It is the trend to have a lyric video on the go these days, and whilst I haven’t been a fan of many, I can appreciate that they fill a purpose in stemming a gap between track promotion and subsequent video release whilst, also being an alternative audio tool.
I guess that my disgruntlement with the set-up lies within my old-school thinking brain, as what I have become accustomed to knowing as a video “proper” promoting music in the main, is that of either an acted out representation of the lyrics, an animation or a live performance piece.
Whilst, it is all so easy to thread together basic graphics around lyrics in a karaoke fashion, in this ever growing popular medium, it requires a lot more than just a fab tune and a showreel of words to stand out from the pack these days. I can only imagine graphic designer’s must be seeing a bit of a boom in demand, as music artists seek them out, but of course, they can only do this with the appropriate capitol behind them. However, the conundrum then is of balance, make the lyric video’s too impressive the main video event proper has to be an even greater spectacle, or if you’ve made the lyric video much more true to life and not in a graphical format, is it wholly seen as a lyric video even? For the purposes of our blogging here on EQ (as it is a question that has been put to me a few times lately) our opinion stands that if it has lyrics spread out upon it, it is seen as an audio tool.
Why have I gone to such lengths to express my views?, simply, it does appear to me that we are entering into times whereupon these presentations are increasingly merging.
As a prime example I see this within David Guetta’s latest comic book derived lyric video for “Bad”, as there have been past instances when music video’s have been purely graphic art based / comic book animated, and I feel in particular “Bad” does raise the question. Though, I guess being that he is David Guetta he can go all out on a zombie attacks comic book themed lyric video if he wants too!, but let’s just say in this case I am especially going to be very interested to see what arrives as the video proper!
The track in question “Bad” has already topped Beatport, and find it is underlyingly consistent of David’s signature club beat stylings, whilst it is given an extra boost of harder hitting anthem power by the tracks collaborative partners, the Dutch electronic dance act Showtek. It is truly a ravey monster anthem cut, albeit that Australian dance diva Vassy’s vocals are given the helium lifting treatment.