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Several newcomers, most notably Williams (who did Mary J. Blige's lush clip Everything), Paul Hunter (Erykah Badu, Sean "Puffy" Combs), Jonathan Glazer (Radiohead, Jamiroquai) and Floria Sigismondi (Marilyn Manson, Tricky), have risen to the challenge. As a result, the directors themselves are becoming MTV stars. Williams and Hunter have almost become brand names; each has a colorful, highly recognizable style, and hip-hop stars--and even some alternative bands--are rushing to work with them. All four of these directors are up for multiple awards at next week's MTV Music Video Awards, and all four are starting to hear from Hollywood as well.
Interestingly, some of the directors are contemptuous of the field in which they've risen to the top. "Music videos are largely rubbish," says Glazer, whose video Virtual Insanity, for the trippy Euro-dance group Jamiroquai, is nominated for a record 10 MTV awards. Says Sigismondi: "I don't watch [MTV]. I'm really not up on what's trendy. I'm in my own little world."
Williams, 28, who grew up in Queens, New York, wanted to be a painter. "That's what probably stimulated my interest in color now," he says. "I wanted to be Basquiat or Keith Haring." Hunter, 31, started his career as a photographer but decided to study film at California State University at Northridge after visiting a movie set when his brother, an aspiring actor, got a part in a small indie film. Hunter later dropped out, and says now, "I learned that I had to go out and hustle if I was going to make it, [that] I was going to have to go out and make films by whatever means I could."
A scrappy intelligence makes the work of all four of these directors stand out even when the songs they are visualizing aren't all that strong. Hip-hop king Combs' It's All About the Benjamins is a slight affair on record, but in Hunter's video it bursts into life. We see Combs, with his white-suited posse, running through a forest; the scene shifts to a stone quarry, drenched in floodlights and filled with revelers; then we see Combs again, in black, rapping onstage as the film slips and slides in the projector--and that's all in the first 10 seconds.
Glazer's video for Jamiroquai is less flashy but nonetheless eye catching. The band is mostly unknown in the States; its current album, Traveling Without Moving, is a mere echo of stronger, tighter, better American R. and B. from the '70s. Virtual Insanity, a rant against technology that draws heavily, if not entirely successfully, on Stevie Wonder for musical inspiration, is the only truly catchy song on the album. In the video we see Jamiroquai's singer, Jay Kay, standing alone in a mostly empty room. The floor seems to move as he dances, sings and poses; furniture appears and vanishes. The clip is somewhat dry, but it keeps us watching as we try to figure out the physics of this weird space. "If you're simple, you're effective," says Glazer, 31, who majored in theater arts at London's Middlesex Polytechnic College.