Video Killed The Radio Star

"I grew up in White People Land..."

That was a statement made by my boyfriend a few nights ago when we were talking about music videos. We were in the middle of a two or three-hour exchange of music videos we loved as adolescents and that was his response to my showing him Nas' "Hate Me Now" video and asking: "You've never seen this?"

One might be inclined to say that the obvious thing here is the race thing. However, the longer we swapped videos was the more it became evident that, yes, it's the race thing but it's also a whole host of other things including the difference in taste thing and also the six-year age difference thing.

While he was watching heavy metal videos like this on TV...:

...I was just discovering MTV and VH1 thanks to my parents' new satellite dish and on the verge of starting an unhealthy obsession with Michael Jackson.

As much as we would like to discard popular media as incidental, the media we consume tell a story (albeit not the whole story) about us and the way we experience the world. My boyfriend is obviously a real child of the '80s and you know this when you first start talking about movies with him. Understanding the period in which he first became an active consumer makes it easier to understand him, his politics and the way he sees the world outside of America.

My mother grew up listening to music via radio and the loudspeakers of various sound systems in Jamaica. There weren't any showy, egocentric (as she often puts it) music videos. Of course, she spends much of her time bewildered by the musical tastes of my generation.

I now understand my mother's bewilderment when I hear/watch stuff like this on TV:

The hilarious thing is that, as annoying as I find Japanese pop, there are women here my mother's age who list J-pop as their favourite genre of music.

While I was thinking about the topic, I asked some friends what their favourite music videos were. Here are the responses I got:

From Erin (Canada)

From Garreth (Jamaica)

From Channon (U.S.A.)

From Davis (U.S.A.)

From L'Oreal (U.S.A.)

From Nivi (Kenya)

And from me...?

Earlier on in this post I may have given a hint. Here's one of my all-time favourites:

What's yours?