Adam did his best for yesterday's Times Saturday Review.
"My new TV show BUG is a medium to showcase the brilliance of the music video. It's been running as a live show at the BFI for about five years, and the aim is to introduce people to innovative and groundbreaking videos, and highlight the funniest comments about those videos from the You Tube community. So rather than me coming out with some half-baked, pompous crap, I'm using other people's half-baked, pompous crap. I'm a fan of things that are simple and work within boundaries. The constraints of the music video are such that you come out with stuff that you don't get with any other medium. The main constraint is time - they're short. Most music videos don't outstay their welcome, and in that short space of time you have to put across all kinds of visual and metaphorical ideas, and you have to do it quickly and succinctly or people will get sidetracked. When that's done right, nothing is more exhilarating. A good video can reinvent a boring piece of music, or make you hear it in a different way and make you realise that you were missing the point. I found it difficult to choose six because the ones I have seen recently tend to be the ones I remember but here's a mixture of old and new.
BUG starts on Sky Atlantic, July9, 9:30pm"
Simple Math - Manchester Orchestra - Daniels It's an epic stuffed with ideas - a guy gets into a car accident and then flashes back through his life. There's lots of simple visual tricks but it's beautifully done and seamlessly integrated.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaMiVDZu_T4?&showinfo=0]
They Come To Get Us - The Death Set - Guillaume Panariello This is crammed full of pop cultural references - images from The Simpsons, Star Trek, SpiderMan and video games. It's spectacular.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dleV9-9xXsw?&showinfo=0]
Sledgehammer - Peter Gabriel - Stephen R Johnson I was so excited the first time I saw this. It was an event. It was done by Aardman. Back then, you had no control over when you saw it. I was constantly living in a state of anxious hope that it would be on.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g93mz_eZ5N4?&showinfo=0]
Knife - Grizzly Bear - Encyclopedia Pictura It is completely odd and - like a lot of music videos - packed with really strange, ludicrously obscure and pretentious imagery. But it's done with so much flair and imagination.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJpC9JqSnJk?&showinfo=0]
Weird Fishes - Radiohead - Tobias Stretch Tobias Stretch is from Pennsylvania and he shoots most of his stuff in the Appalachian Mountains. It's just him with a digital stills camera and he does a lot of stop-motion stuff with these big, weird puppet creatures that he creates. He submitted this video for an Aniboom competition, which he won. It is just brilliant.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNRCvG9YtYI?&showinfo=0]
Let Forever Be - The Chemical Brothers - Michel Gondry This is my favourite. It's mind-boggling. It's a simple idea, but it's still hard to express in words. Gondry takes video effects - wipes, transitions etc - and represents them in real life; making home-made versions of things that previously only existed in the technological world. I don't even like the track that much, but the video goes perfectly with the music. And it hurts your mind to try to work out how he did it.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5FyfQDO5g0?&showinfo=0]
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