17 April, 2007

Music Video 2.0: “Voice” by Pentagram

It seems like a gimmick, but how it worked. Sometime back, the Indian rock band Pentagram got together with VH1 and announced that they were going to ask their fans to make a music video for their next release, “Voice.” Making a video takes a lot of effort: listening to the song dozens of times, coming up with a concept, getting together cast and crew and props and so on, shooting the thing, editing the thing, and so on. You’d have imagined a handful of nuts would enter.

Pentagram got 991 entries.

Yes, that’s right, 991 music videos. A decade ago, when I worked in first Channel [V] and then MTV and wrote for Rock Street Journal, many of us thought that Indian rock was just about to take off in a big way. We were wrong then—there wasn’t much of a following for it outside the college circuit. But if 991 people make music videos for a song, you’ve got to imagine that the number of actual Pentagram fans out there must be many multiples of that. Who knows where this could go?

Anyway, Pentagram eventually used a composite of the 26 best videos as their official video release. But the rest are available on YouTube. One that Pentagram vocalist Vishal Dadlani especially likes, and that Mohit brought to my attention, is an anti-reservation video by Varun Agarwal from Bangalore. Here it is:

I’ve articulated my opposition to reservations in these posts: ”It’s the thought that counts, right?”, ”Protesting the politics of reservations”, ”The calculus of reservation” and ”Don’t think in categories” (last two paras).

And now, below the fold, the final video of “Voice,” putting together shots from the 26 best videos they received:

Update: Nikhil Pahwa has some thoughts on reservations and “Voice” here.