I sat out the years when music videos were coming along, never saw a single example till not long ago when Michael Jackson dropped my jaw: unbelievable production, money pumped like there was no end to it. I remember the BeeGees and disco just from my ear. Since then I've seen them on the tube in retrospectives where there's always some sort of stage bullshit going on to make people conditioned by movies and TV to expect something for their eye with their music: weird lights, colored mist, freaky costumes ... But here some sort of video had been constructed, kicky-kooky, the boys in a doorway one shot, then on a bridge, lip-synching. Where was the gondola? Barry, with his teeth and his hair, making his brothers look, er, somewhat less Barbie & Ken.
Here in my ear was the familiar disco music: eccentric merry-go-round, some nice hops from the bass, and there in my eye were the boys moving their mouths.
Accustomed from birth to a causal connection between mouth and sound, we want to assume one in all cases. Mommy says Coo Coo, even baby's two ears locate the sound as coming from her mouth. But the Bee Gees sound does not come from their mouths, not directly; it "comes from" the mixer, from the sequencer ... from the bank of computers: their instruments, other instruments, and a gang of engineers also involved. (All that wasn't shown in the doorway. Neither were they on the bridge.) (Maybe they were on the gondola.)
So in college the question freaked me out: If Donald Duck isn't really speaking in the cartoon, if his quacking speech is really concocted in a studio, and doesn't issue from a series of cell drawings, even though those drawings show a beak, make it seem to ''move," what makes us think that we're really speaking when we speak? How do we know that we're not the drawn cells of some demon, coordinated with sounds coming from an entirely different department? If so, might it not be foolish to attribute meaning to what we hear ourselves say?
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