-like. Most pop-rap videos fall into this category. The bad: “Tipsy” by J-Kwon. The good: Usher’s “Yeah.”

3.) The artsy-makes-no-sense video: in this video, the director or the band has been given WAY too much leeway and turns out a wholly ambiguous video, including images of shattered TVs and gypsies running 10K marathons.

4.) The shock value video: in the shock value video, everything is super grotesque and ultra vivid. Marilyn Manson pretty much coined this video and did it quite well. But most bands that use this type of video usually do it solely for publicity’s sake (read: their music sucks and they need to alarm people to garner attention).

5.) The overtly manufactured/commercial video: a cousin of the shock value video, in that the artist isn’t very good so the director makes them as pretty as possible, with the hope that the good looks of, and the image manufactured for, the artist will mask the crappy music. Also included in this category is the video from a soundtrack that splices movie clips. This category basically houses the overtly manufactured video that tries to do anything and everything possible to distract the viewer from the actual music. These videos all tend to look vaguely similar no matter who the artist or director is: guys in white suits/girls in tank tops and low jeans at a carnival/beach/pool/gas station flirting with some person of the opposite sex (see: Jessica Simpson’s whole catalogue of videos).

6.) The plot-driven music video: what really makes me love the narrative video is my love for all things storytelling. In the plot-driven video, the music is intertwined with some sort of visual story, and generally cuts in with shots of the band doing bandesque things. The height of this genre might be the Guns N’ Roses video trilogy (Chuck Klosterman does an excellent exploration of the this video trilogy in Fargo Rock City). The thing about this genre of video that interests me so much is that the lyrics are often translated into dialogue or visual description, offering a unique simultaneity of storytelling. A good example of this video type is Eminem’s video for “Stan.” The song itself is a story—told through the writing of letters—of an obsessed fan’s unraveling into a psychotic episode that results in him driving his car and his pregnant wife off a bridge. The video basically takes the same narrative arc of the song, and fills in the gaps of the song’s story (i.e. why the letters weren’t delivered until after Stan’s death, and what happened at the event where Eminem supposedly ignores Stan and his brother). The video becomes a sort of visual aid to the song; the two mesh seamlessly into one cohesive unit.

Of course, videos with stories do not always flow logically. Sometimes they collapse into bizarre and unrelated pieces of stories. Take, for example, Bon Jovi’s “This Ain’t a Love Song.” (On a side note, I think it’s hilarious that Bon Jovi titled his Greatest Hits box set “100,000,000 Bon Jovi Fans Can’t Be Wrong.” because a) I can’t even find half a dozen people who admit to being a Bon Jovi fan and b) it makes about as much sense as Marky Mark telling people he’s a badass: if you gotta let people know you’re popular, you’re not popular.) From what I remember, the video stayed on the MuchMusic charts for over 20 weeks, an unheard of shelf life (usually videos peaked in 8 and were gone in 12). I’ve downloaded the video to make sure it makes as little sense now as it did then. I wasn’t disappointed.

The video consists of an old guy running around in a foreign country (I assume Vietnam) spliced with shots of, presumably, a younger version of the same guy, working as a war photographer. There is also a young girl involved (considerably younger than the video’s protagonist; he’s 20 and she looks 10) not to mention a teenage girl, who might be an older version of the 10-year-old girl. In the end, the old man gets beaten up. The only thing I can surmise from this video is that the young girl was a time traveling alien and Bon Jovi was trying to make a subtle comment on the dangers of interstellar relationships and pedophilia.

As entertaining as “This Ain’t a Love Song” is, my favorite broken narrative video would have to be Lionel Ritchie’s “Hello.” The video has everything: an awesome storyline, a Peja Stokavic look-alike (the guy playing Billy Bob at the beginning), a blind girl, a step aerobics/ballet class, an overemphatic Ritchie singing “Hello” like he’s having an aneurism and enough unintentional comedy to fill a dozen high school gyms. The basic storyline: Ritchie, a drama teacher at a school of some sort, is romantically pursuing a blind girl (one of his students). My favorite moment occurs when Ritchie calls the girl on the phone, says “Hello” in neck popping fashion, then proceeds to sing directly to the camera, completely forgetting the girl on the other end. And of course, nothing can top the end, where a student tells Ritchie to rush to the art class where the blind girl has made a clay bust of Ritchie that looks nothing like him. A perfect ending to a wonderfully imperfect video.

Over time, the pop music video, in its many forms, has given me a fine grounding in popular music and a healthy appreciation for my headphones. The music video (both the song and the images) is a form of entertainment, intended for mass consumption. More than this, music videos are designed to mean the same thing to everyone in that they can only be appreciated in one place, in one environment: in front of the TV. Unfortunately, the contrived environment that the video needs does not give much leeway for subjective meaning making, and often results in fairly confusing storytelling. But I don’t want to call the music video a total failure. Like any good song, good music videos become tethered to a moment; they become attached their own set of images, memories and experiences. From now on, I’ll never be able to separate Sheryl Crow from her black and white frame, or Bon Jovi from his coiffed hair, from the desert ruins that surrounded him. Music videos do not quite offer the acoustic space Marshall McLuhan envisioned, but they do provide an important step towards the multi-sensory environment we’ve become so ubiquitously wrapped inside.