Music videos in the dead of the night

 

We can get all our music from Youtube or Spotify or anything you fucking like now, but the algorithm is completely rubbish at exposing you to new things. It's really good at just giving you what you want, over and over again, but not giving you the things you don't know you need.

The radio still has a part to play in our society and remains a great source for random music you've never heard before. I still get a lot of my new pop music from a Saturday afternoon music show that plays while I'm working.

And I know I'm getting more into the 'kids don't know how lucky they are' territory with every year that speeds past, but they really don't know how good it was just to watch late night music videos on the TV, and seeing what comes up.

At one point in the 90s there were three channels playing nothing but music videos all night on local TV (10 years earlier, there had only even been two channels).  The videos I saw in the middle of the night sparked full-blown obsessions with Pulp and Queens of the Stone Age. Coming home from the pub and watching Bic Runga put it all out there, or just hanging with your mates and flicking between channels and there's Shirley Manson in glorious action for the first time. The first time I ever heard Massive Attack was in the Karamacoma video late at night, all alone in my first ever flat, and it freaked me the fuck out, man.

Around the 2000s, I would tape three hours of late night TV music channels, and then dub the best stuff onto its own tape. I've lost a hell of a lot of music that never had a physical home like that in the time since, but I've still got the tapes.

I still like listening and watching music videos late at night, usually on YouTube, and I can always find exactly what I'm looking for. But if I don't know what I'm looking for, I don't know if I'll find it at all, and without the randomness, I'll never know.