Extended Play

In some quarters, the album is an antique, bobbing in the frothing stream that pumps 24/7 from Spotify, Deezer and the like. 

Those platforms' compressed music files earn their artists a royalty so low it makes the penny offered The Beatles for each A and B side, when they signed with EMI in 1962, look like the riches of Croesus. 

The Beatles' 87-minute musical comedy adventure, A Hard Day's Night, told the story of a 'typical' day in the life of the band. 

Vinyl junkies aside, most listeners no longer consume music by the album-load, preferring the pick n mix of streaming, following the weather vane of compressed attention spans. So artists looking to immerse their fans in that old-fashioned album experience are turning to visual entrapment. 

Visual albums are not a new phenomenon – you could point all the way back to A Hard Day’s Night to find a near-perfect melding of sound and vision in Richard Lester’s 1964 classic – and fast-forward to the biggest music film of the year, Peter Jackson’s eight-hour epic, Get Back, with which the Fabs redefine the true meaning of ‘long-form’. 

Peter Jackson's film for The Beatles, Get Back, is a musical docu-series shown in three parts on Disney+ television.

For rising music video directors like Douglas Bernhardt, who signed with Stink Rising in 2018, it was Beyoncé’s Lemonade, released in 2016, that proved a game-changer, inspiring their own paths into long-form. 

“That’s what blew it all open,” he says, talking from his home in Brazil. “It was a great album, a great piece, the best moment of Beyoncé’s career. The timing was perfect, For my generation of directors, that was the turning point of that long-form format.”

The Jonas Akerlund-directed video for Beyoncé's Hold Up, the second of Lemonade's 12 tracks and part of the 57-minute visual album.

To realise Lemonade on screen, Beyoncé collaborated with six directors, Mark Romanek, Jonas Akerlund, Kahlil Joseph, Dikayl Rimmarsh, Todd Tourso and Melina Matsoukas. 

Matsoukas had worked with Beyonce before on single videos, and her work out of Prettybird for the likes of Snoop Dogg, Rihanna, Solange and Lady Gaga, had won her a Titanium Lion among a shelf of awards hardware.

I think the Formation video, from Lemonade, from the minute it came in the door, to the minute it was out the door, was less than two weeks. It was an insane turnaround.

“Melina is very much in narrative,” says her executive producer at PrettyBird UK, Juliette Larthe. “She loves a story. And because a lot of her work is a vehicle for social change in culture and in society, it works better for her to have more meaning, and to have extended time to tell a story.” 

Larthe is a music video veteran, the recipient of an outstanding achievement award at 2021’s UKMVAs. For her, like Bernhardt, the Lemonade visual album Matsoukas created with Beyoncé hit the top spot. “It’s about telling a story that will stick in people’s minds,” she says, “and not just for that moment. Melina works incredibly closely with her artists, on whatever she creates,” she adds. 

When you unpick those lines within [Brown Skin Girl] and how the narrative works with the narrative of the visuals... it is a really powerful representation of what it feels like to be a black woman in society in the west today.

“She’s a long-term collaborator with Beyoncé, and she often has no time at all and then has to brainstorm and create the work really quickly and in a very fast turnaround. I think the Formation video, from Lemonade, from the minute it came in the door, to the minute it was out the door, was less than two weeks. It was an insane turnaround.”

The extended video for Beyoncé's Brown Skin Girl won a slew of awards. 

Beyoncé’s long-form visual focus didn’t end with Lemonade. Larthe was president of the jury at the 2020 Ciclope festival when the extended stand-alone video for Brown Skin Girl from Beyonce’s Black is King video album, won the Grand Prix – and later a Grammy – for its director, rising Nigerian British star Jenn Nkiru. 

“When you see that collection of imagery and understand what she is saying, and you unpick those lines within it and how the narrative she is singing works with the narrative of the visuals,” says Larthe, “and then you have the connotations beyond it all, can you not see how it is a really powerful representation of what it feels like to be a black woman in society in the west today? And culturally, where that comes from and how she’s owning that and she’s putting it out there? It moved me so much.”

The video for Crazy is part of the upcoming Spiritualized album and long-form video, Everything Was Beautiful, directed by Juliette Larthe.

Larthe is currently working on a series of linked videos for Spiritualized, using found footage thematically tied in with the album visuals. The same concept of interlinked long-form drove the fruitful collaboration between director Nick Knight and Kanye West for his 2013 epic, Yeezus. 

Kanye West collaborated with Nick Knight on the video projection New Slaves. 

“We did about six films,” Larthe recalls of the project, “starting off with New Slaves, which you could only see if it was projected onto a building.” Knight went on to direct Kanye’s Jeezus is King performance video shot in sculptor James Turrell’s Roden Crater in Arizona – which leads us down a significant offshoot of the video album – the streamed lockdown performance. 

Nick Cave's Idiot Prayer is available to watch on BBC iPlayer. Pic courtesy of BBC/White Light International Media Limited.

During lockdown, full-length performance films took the place of live gigs – think Nick Cave in cavernous Alexandra Palace for 2020’s Idiot Prayer, or Alma Har'el’s brilliant realisation of Shadow Kingdom for Bob Dylan in 2021. 

Jarvis Cocker’s visual album for Beyond the Pale had directing duo Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard shoot Jarvis and co performing the album live amid the subterranean splendours of Peak Cavern in Derbyshire.

Jarvis Cocker's long-form video Beyond the Pale was filmed in a cave in Derbyshire. 

Like Dylan’s Shadow Kingdom, Beyond the Pale enjoyed the internet lifespan of a butterfly, with viewers given 24 hours to watch before it disappeared. At least that’s a lifespan longer than the in-performance visualisations that last only as long as the stage show itself. 

Alma Har'el directed the performance video of Bob Dylan's Shadow Kingdom.

Larthe points to director Theo Adams’ staging work for the Pet Shop Boys’ Big New Years & Years Eve Party extravaganza with Kylie and Ollie Alexander, taking long-form visuals out of the video box and onto the live stage. 

“It’s about cohesivity and creativity,” says Larthe of the dynamics at play, “and how to expand on that. We have so many options now and so much choice – I don’t think there’ll be a set way of doing anything.”

Ollie Alexander in the Big New Years & Years Eve Party, which blended live performance and long-form video.

While the visual albums of megastars like Beyoncé and Kanye have arrested the attentions of millions worldwide, break-out artists are turning to long-form, too, placing and redefining themselves in the context of their own stories. 

Since Lemonade there has been a lot of long-form, but some of them are just long music videos that don’t translate an idea or a story. 

Brazilian director Douglas Bernhardt, who was behind the brilliant Revival video for Gregory Porter, is fresh off an intense visual collaboration with new Sao Paolo rapper Nego Bala for his debut release, Sonho. 

“The challenge,” says Bernhardt, “is having a subject that holds you. Since Lemonade there has been a lot of long-form, but some of them are just long music videos that don’t translate an idea or a story. The challenge is how to grab people. When you have a story to tell, you can’t rely on the music 100 per cent. You’ve got to recognise that you have something bigger in your hands, then think about how to grab the audience for longer.” 

The biggest intention of this film is to inspire kids, so we had to translate this moment [in Sonho], when he meets the person he was before, who didn’t believe in himself.

Making Sonho, he chose for his narrative the story behind the song’s creation, which goes all the way back to a teenage Bala stuck in one of Sao Paolo’s jails, and with this song stuck in his head. The video’s extended narrative relates and illustrates how that teen prisoner was able to loosen the shackles, carry that song out of jail and into reality, becoming an artist powered and empowered by his sonho (dream), realised in the face of harsh inequities. 

“His life is a result of how chaotic and unequal Sao Paolo is,” says Bernhardt of Bala’s backstory, “and we chose Sonho because it had a sense of hope. So we talked about the creation of the song, discussing what he wanted to achieve and the audience he wanted to reach. And after a while we understood that the story of the creation of the song was as interesting as the song itself.” 

It was there that they found the film. It opens with the young Bala in jail, trying to memorise his new song by humming it, and getting thrown into solitary as a result. The sense of injustice burns off the screen. “He always highlighted this moment, of trying to memorise the song and getting put in solitary,” recalls Bernhardt. 

Stink director, Douglas Bernhardt. 

Mixing the tightly scripted with powerful freestyle, improvised moments, the video culminates in Bala coming to meet his younger, incarcerated self on the streets he grew up in. “The biggest intention of this film is to inspire kids, so we had to translate this moment, when he meets the person he was before, who didn’t believe in himself.” 

When it came to filming this powerful culminating moment on the last day of the shoot, they set the script aside. “I said, you know what you need to tell, just go for it. Improvise it. We’d left it till everything was done, and he was in the mood, he understood how big the production was, so it was a very honest moment. It was his life experience.”