Literal Videos

Where poetry meets prose.

Many music historians consider the 1980s and 1990s to be the golden age of the music video. During that period, successful songs could inspire wildly elaborate productions, but often, the relationship between the lyrics of a song and its video were abstract, symbolic, or just indecipherable. The video for “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” for instance, contains neither eclipses nor heartbreak. At least not in any literal way.

In the early years of YouTube, clever sound mixers started “literalizing” these videos, keeping the tune, meter, and rhyme structure of the original songs but changing their lyrics to match what was happening on screen. Sometimes this description was as literal as what Scott McCloud would call a “duo-specific” comics panel…

…and sometimes more improvisational comedy crept in, but when it did, it always used the described action as a basis:

Despite being fun and relatively easy to make, literal videos didn’t last long as a YouTube subgenre. Part of that reflected copyright issues. There was a fair-use case to be made for the work, but putting your work on a platform like YouTube means you only get as much of a fair hearing as YouTube chooses to give.

Often, YouTube takes an algorithmic approach to “copyright enforcement” anyway, using more primitive brands of AI to decide what’s too risky to have on its platform. Google has always preferred to outsource these messy human matters to an algorithm that they’re 95% sure will get it right 95% of the time.

One can still find a few videos by Dustin McLean/Dusto McNeato, the genre’s creator. But anything interesting in the field was done and abandoned a decade ago.

Or that’s what I would’ve thought before this month! That was when I stumbled over the videos of YouTube user Thadudette. For her primary satirical target, she picked one of the most copyright-defensive companies ever to exist. And somehow, she seems to have gotten away with it:

To be clear, Thadudette’s work is only new to me. This piece is from 2014 (just a year later than Frozen itself) and her most recent “literals” are from 2020. I don’t know of anyone releasing such videos regularly since then…not in English, anyway. Luksan Miracle seems to have a few good ones in German.

Still, a genre that I thought was entirely dead for a while has been found alive, and it does make me feel a little like Anna in the above image, celebrating as those new tiny ducklings quack at her. Here’s a link to Thadudette’s full page, and a couple more samples:

Tomorrow: Here comes X!