Pete Hindle

Now that we’ve shaken off the annoyances of changing themes, let’s talk fun stuff.

The video above is such a classic piece of mid-1990′s footage. The style of it is pretty eye-catching, washed in original sentiment grunge, but gear-heads like me will notice the reel-to-reel tape recorder in some of the session footage. Do you know how expensive recording things used to be? It was crazy! Now everybody has got a laptop that can do multitracking, so the cost of making a single has dropped.

And bear in mind that the footage you are seeing is from 1996. There wasn’t really an internet in the same way that we have one now; search was still getting started in a lab at Stanford University. There was still a media hierarchy that meant it could take months for some media to come out – ‘sleeper hits’, etc, that would permeate through a system of media.

I don’t really know much about Jem Cohen, who according to wikipedia has also designed the album covers for Fugazi. Apparently he shot this video for a fanzine, which seems like a very ambitious fanzine. At first I was confused, and thought that he was the same Jem that used to be in the Pogues, and later went on to make music inspired by the philosophies of the Clock of the Long Now. This is not so; apparently Cohen is his own Jem, working in different areas.

I’d stick with the video up until the last song, ‘Angeles’, comes on. That’s my recommendation, anyway.