A YouTube video genre in which an original video is made for a song (whether or not the song already has an official video).
Unofficial music videos can take many forms, including live-action dramatization, lip-syncing, and original animation. From a remix culture point of view, three prominent sub-genres are worth recognizing:
- Anime music videos
- Gaming music videos
- Fanvids
Anime music videos, as the name suggests, are made by re-cutting clips from anime and using songs, music, or trailer announcements and other audio elements to create an original audio-visual experience. There is a very large community, especially in Asia, devoted to making and watching these videos. See the Anime Music Video site for an English-language entrance into this world
Though not as common as anime videos, there is also a fandom that uses machinima techniques to make original pirate videos for songs, Gaming Music Videos.
Gaming videos may be “serious” interpretations of the gaming world, as with Khallys’s 2013 World of Warcraft video “Tide of War,” which cuts machinima footage over the song “The Howling” by Within Temptation, or it may be more of a détournement of the original gaming environment’s culture, as in various Avengers “dance-off” videos created by gameplay artist Mightyraccoon!, including one that was then appropriated and re-edited as a Bollywood dance-off by Jajuist Edits.
Fanvids are the oldest and most politically interesting form of unofficial music video. See the main article for more details.
Redub videos
An interesting variation on the unofficial music video is the redub video. In this kind of mashup, you use the video from an official music video, but you replace the audio with a different song or other audio content.
A controversial but well done and much-watched example is LOTI’s “This is America so call me maybe” (2018), a partial redub of Childish Gambino’s “This is America” video (2018) with Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” (2012).
A much looser bit of editing, but perhaps more politically thoughtful is my redub of Drake’s “Hotline Bling” (2016) with a song whose message interests me more, Lupe Fiasco’s “State Run Radio” (2011).
Musicless music video
An often quite subversive form of music video redub is the “musicless video.” Possibly the best and (I believe) one of the first was Mario Wienerroither’s redub of David Bowie and Mick Jagger’s 1985 video for “Dancing in the Street.”
Here is the original video from 1985 (pretty bad).
And here is Wienerroither’s version:
Wienerroither’s YouTube channel presents a dizzying array of these kinds of experiments. Here’s one that’s rather delightful.
The musicless music video draws attention to the content of the video and how laughable it might be in many cases if it were not accompanied by a powerful song.
Literal Music Videos
In this genre a new cover of the song is created in which the lyrics refer directly to the action we see in the video. Again, this began as a sendup of corny or pretentious 1980s motifs, but has since spread into our own corny and pretentious videos from the recent past.