When MTV and MuchMusic
debuted, I remember some people complaining that what was shown in
music videos often had nothing to do with the song or that they
imagined comepletey different visuals for the song. With the rise of
cheap and plentiful broadband, good audio compression and tools like
Flash, making your own video for your favourite songs is easier than
ever.
Indie artists often don’t have the money to make videos (which means
that they also don’t have the money to hire lawyers to hand out
cease-and-desist nastygrams), so a good number of these homemade videos
are for songs that wouldn’t otherwise have them. Notable ones
include Wesley Willis’ Merry Christmas and geek troubador MJ Hibbett’s ode to computers of the 1980s, Hey Hey 16K (which I first mentioned in this entry).
The threat of lawsuits doesn’t stop everyone, however — especially if
they live in places where the observation of copyright is a little,
shall we say, relaxed. A Chinese site whose URL I can’t find has a
number of videos, most of them dreadfully bad, save for this video of Nirvana’s Dumb.
I rather like the artist’s cartoony renditions of Kurt, Krist and Dave;
if Nirvana had a Saturday morning cartoon show just like one of their
chart contemporaries, they’d probably be drawn like this.
One reply on “Homemade Nirvana Flash Video”
Comically.