Spike Jonze Skate VHS MV

Spike Jonze Skate VHS Aesthetic

Spike Jonze arrived in music video direction from skateboarding photography and video - he was a teenage skate photographer and filmmaker before becoming a director - and that origin is visible in every formally important choice his early work makes. The grammar of skateboarding video (handheld 8mm or VHS cameras, the pursuit shot following a skater, the willingness to include falls and failed attempts as content, the acceptance of noise and grain as truthful) translated directly into a music video aesthetic that felt radically different from the theatrical, polish-obsessed videos that dominated early-to-mid 1990s MTV.

Beastie Boys 'Sabotage' (1994)

'Sabotage' is a note-perfect pastiche of 1970s American crime TV - 'Starsky and Hutch', 'Kojak', 'S.W.A.T.' - shot on Super 8 and VHS-degraded footage to match the period's television quality. Jonze and the Beastie Boys created personas, costume, and fake-mustache prop comedy with the commitment of genuine television actors; the editing matches the quick-cut grammar of 70s cop shows but pushes it into absurdity. The video won the MTV Video Music Award for Best Direction in 1994. Its influence on the music video form - and on the subsequent decade of celebrity in comedy-pastiche format - is difficult to overstate.

Weezer 'Buddy Holly' (1994)

'Buddy Holly', also directed by Jonze in 1994, digitally inserted Weezer into footage from 'Happy Days', the 1970s ABC television series. The technical achievement was remarkable for 1994 - Industrial Light and Magic did the compositing - but the conceptual achievement is as important: Jonze understood that the joke required commitment to the period's visual grammar (3:1 aspect ratio broadcast video, grain and color matching) rather than a comfortable frame that reminded you it was a gag. Microsoft included it on CD-ROMs bundled with Windows 95 as a demonstration of the multimedia computer, reaching an audience that had never seen a music video.

Fatboy Slim 'Praise You' (1999)

'Praise You' is Jonze's most formally audacious video: he appears in it himself, as the fictional director of a dance company performing an impromptu routine in a movie theater lobby while the management tries to shut them down. The video was shot guerrilla-style on consumer DV in a Los Angeles movie theater before a real audience. The fictional framing - this is supposedly the dance company's own promotional video, not a Fatboy Slim production - created a mise-en-abyme layer that only became visible on close examination.

The Skate Video Grammar

Jonze's skate origins inform the camera choices across all this work: the acceptance of imperfect framing, camera shake, and missed focus as evidence of realness; the found-footage aesthetic that positions the camera as witness rather than author; and the humor that comes from treating absurd situations with straight-faced documentary commitment.