Altogether, it's knowing, it's wry, and it's completely of its time: hopeful, but wary about what's to come. Per the video, it's up to Jay to move deftly, gracefully enough to make way for the inevitable shifts in the furniture - to maintain some humanity and humor among the right angles and bright, unthinking lights. Per the song's lyrics, we hear concerns that a preoccupation with newfangled toys and virtual escapism is at odds with humans doing right by each other (keep in mind most Americans didn't even have the internet in their homes in 1996). And then there's the fact that he's literally dancing over a rapidly changing landscape as he sings about misgivings with an uncertain, tech-centric future. It's intimate - a cousin to Hype Williams' signature fish-eye, perhaps, but sillier, less self-consciously stylish. There's Jay Kay's delightfully playful way of moving, a Beck-meets- The Jetsons update on the moonwalk. It's stark and minimalist without feeling cold, yes.
What is it that makes "Virtual Insanity" so watchable? He should probably just print business cards with a paragraph about it on the back and hand them out to everyone he meets.īut it's not just an understanding of the analog magic that makes this video so compelling, such a charmer, 20 years down the line. Director Jonathan Glazer has basically spent his entire life explaining how he made this music video. Now, you can look up 20 years of repeated, detailed explanations for the (still impressive) single-shot trickery. Google was quietly being birthed by young dorks at Stanford in 1996, but regular people sure didn't have it yet. So we asked each other questions instead: How did they make this thing? How did it look so cool? What was up with the hat? Perhaps more memorably, if you are a person who was between the ages of, say, eight and 30 in 1996, it was the video that launched a thousand awed conversations. "Virtual Insanity" won Best Video at the VMAs in 1997, beating out the videos for Beck's "The New Pollution," Nine Inch Nails' "The Perfect Drug," No Doubt's "Don't Speak," and Jewel's "You Were Meant for Me." (Which: what. Pause for a moment, if you will, and watch the music video for Jamiroquai's "Virtual Insanity," which was released 20 years ago this month. But it's undeniable: when most people are carrying a powerful, fully customizable computer around in their pockets, the idea of 13-year-olds rushing home from school to catch their favorite videos on TRL - because that was the only way to see them - sounds as endearingly sepia-toned as suburban families gathering around the radio for the next installment of Hopalong Cassidy.
Whether you view this as awesome or sad or both probably depends on the year you were born. Broadly speaking, it's one arm of the story about the splintering death of the monoculture at the hands of the internet, in all its instantly gratifying, personally curated glory. But our collective ambivalence toward the music video as a medium - setting aside its place as a unit in the art film/visual album, we'll get to that in a moment - is bigger than format. Sure, lots more people are watching via the internet.
Of course, you don’t have to be an industry insider to understand why the Video Music Awards, an exaltation of the year’s best stand-alone music videos and a onetime cash cow for the cable network, no longer constitute must-see TV. Are those things still called commercials? Let’s call them commercials. That was one (admittedly clunky) proclamation that hung in the air last week, as MTV reported dismal ratings for its big annual celebration of music set to film and scripted celebrity drama set to aggressively sponsored content starring DJ Khaled and Nikes and Snapchat. The music video is dead long live the music video - as long as by "music video" you mean visual album.
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